On Sunday there was a happy confluence between two of our biggest interests: the midterm elections and the hilarity of Ross Douthat bringing his spellbinding anti-charisma to TV screens every week on 60 Minutes. To watch Douthat try to interview someone is like watching a black hole suck in every nearby star. It’s like staring into a cup of wheat germ until you go cross-eyed. It’s like seeing two Galapagos tortoises trying to fuck.
Truly, it is the wildest of rides. Would Andy Rooney have been able to spend decades griping every week that sandpaper needed a wider range of grit or whatever if he had the personality of a doorknob? No, he would not. Who on Earth thought this guy with the screen presence of Lysol and a voice like an adenoidal Muppet would bring in viewers? Oh right, this dip.
This week, Douthat interviewed candidates Abdul El-Sayed and Mike Rogers for a piece on their Michigan Senate race that comes to a merciful end after today, when the votes are all counted, El-Sayed declares victory at a wonderfully early hour, and Mike Rogers has slunk back to wherever he first slunked from.
It was all as scintillating as it sounds. We knew we were off to a good start when Douthat opened the segment by suggesting a big issue for Abdul El-Sayed was whether “ideas that thrill the Democratic Party are what Middle America wants right now.” Because El-Sayed is to the left of the average, normal, every-day working class hero that Douthat and his fellow travelers have convinced themselves are the only voters who matter, Ross has to make it sound like the Russian Revolution of 1917 is bearing down on the good, hardworking volk of America.
The thing is, that volk wants much of what El-Sayed pitches. The latest Gallup polling has Americans saying that healthcare and the economy are the two issues they are most concerned with. El-Sayed has been pushing some sort of Medicare for All program. Whatever skepticism you may have about his plans — and Douthat is skeptical that he can pay for all this — you can’t say he is ignoring it.
It’s the same with the economy. People are concerned about rising costs. El-Sayed addresses those all the time. Breaking up monopolies and supporting unions that can negotiate higher pay and benefits and protect jobs are two of his core positions. It’s not tough. You can watch his speeches before you interview him, even!
But that’s the weird and bigoted thrust of the whole piece. El-Sayed, being a nonwhite Muslim, is some sort of exotic creature with quixotic ideas about culture that will rile up the Left nationwide. Mike Rogers is just a guy who wants to help Michigan. That there might be any overlap here — that El-Sayed’s ideas apply to Michigan and everywhere else — just seems to be beyond Douthat’s comprehension.
But where El-Sayed really turned Douthat into a stammering mess was in a discussion about the Israel-Palestinian crisis. Whatever you think of that situation, or whatever you think of the great bogeyman of AIPAC, you can’t say Ross was exactly prepared for pushback here:
That was the saddest gotcha moment we have seen in quite a while, and we watch this stuff for what we guess you would call a living. Douthat really thought he was going to say But Saudi Arabia also spends lots of money buying the US government and killing Arabs, and you don’t get all worked up about them! And then El-Sayed would say, You know what, Ross, you’re right. There is zero difference between a lobbying organization spending money in primaries and an authoritarian government fully participating in the US turn to kleptocracy by sucking up to the president’s son-in-law, which I obviously don’t care about. I should stop talking about this and more closely examine my assumptions and internal biases. You’ve given me much to think about!
But pushback really threw Douthat. He didn’t have a Plan B in case El-Sayed had an actual answer to the question.
The whole exchange was in keeping with the right-wing ethos that Bari Weiss has brought to CBS, though. You take whatever stereotypes about the intersection of crazy liberals and selective anger that everyone in National Review and the Daily Wire and Fox News and OANN thinks is so obvious that you just have to point out the hole in their logic and their heads will explode like Futurama robots contemplating a logical fallacy. You don’t even think about having a fallback. What do you need with a fallback? You’ve got those liberals right where you want them.
Hard to believe the ratings for 60 Minutes have been shrinking faster than Dennis Quaid in Innerspace.
Douthat’s extended interview with El-Sayed is below if you have a spare hour and a punishment fetish.
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<It’s like seeing two Galapagos tortoises trying to fuck.>
The existence of more tortoises indicates that they eventually get there, unlike Douthat.
OT:
cnn
"Trump says US is cutting off aid to Israel at year’s end because ‘they don’t need it’
The president said Tuesday that the US is halting $4 billion in aid"
Too late FUCKER!