Sunday Bloody NYT Sunday: Special All-You-Can-Hate Edition

We were remiss in providing you a Sunday Bloody NYT Sunday because the entire editorial staff of yr Wonkette/HappyNiceTimePeople was blackout-shade-level sleeping it off in Boston. We blame you, particularly if you came out to Boston and encouraged our otherwise teetotaling selves to drink too much. But now we're back to provide you an utterly arbitrary and incomplete recap of the paper of record as we troll through the lives of people who have too much money and writers who have too little sense, except when they make sense, which makes for much less interesting mocking.

First up: Frank Bruni has clearly been checking out yr Wonkette on the regular, as he is now a Superfan of New Pope too. He's saying what we've been telling you all along, people, but with way less swears:

He didn’t right past wrongs. Let’s be clear about that. Didn’t call for substantive change to church teachings and traditions that indeed demand re-examination, including the belief that homosexual acts themselves are sinful. Didn’t challenge the all-male, celibate priesthood. Didn’t speak as progressively — and fairly — about women’s roles in the church as he should.

But he also didn’t present himself as someone with all the answers. No, he stepped forward — shuffled forward, really — as someone willing to guide fellow questioners. In doing so he recognized that authority can come from a mix of sincerity and humility as much as from any blazing, blinding conviction, and that stature is a respect you earn, not a pedestal you grab.

Thisssssss. We do not believe New Pope is going to gay marry your two most radical abortion-loving lady feminist friends to one another any time soon, but New Pope is fucking humble, yo, and humble people listen thoughtfully, which has not exactly been the hallmark of the Catholic Church of late. So once again we say yay, New Pope! Yay, Frank Bruni!

Many of the denizens of this week's NYT could take some lessons from New Pope on how to be more humble and less of an ostentatiously-spending-everything-dickhead. First up, one Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Wonkette Shoots Themselves In The Face To Read No More Of This. Incredibly rich author lady wrote ginormous bestest-selling memoirs about her precious life, but now wants to be taken seriously as a writer and used to write just like Hemingway or something something. All of this would be bearable but for the description of where she does her writing:

Gilbert will return to what remains ground zero for her creative life, the attic space she calls her Skybrary.

It is a spacious, low-ceilinged aerie filled with books and relics and secret compartments. There is a bed in one corner for naps. There is a pilgrim’s kimono from Japan. There is that ancient edition of Captain Cook’s “Voyages,” bound in leather and as regal as billed. There is a 15-foot slab of polished acacia that serves as her desk.

It will not surprise you to know that this precious room has secret compartments, just as it will not surprise you to learn that yr Wonkette is writing on the surface of a desk door slung across sawhorses littered with whiskey bottles and yesterday's clothes on the floor. We do not have a "Skybrary" and even if we did have a writing palace, it would not be called something so dumb.

What else are the rich doing? They're going to hospitals that look more like hotels because of course they are. There is also the tale of a young lady who does not seem to need an actual job, income-wise, so she has turned her attentions to trying to force the French to eat kale, because it is her fave, whether the French like it or not. SPOILER ALERT AND TRIGGER WARNING: By and large, they think she is dumb. Yay French people! Rich people are also taking their dogs to really gaudy pet-friendly hotels so that their dogs can be pretentious assholes along with their owners:

Shortly after arriving at the new Viceroy Riviera Maya in Mexico, dogs are blessed by a shaman as he circles them with burning incense. Afterward, the dog receives a garland of shells and flowers and can retire to a miniature palapa.[...]

One could go on, particularly in New York: the new pet pedometers at the Muse Hotel, the imminent pooch minibars at the Benjamin, the Lacoste polos for dogs coming soon to the Gansevoort hotels.

One could also go on, dear reader, about how this little richdog trend piece gets even more distressing:

At the Gansevoort hotels in New York, guests will soon be able to spare their pets from teeming sidewalks with a minimalist, Gansevoort-branded harness known as a puppy purse ($70), enabling the tiniest of dogs to be worn across one’s body like a living Judith Leiber bag.

We have no words. Should we try the Arts and Entertainment sections? (Skims, throws across room. Depressingly notices that there are not one but two articles about emo-yet-tough rapper Drake and his ilk, and while we like the new-ish Drake single quite well, thankyouverymuch, if this is the future of hip-hop we probably do not wish to go to there.)

After this much opulence, the editorial pages may very well be a relief. HAHAHA it hurts when we lie to ourselves, but we need to.

Maureen Dowd wrote a column that is facile but does not actually make us want to weep with rage at the dumb of it. Takeaway from MoDo's column? Warren Buffet is very rich! He is also giving some monies to charities! MoDo has already written about him in 1996 because she is ahead of the curve, our MoDo. God bless you, Maureen Dowd, for sparing us our usual reaction to your column, which is to headdesk again and again. Yay Maureen Dowd!

Boo Thomas Friedman, who is back with a boilerplate piece of tripe that could have been written by the Thomas Friedman Op-Ed Generator. Everything is the same again because Egypt and Iran! Except everything is different because more people live in Iran. Everyone should listen to a complicated yet ultimately content-free suggestion from Thomas Friedman:

But just as Mother Nature is demanding better governance from above in both countries, an emergent and empowered middle class, which first reared its head with the 2009 Green revolution in Iran and the 2011 Tahrir revolution in Egypt, is doing so from below. A government that just provides “order” alone in either country simply won’t cut it anymore. Order, drift and decay were tolerable when populations were smaller, the environment not so degraded, the climate less volatile, and citizens less technologically empowered and connected.

Both countries today need “order-plus” — an order that enables dynamism and resilience, and that can be built only on the rule of law, innovation, political and religious pluralism, and greater freedoms. It requires political and economic institutions that are inclusive and “sustainable,” in both senses of that word.

Think on this for a second. Thomas Friedman is paid literally millions and millions of dollars to come up with the genius suggestion that maybe it would be better if places had functioning governments that weren't racist or religiously restrictive, which is probably something you've already thought of. But you didn't call it "order-plus" so suck it, you get no pile of money.

Though Friedman's blithe derpiness about how to fix the Middle East is awful, it has nothing on Ross Douthat's exegesis on populism because he is Ross Douthat. What does the chinhair-bedorned baby have to say today? That Rand Paul and David Vitter and Mike Lee are populists because antiwar antidrug antibank cultural conservatives something something. Funny how "populist" means, well, anything Ross Douthat wants it to mean. Throw in an incoherent Simpsons reference at the end (populism is like beer, source of and solution to all problems, heh) to show that you are still down with the kids, and there you have it.

We'd be remiss if we didn't mention that the NYT had an article that really did speak to us this week. Yes, the NYT has discovered hate-reading, and they are ON IT. What is hate-reading? Hate-reading is when you read those Facebook posts of your dumb acquaintances from high school where they quote Sarah Palin with glowing admiration. Hate-reading is reading the comments. Hate-reading is...reading the NYT in a rush every Sunday just to write this thing. Yr Wonkette is ahead of the curve, people. We are a fucking thinkpiece trendpiece unto ourselves. Yay Wonkette!

[ NYT ]