Winning the Lottery

I find myself flabbergasted by Maureen Dowd's column today. I choose to view this column like a lottery. Even if the odds are a million to one, if you buy a million tickets, chances are you'll win once. That describes Maureen Dowd's relationship with sensible conclusions. Sooner or later, she just stumbles upon them by accident.

OF TOP HATS, TOP KILLS AND BOTTOM FEEDERS by Maureen Dowd

It’s unnerving, disorienting. 

Why do crappy writers insist on starting columns with bullshit sentences like this? No, this does not draw me deeper into the article saying “OMG!!! WHAT IS UNNERVING AND DISORIENTING?!?! AND WHY DID SHE USE A COMMA INSTEAD OF A CONJUNCTION?!?!” The ambiguity of the pronoun doesn’t make me feel like I need to know what she’s talking about. The evasion of grammatical conventions does not make me think that her opinion must be important; it just makes me think she’s a crappy writer.

Capitalism is Dignity

I used to ascribe to the school of thought that Capitalism, in its irrefutable virtues, needed no defense. If only that were still true. Avowed communists have penetrated the Executive Branch. The President has advocated for wealth redistribution on multiple occasions--famously with Joe the Plumber in '08.  Today's Object of Ridicule and Scorn is Roger Cohen, who apparently believes that the weakness of governments in India demands a stronger government here. (Yes, it's exactly that asinine.)

This piece is a call-to-arms for the institution of neo-Communism in the United States. More government. Less freedom. More toilets. Less cell phones. I realized about half-way through that I was no longer being funny. In truth, there’s not much to make light of in this article. These may be some of the most dangerous, and brutally honest ideas expressed by the left: Capitalism is broken. Trust us to fix it. Stop asking how.

TOILETS AND CELLPHONES by Roger Cohen 

NEW YORK — I was intrigued to learn the other day that there are now more cellphones in India than toilets. 

There’s an ap for that?!?

Almost half the Indian population, 563.7 million people, is hooked up to modern communications, 

Not too long ago, the United Nations teamed up with One Laptop Per Child as a means to distribute information to children to bridge the information divide between rich and poor nations. Now, all of a sudden, technology is indefensible when developing countries decide they want to spend their own money on it?

Just Skip to the Crossword.

Today's Object of Ridicule and Scorn is the New York Times Editorial Board. The Times' liberal slant, particularly on the editorial board, has been well-established. When David Brooks is the conservative anchor of the operation, you know something's a little off.

Here, the Times has wandered way outside its wheelhouse and into the realm of high finance. Andrew Rosenthal & co. should stick to subjects it's more comfortable with--defending the artistic chops of fecal sculptures, supporting the socialist propaganda in middle school education, bludgeoning conservatives with White Guilt, and swooning for Hugo Chavez. Never forget: write what you know.

The clumsiness of the argument belies an unfamiliarity with the subject matter altogether. Leave the big-boy talk to the Wall Street Journal, and just skip to the crossword. Quick! What's an eight letter word for "utterly uninformed?" Damn it. Now I need a five letter word for "lacking in originality."

The Sentinel of Xanadu

This is the first piece in an ongoing EtD feature I'm going to call "Object of Ridicule and Scorn." Today's Object of Ridicule and Scorn is Helen Thomas, a partisan windbag with clear opinions. You'd think she’d be my type of writer. Sadly, she has eschewed coherence at virtually every turn. So in an homage to the late, great baseball blog “Fire Joe Morgan,” I’m going to mercilessly parse her latest column, entitled “An Eloquent Defense of American Democracy.”

AN ELOQUENT DEFENSE OF AMERICAN DEMOCRACY by Helen Thomas

I know this is going to be fun because, as any grade schooler with a civics class under his belt could tell you, there is no such thing as an American democracy, and for good reason. Now, I understand that for whatever reason, democracy has a leg up on representative republicanism in the P.R. department (I’ll leave you to meditate privately as to why), but the disparities between the two are not trivial, particularly when one uses the specifics of the definition to make a political argument. It’s not without condescending bemusement that I ponder how both Helen Thomas and Barack Obama—to whose speech Ms. Thomas’ title refers—managed to elude this very basic premise of American governance.