All About Douthat

Maureen Dowd took the day off, but that doesn't mean there wasn't news coming from the Gray Lady's Op/Ed page. In a stunning and daring upheaval of the existing paradigm, the Times has replaced a conservative Harvard grad with, wait for it, a conservative Harvard grad. While hardly anyone will argue that anybody brighter than J. Fred Muggs would be an improvement over the lazy and tired scribblings of Kristol Meth, some vetting of Douthat needs to be done. Lets see how he matches up.

Bill Kristol	Ross Douthat
Harvard '73	Harvard '02
The Weekly Standard	The Atlantic
The War Over Iraq: Saddam's Tyranny and America's Mission (with Lawrence F. Kaplan)	Grand New Party: How Republicans Can Win the Working Class and Save the American Dream
"[Obama's] selection of Rahm Emanuel as chief of staff suggests that Obama’s not going to be mindlessly leftist."	"Barack Obama won the 2008 Presidential election on an agenda that tilted him further leftward than most recent Democratic nominees on nearly every issue."

All I can say is that Bill Kristol had a rock-solid reputation about never getting anything right. And for the new blogger on the right, those are tough shoes to fill. Someone as young as Douthat is a blank slate still. At just barely over half of Maureen Dowd's age, this baby-faced newcomer could be around for a long time.