Only the Loathsome, Part III

By A.J. Liebling
Content Deconstructor

We have now marshaled our forces sufficiently to dig our way through the final portion of “Kevin” Dowd's column in last Sunday's New York Times.  We can't go on much longer, so, breaking our promise to readers of line-by-line analysis (of course, if we were as narcissistic as “Kevin”'s choice for President, we'd just deny we ever said it), let's skip ahead a paragraph or so.  (For those of you who came in late, we have Kevin in quotes because we don't know if he's real or just a chance for sister Maureen to tell us what she really thinks while retaining plausible deniability.)

After berating college students who skipped class because they were upset at the imminent transformation of the United States of America into a kleptocracy (apparently, college students, unlike he-men firemen, policemen, and newspaper columnists aren't entitled to personal days off), “Kevin” decides to take a shot at what the kiddos are studying at college these days:

Not one of the top 50 colleges mandate one semester of Western Civilization. Maybe they should rethink that.

Jesus, Mary, and Joseph! Maureen, you've heard of Columbia College up there on 116th Street?  Here's its description of its required freshman course, Contemporary Civilization:

The Core Curriculum is the set of common courses required of all undergraduates and considered the necessary general education for students, irrespective of their choice in major. . . .

Introduction to Contemporary Civilization in the West

Founded in 1919 as a course on War and Peace Issues, the central purpose of Contemporary Civilization is to introduce students to a range of issues concerning the kinds of communities – political, social, moral, and religious – that human beings construct for themselves and the values that inform and define such communities;. . .

We're not going to go through 50 fucking websites just to prove that “Kevin” doesn't know jack shit about higher education, but here's two more:

At the University of Chicago, thought by many others besides “Kevin” to be a pretty fair school, undergrads must take two courses from the following list:

	Readings in World Literature I-II-III
	Philosophical Perspectives I-II-III
	Greece and Rome: Texts, Traditions, Transformations I-II-III
	Human Being and Citizen I-II-III
	Introduction to the Humanities I-II-III
	Reading Cultures: Collection, Travel, Exchange I-II-III
	Media Aesthetics: Image, Text, Sound I-II-III
	Language and the Human I-II-III

Closer to home perhaps, here are the core requirements of one fine school within rock-throwing distance of Annandale, Georgetown:

• One course in writing
• One course in the Humanities: Arts, Literatures, and Cultures (HALC)
• Two history courses
• Two theology courses
• Two philosophy courses

Kevin Dowd remembers when college taught you how to think white

They also have to take science courses so they can understand that women do not have to remain silent whilst menstruating, a tidbit lost on “Kevin”'s preferred candidate.  Maybe “Kevin” should rethink getting his information on the state of American academe from Rush Limbaugh.

Let's move on to “Kevin's” next nugget:

Mr. Trump received over 62 million votes,

A mere 2,500,000 fewer than Hillary Clinton, which doesn't seem to slow down “Kevin”'s entirely unearned triumphalism.

not all of them cast by homophobes, Islamaphobes, racists, sexists, misogynists or any other “ists.”

That's true.  Some were cast by poor whites in Appalachia because they thought the Tangerine-Faced Grifter would help them.  Perhaps “Kevin”'s definition of “help” includes cancelling their Obamacare-provided health insurance thus allowing them to depart their grim lives years earlier.

I would caution Trump deniers that all of the crying and whining is not good preparation for the coming storm. 

Another fact!  That makes two in a row.  He is absolutely correct that crying and whining is not good preparation.  Organization and resistance work much better.  We did like the neologism “Trump denier.”  That's different from “climate denier” – an individual who like the Tangerine-Faced Grifter denies the irrefutable scientific proof of human-caused global warming, an issue of no interest to “Kevin,” unlike say freshman college course requirements.

The liberal media, both print and electronic, has lost all credibility.

I come here not to defend the liberal media, whatever that is, but only to note that “Kevin” has provided us with the moron's version of a Buddhist koan.   If a column in in the “liberal media” says the liberal media has lost all credibility, then is “Kevin” Socrates?  We'll go with no.

I am reasonably sure that none of the mainstream print media had stories prepared for a Trump victory. 

I am reasonably sure that “Kevin” pulled this out of his blowhole. If he really wanted to know what preparations the media had made for election night, perhaps his sister could have picked up the telephone and called Dean Baquet, her executive editor and boss.   Sadly that would require an act of “journalism,” a craft last practiced by Maureen Dowd during her salad days on the late lamented Washington Star (died 1981).

Here is a final word to my Democratic friends.

To quote Tracy Lord, “Of whom he has many I'm sure.”

The election is over. There will not be a do-over. So let me bid farewell to Al Sharpton, Ben Rhodes and the Clintons. Note to Cher, Barbra, Amy Schumer and Lena Dunham: Your plane is waiting. And to Jon Stewart, who talked about moving to another planet: Your spaceship is waiting. To Bruce Springsteen, Jay Z, Beyoncé and Katy Perry, thanks for the free concerts.

This gets to the heart of  “Kevin”'s artichoke.  For him and his fellow white louts, the campaign was not about the economy (as Annandale has been living large at the Federal teat for generations), managing complicated and dangerous crises in the Middle East and Eastern Europe, keeping the world from drowning our children, or making life better for the downtrodden.  It was about white male triumphalism: the supposed right to gloat over a list of mostly female, minority, and Jewish celebrities that “Kevin” now feels entitled to patronize, because of how 100,000 votes fell in three Midwestern states.  (By the way, you can try to make fun of Jon Stewart if you dare, but his joke was making the obvious point that if you fear that the Tangerine-Faced Grifter will blow up the world, as you should, moving to Canada is hardly a solution.)

Ridiculing celebrities on the left is considered quite a sport among the white supremacist set, so it's hardly surprising to see “Kevin” piling on.  Liberals don't get to have equal amounts of this fun, because what's the point in roughing up Scott Baio and Ted Nugent?

“Kevin” saved his KO punch for the end:

And finally, to all the foreign countries that contributed to the Clinton Foundation, there will not be a payoff or a rebate.

That riff hasn't aged too well, has it? In the last week alone, we've seen the Grifter-Elect profit from foreign countries booking events at his DC hotel, and from countries like Argentina and the Philippines hiring the Grifter-Elect's real estate partners to influence the G-E. And since the G-E refuses to divest his holdings, instead entrusting them to Santino, Fredo, and Michaela Trump, he'll be in position to profit from not only foreign deals but also, just to name a few, going easy on penalties for a German bank to which he owes $650,000,000 and nobbling the National Labor Relations Board so that he can violate with impunity the collective bargaining rights of ill-paid maids at his Las Vegas sh*thole.

But “Kevin”'s not worried, because he knows that a Cabinet and White House staff composed of former Goldman Sachs partners, white supremacist mouthpieces, reactionary hacks, and billionaire finaglers will no doubt stand up for average hard-working Amurricans like him.  While that crowd of swindlers is robbing him and our poor country blind, stealing Medicare from “Kevin” and his contemporaries, and leaving 20 million Obamacare recipients to expire in the street, they'll provide “Kevin” what what's really important to him: a steady diet of insult comedy, unearned gloating, and the chance to put the non-white, the non-hetero, and the non-testicled in their place.

He must be so proud of himself.