Well sure, but whose jeans was he wearing?

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 8, 2011

Ashley rides again: Ashley Parker strikes again in today’s New York Times.

Parker is one of the youngsters being groomed to continue the newspaper’s fatuous culture. She spent five years as Maureen Dowd’s “research assistant.” Today, she pens a report on page A14 about Mitt Romney’s “POLICY PROPOSALS.”

On Sunday, Dowd devoted her column to very tight, pricey designer shoes. Here’s how her addled acolyte starts a report about policy:

PARKER (11/8/11): Crowd helps Romney with cuts

Mitt Romney, clad in Tommy Bahama blue jeans and a blue plaid work shirt, took that stage at a metal fabrication shop here and offered two different scenarios a year from now.

Darlings! Before you hear what the man has proposed, you must know whose jeans he was wearing!

This sort of "reporting" is of course intended to suggest things about a disfavored candidate—stupid things which can’t be stated within the rules of standard journalism. In the fall of 1999, these same bazoos spent weeks and months “reporting” on Candidate Gore’s deeply revealing clothes.

(In that case, to make the clothes more revealing, they simply made lots of shit up.)

Twelve years later, the emptiness of this paper’s recruits is really a thing to behold. By the rules of the guild, they must have gone to the very best schools—and they can’t have a thought in their heads! That said, the older generation was clowning away in this same manner last night.

Chris Matthews helped invent this gong-show culture. Last night, convinced that his viewers are low-IQ fools, he pimped this sad culture along:

MATTHEWS (11/7/11): Up next, we’ll meet a woman who spent two hours on a plane sitting next to Mitt Romney.

Can you stand the excitement? She said she came off—he came off as out of touch, even wooden! You're surprising me so much! I can’t wait to meet this eyewitness. This is Hardball, only on MSNBC.

Gore was wooden—and Romney is too! This is memorized stuff.

Let’s face it—it’s hard to get dumber than this. But sure enough! As Matthews introduced his eyewitness guest, he revealed the source of the dumb:

MATTHEWS: Welcome back to Hardball.

When Dr. Carolyn McClanahan took her seat aboard a flight from Atlanta to Boston, she found herself seated next to Mitt Romney. She asked Romney if he'd pose for a picture and he agreed. Then, Carolyn tweeted it to her followers.

But when she tried to engage the candidate about health care reform, he wasn’t in the mood to talk. And that led to this headline in the New York Times politics blog, The Caucus: "An Aloof Romney in a Plane Encounter."

Dr. Carolyn McClanahan is a former practicing physician who is now the director of her own financial planning company. She joins us from Jacksonville, Florida.

Doctor, thank you very much for joining us. I’m not saying I’m overwhelmingly surprised by this but you were.

McClanahan was overwhelmed. The source of the dumb was, what else, the New York Times politics blog! Modern doctors know who to call with their inane observations!

Maureen Dowd largely invented this culture, though it typifies palace culture through the annals of time. To state the obvious, the simpering culture these people affect is that of the top one percent.

As for Ashley: Mommy and Daddy sent her to Penn. After five long years with Dowd, this puddle is all they have left.