That’s three minutes I’m not getting back

There’s been a lot of talk lately about just how awful the NY Times’ op ed lineup has become. My initial reflexive reaction to such complaints is who cares, newspapers are dead, this is the age of the internet, etc.

Then tonight I made the terrible mistake of reading a Maureen Dowd column: something I probably hadn’t done in at least five years.

While there are many eviler, stupider, and otherwise more objectionable pundits than Dowd, I don’t think it’s possible to equal her for a certain sort of twee vacuousness that, like reading People magazine (something I did while waiting for a haircut yesterday; apparently I like to live dangerously), causes the reader to lose approximately five IQ points per minute:

It doesn’t feel like leadership. It doesn’t feel like you’re in command of your world.

How can we accept these reduced expectations and truculent passivity from the man who offered himself up as the moral beacon of the world, even before he was elected? . . .

Mr. President, don’t you know that we’re speeched out? It’s not what we need right now.

You should take a lesson from Adam Silver, a nerdy technocrat who, in his first big encounter with a crazed tyrant, managed to make the job of N.B.A. commissioner seem much more powerful than that of president of the United States.

As the kids say these days, I don’t even . . .