It’s Like, How Much More MoDo Could This Be?

There is a column in the Sunday Review of the country’s most prestigious op-ed section this week. It is entitled “Scaling Wokeback Mountain.” The first thing you’ll note as that this doesn’t make any sense. The second is that this incredibly strained reference is to a movie that was released in 2005. And yet, for the columnist in question, this reference is unusually fresh:

And I imagined the most potent feminist partnership in American history: Nancy Pelosi as sensei, bringing her inside game, and A.O.C., the Karate Kid with a wicked Twitter game.

Again, this is the most banal observation imaginable, pegged to a movie that was released during the Reagan administration; if it only managed to wedge in a claim that Joe Biden is actually a woman it would be the Platonic ideal of a Maureen Dowd paragraph.

Obviously, if (say) Paul Krugman had an incredibly dated and obvious selection of pop culture references, who cares, but Dowd has no expertise about policy or politics; witty pop culture references are supposed to be her selling point, and yet she’s about as fresh as a Tim Allen monologue.

And yet, it can get even worse than this:

So I went to the gym. Alex Toussaint, the digital Peloton instructor inside the little screen on my spinning bike, had some wisdom for me — the kind of New Age bromide dispensed in spin classes everywhere:

You climb the mountain to see the world. You don’t climb the mountain so the world can see you.

I only wished A.O.C. was cycling alongside me to hear it as well.

DEEP MAN. I mean, give poor Dale Peck this — at least he didn’t outsource his material to computerized spin instructors programmed to “New Age cliche” mode. Or, even worse…

Rahm Emanuel told me Chakrabarti is “a snot-nosed punk” who has no idea about the battle scars Pelosi bears from the liberal fights she has led.

Christ, who cares what this hump — who, it is worth remembering, urged Obama and Pelosi to give up on passing the ACA, among countless other sins — thinks about anything? And can’t these washed-up hacks be happy with their many sinecures rather than giving inflammatory quotes to lazy pundits?

Anyway, I can’t wait for next week’s column. “I spoke with Mark Penn, the Yoda of ex-Democratic pollsters. ‘I was hoping that AOC would be the Rocky to Pelosi’s grizzled trainer played by Burt Young,’ he told me, ‘but it turns out she’s a big poopyhead who will never appeal to lacrosse aunts.'” Or if Penn is too busy with his latest grift, I’m sure Doug Schoen has plenty of time on his hands.