America’s Least Necessary Pundit Offers Penetrating Insights About the 2016 Election

Here’s what you’ll “learn” if you read the latest emission from Maureen Dowd’s sinecure:

• Donald Trump winning the Republican nomination has caused some measure of tension with Republican Party elites.
• When you think about it, in terms of their substantive views Donald Trump is like Bernie Sanders and Paul Ryan is like Barack Obama.
• Maurren Dowd really likes typing the words “Lena Dunham,” referring to an actor, writer and star of a rather good HBO series who many pundits seized on as a symbol of young feminists in 2012.

It’s sort of a perfect template of a Maureen Dowd column, in other words. The content runs the gamut from banal to transparently wrong, often in an offensive way. The cliche-saturated prose perfectly reflects the content. It’s a simple shtick, really: take one of the 3 or 4 points you choose from every week (in this case, “there are no meaningful substantive differences between the parties worth considering, but at least Republican men are Authentic Real Men, unlike Democratic men who are women, and Democratic women, who are men.”) Then you have your interns look for the references that America’s hackiest comedians finished running into the ground a minimum of sixth months ago to lard your column to make it look all with it. Through these references into the column without any worry about whether they’re apropos of anything. That dreary 45 minutes out of your week done and done, sherry with Leon Wieseltier in Georgetown. Nice work if you can get it!