The New York Times' New Hater

For those wondering just how craptacular John Tierney's New York Times op-ed column will be, wonder no more. Here's a preview, an actual Tierney article from yesterday's automotive section:

It has always been tempting to think you can figure out who a person is and what he thinks by what he drives. That subject was raised recently by Chely Wright in her country and western hit, "Bumper of My S.U.V.," in which she tells of a "lady in a minivan" giving her a vulgar hand gesture for driving a car with a Marines bumper sticker:

"Does she think she knows what I stand for/Or the things that I believe/Just by looking at a sticker for the U.S. Marines/On the bumper of my S.U.V.?"

The lady in the minivan might not know, but some of the finest minds in market research think they do. By analyzing new-car sales, surveying car owners and keeping count of political bumper stickers, they are identifying the differences between Democratic cars and Republican ones.
...

Last year, the Republican National Committee applied data supplied by Scarborough Research, a New York market research firm, to a range of leisure-time and consumer activities to find where it could reach potential voters with advertising. Part of Scarborough's effort was to survey 200,000 car owners about their political affiliations.

Scarborough found that Porsche owners identified themselves as Republican more often than owners of any other cars, with 59 percent calling themselves Republicans, 27 percent Democrats and the rest either calling themselves independents or declining to answer. Jaguars and Land Rovers also registered as very "Republican" vehicles.

A masterpiece of insipid trendspotting, pop sociology, cliche and consumerism, heavily dependent on quotes from friends and market research flacks rather than research or reporting. Tierney's the bastard son of MoDo and Bobo.

But wait: It's much, much worse!

Tierney's ostensible news article is based on an RNC survey, and relies heavily on quotes right-wing pals Mickey Kaus and Steve Sailer.

You'll recall Sailer last made an appearance in the Times in a Tierney piece about Presidential i.q.s, which also quoted Sailer's Pioneer Fund friend, Linda Gottfredson. Sailer's an expert on i.q.; he's an expert on cars. He's a fricken' genius, that guy.

This time, Tierney even lets Sailer spout off on a favorite subject, race:

"Nascar has an American-made-only requirement for cars and a variety of other rules that discourage foreign makers from competing," said Steve Sailer, a conservative journalist who has analyzed the red-blue divide. "Toyota has dipped its toe into Nascar's truck-racing series with its American-made trucks, but there isn't a lot of demand for Japanese participation.

"In truth, a lot of fans would be sore about ending the all-American monopoly. Nascar has become a covert ethnic-pride celebration for red-state whites of Northern European descent."

"NASCAR: The Master Race." How nice. It's uncanny how Sailer gets inside the minds of those ethnic-pride-filled whites of Northern European descent. I can't imagine how he does it.

I expect we'll hear much more from Sailer and his loathsome ilk when Tierney doesn't have to temper his views with faux objectivity.

But perhaps the most offensive thing about Tierney's article is its unsubtle smear that Democrats are unpatriotic. He writes, "The survey also found that minivans skewed blue, just as Chely Wright surmised in her song.." Get it? Democrats are vulgarians who hate America's troops, just like a character in a country-and-western song. (Needless to say, Wright doesn't surmise anything about the character's political affiliation or state of residence in her song -- Tierney filled in those hateful details himself.)

Why Tierney uses a car column to piss on the thousands of dead and wounded American soldiers from the "blue states" -- as well as the hundreds of thousands of servicemen and women from those states --- and their families -- is beyond my understanding.

And the only real Marine in Tierney's column -- Tierney included -- is a true-blue Democrat.