Not the first time progressives and conservatives agree. Remember al&tipper Gore and Evangelicals?
§ As of Monday afternoon, Ross Douthat’s post-death takedown of Hugh Hefner from The New York Times was still garnering praise on Twitter.
As many have pointed out, the column was indeed a fantastic piece of prose that persuasively pushed back against a slew of Hefner hagiographies. And Douthat, one of the Times’ most socially conservative columnists, managed to win over people on the left and the right.
But Douthat’s relentless character assassination of a recently deceased Hefner also falls into a relatively new tradition of treating the deaths of public figures as opportunities to issue definitive judgments about whether they were Good or Bad. For whatever reason, the occasion of someone’s death tends to make us even more allergic to nuance than usual.
Nothing bespeaks courage like a "post-death takedown".
He was a good man and a fine bowler
Shame on those dogs picking at his bones
SHAME...dingding...SHAME...