This rant comes via Sarah Hoyt.

Taki is just a trifle negative about today’s New York.

NEW YORK—In the dark she still looks good. The mystery and magnetism linger until dawn, and then you slowly see the lines and the harshness. Like a lady of the night who has smoked 10,000 cigarettes, the coming of the light is the enemy. New York ain’t what she used to be, that’s for sure. She’s a tired old place, with the upper-class vertical living gone to seed, and the honky-tonk fun side of the city gentrified and made boring. Michael Bloomberg as mayor did his best to ruin the glamour of the city, allowing glass behemoths to make the Chrysler Building, one of the world’s monuments to architectural brilliance, be buried amidst glass monstrosities. Bloomberg was and is a lowlife who knows how to count to 50 billion but couldn’t tell you Admiral Nelson’s Christian name if his miserable life depended on it. The present mayor, de Blasio, is a lowlife wop without the billions.

What happens in the sky is felt in the streets below. The once-exclusive Vanderbilt Avenue, where stores sold expensive tennis gear and hunting shotguns, is now a dark and dreary place, and just as well. The Vanderbilt was the hotel where the swells met—under the clock—since before Fitzgerald’s time and long past Taki’s. It was gone with the wind when Bloomberg types descended on the city like the northern jackals who went down south.

RTWT

Stephanie Cutter

I haven’t seen it, but apparently CNN has revived its public affairs debate program Crossfire. The new version features Newt Gingrich and (from the left) former Obama Deputy Campaign Manager Stephanie Cutter.

Patrick Howley supposedly reviewed the new Crossfire at the Daily Caller, but his review consisted of a really spectacular anti-Cutter rant.

To watch this latest incarnation of Crossfire is to confront, head-on, the defining unspoken reality of human existence: bad people like Stephanie Cutter can climb, in defiance of taste and public demand, to a position of success.

A loathsome creature like Stephanie Cutter, the roots jutting out from her blonde dye job as black as the recesses of her soul, can push her way onto national television to sit next to a former Speaker of the House and two sitting U.S. senators. A charmless, dead-eyed, tacky sociopath with no sense of ethics, an empty shell spewing her flat-throated bile without the slightest trace of self-awareness, can beat all of us to the front of the Darwinian line.

A figure of hatred and dishonesty, a person devoid of any pleasantness or redeeming human value, a treadmill-stomping, Starbucks-chugging monument to modern self-absorption, someone incapable of appreciating good art, fine food, or the love or kidness of her fellow man, can shove and kick and lie her way ahead of the rest of us in this misbegotten society. This unmitigated monster can appear before us, talentless, grating, fraudulently tanned, thrusting in our faces the career trophies she earned simply because we didn’t care enough to stop her from getting them.

Who is responsible for this speed-talking tragedy? Who, among us, will stand in the public square and admit “I helped cause Stephanie Cutter.” Will anyone? Should we all?

Stephanie Cutter is feminism mutated into grotesque cartoon. She is the 90-IQ suburbanite Student Council vice president smugly doodling her gel pens in the front row of the class, mixed with the ranting fever dreams of the Smith College lecture halls, doused with half a dash of unearned metropolitan haughtiness and marinated in the despicable shouting matches of post-Carville politicking. She is Carrie Bradshaw without the literacy, Chelsea Handler without the punch lines, Kirsten Powers without the prettiness, gorging her face with the spoils of ill-gotten first-world privilege. How did we allow this American with a Social Security number to power-walk through the halls of our society for 44 years (yes, Stephanie, forty-four) without recognizing the warning signs?

Read the whole thing.

I must confess that I actually didn’t know who Stephanie Cutter was, and had to look her up.

Can she possibly be this bad? I suppose I’ll have to look for Crossfire to find out.