OFF TO A GREAT START.

How America's newest top-tier pundit? Smokin', my friends. In the past 24 hours Megan McArdle has offered us not one, but two classic columns. First, anyone who was wondering how McArdle would top all the other rightwing weepers over Kevin Williamson may feast their eyes:

A person of color in a white space spends a great deal of time noticing they are a person of color, and that they are in a white space. The white people are very rarely conscious of the glistening pink skin surrounding them on all sides. Something similar holds for liberals and conservatives in American cultural institutions.

I'm tempted to bold or italicize or bold italicize that last sentence but honestly, only the late lamented blink tag would do.

...conservatives spend the first few decades of their lives in a left-skewed educational system, and the rest consuming cultural products made by liberals, so that liberal cultural hegemony barrages them daily with their “otherness.” Which is how they can sincerely feel powerless despite holding a great deal of political power.

They rule America, but what does it mean if they cannot have love? If only Jimmy Kimmel were nice like Fred Hiatt! But wait, there's more -- the column also contains a I'm Not Saying I'm Just Saying Switchback ("I’m comparing the group dynamics, not proclaiming that bias against conservatives is exactly morally the same," reads her "disclaimer," which she describes as "tiresome-but-necessary" and she's half right) and a This Is Why Trump Wonsie ("If that happened to you, probably you’d be pretty mad... Heck, you might even say ‘to hell with respectability politics,’ and vote for a loudmouthed reality television star..."). And on Twitter, this chef's kiss: "My prediction on this column, by the way, is that at least a few people on the right will say 'Wow. Maybe I should be more sympathetic to complaints about systemic racism.'" (Update, next day: No conservative is saying this.)

And a mere turnin' of the earth later, here comes Zombie-Eyed Granny Starver, We Hardly Knew Ye:

Should he have called out Trump more boldly than he did, refused to pass a tax reform without some reasonable attempt to pay for it, and generally made more of a nuisance of himself to the more irresponsible elements of his party? Perhaps. But holding a divided party, or a divided country together, is a delicate and important task. We shouldn’t be too quick to condemn those who attempt it. And when they go down, we should bury them with honors.

Now that’s The Up Side of Down!

...His replacement is likely to be less reasonable, less broadly liked, and less interested in policy than the sound of their own voice. They’re likely to be someone who is desperately interested in the prestige of the office, rather than someone willing to sacrifice from their own interests to party and country.

Wow, maybe that new, lesser GOP Speaker will help push through an even bigger deficit, with even more tax cuts for the rich and shit for the poor, than Ryan did while pretending to be a deficit hawk! And when he retires Megan McArdle will come tell us that we should be nice to that guy because the GOP Speaker after him might be even worse! (Assuming, perhaps unfairly, that we ever have another GOP Speaker.)

Reaching to top of the heap seems to have inspired her. Can’t wait to see what she does next! In fact I’m kind of sorry we all Twitter-mobbed Williamson off The Atlantic — maybe by now he’d be calling to make contraception a capital crime.

UPDATE. Comments -- always worth your time -- include this insight from our old Spy/SOROB buddy Ellis Weiner:

Don't shoot me--I'm just the messenger--but I can see McMegan bidding fair to become the Peggy Noonan of the still-slightly-new century: The fake concessions to common sense. The finger-wagging lectures on responsibility and maturity. The outright lying on behalf of obvious frauds, thieves, and hypocrites. The tremulous citation of the mood of the nation. The pseudo-wise discourses on human nature and psychology that, once you actually read them, turn out to have exactly nothing to do with real people slugging it out in a world in which the rich would, if they could, bring back feudalism and ask the lower classes to thank them for it.

Well, look. Becoming the Tokyo Rose of American class warfare is a delicate and important task.

I take his point; McArdle's got Noonan's natural talent for passive-aggressive twaddle, and Lord knows they both have similarly bizarre notions of financial struggle.  But McArdle's going to have to pay some heavy dues before she ascends to the Tanqueray Throne: She'll have do time in the chrism-and-gin-scented sepulchre of the Crazy Jesus Lady, prostate before the Reagan effigy until, suffused with the Holy Spirit, she can summon the magic dolphins. That Pulitzer's not a walk in the park!