King Pimp

Over in the Better Universe, pundits are required to dress in the rags of their actual profession.

Over here, David Fucking Brooks has a dream:

November 7, 2008

Change I Can Believe In

By DAVID BROOKS

I have dreams. I may seem like a boring pundit whose most exotic fantasies involve G.A.O. reports, but deep down, I have dreams.

…

The administration of my dreams understands where the country is today. Its members know that, as Andrew Kohut of the Pew Research Center put it on “The NewsHour,” “This was an election where the middle asserted itself.” There was “no sign” of a “movement to the left.”

Only 17 percent of Americans trust the government to do the right thing most or all of the time, according to an October New York Times/CBS News poll. So the members of my dream Obama administration understand that they cannot impose an ideological program the country does not accept.

…

They’ll invite G.O.P. leaders to the White House for real meetings and then re-invite them, even if they give hostile press conferences on the White House driveway.

They’ll do things conservatives disagree with, but they’ll also show that they’re not toadies of the liberal interest groups. They’ll insist on merit pay and preserving No Child Left Behind’s accountability standards, no matter what the teachers’ unions say. They’ll postpone contentious fights on things like card check legislation.

…

And so forth.

Before the NYT welded the dumpster lid closed on this reeking pile of hackslag, over 600 citizens had commented on this column. Most, bless their hearts, sounded like “Lisa, Oakland, CA”:

And you asked the Republicans to do this how many times over the last eight years? Funny how a Democratic Congress and President can suddenly make "bipartisan" look like something other than a cuss word from Republicans, who were trying for eternal one-party rule for most of the last dozen years.

In addition to being pissed, a large number of commenters seemed genuinely baffled by David Fucking Brooks' dealing out so much hypocrisy from the bottom of his stacked deck, so fast, so dizzyingly divorced from any reality-based context, and all in one, short essay.

As I mentioned last week, Bobo has two, basic columns:

1. The personal and triumphal when he finds occasion to flaunt his ridiculous, bankrupt ideology. And,

2. The moon-faced alien anthropologist, orbiting the Earth and noting the fall of American civilization from the safe distance of wealth and privilege that this relentlessly mediocre man has somehow been afforded when confronted with the cratered wasteland he and his beliefs have created.

This column is, yet again, a towering example of #2.

For people who were mystified that Our Mr. Brook's is now suddenly and loudly militating for behaviors about which he was conspicuously silent during the Republican Dark Ages, the answer is simple.

Money.

As every cop who ever walked an honest beat knows, people just aren’t that complicated.

Mr. Brooks does not get paid for being insightful or honest: he gets paid for feigning insightfulness and honesty. He gets very, very handsomely compensated for performing exactly the same function as a hooker: telling the Pig People how attractive and strong-like-bull they are regardless of what the mirror says, or how depraved their demands.

Without his Conservative hobby-horse to ride, the relentlessly mediocre David Brooks would be unemployed and unemployable, and this is not a man to risk derailing the gravy train just for the fleeting thrill of telling some ugly, unvarnished truth about his party and his politics.