Fundraiser Day 7: Show Us on the Anatomically Correct Doll

Exactly where Noam Chomsky touched you.

Man, David Fucking Brooks really hates hippies.

Really, really hates them.

Of course, he can't just come out and say that he's an emotionally-decapitated, dyspeptic plutocrat who completely freaks out when the message of the day slips out of the control of he and his band of Beltway frauds.

So instead Our Mr. Brooks has to go dig around and find some poll -- any poll -- against which he can prop his bone-deep loathing of people who refuse to meekly accept Our Mr. Brooks' suffocating, oligarchic vision of tomorrow...where all decision are dictated by elite Villager consensus and led by people like David Brooks:

The only survey I’ve seen on who these people are was conducted by New York magazine. Three percent are mainstream liberals of the Barack Obama variety. Twelve percent you might call assertive liberals in the manner of our own Paul Krugman. Roughly 40 percent say they are outside the two parties in the manner of an angrier Ralph Nader, and about 34 percent say there is no moral distinction to be made between Al Qaeda and America. In other words, this is a pretty hard left group.

To be clear, this particular poll is ridiculous on its face: a grab bag of 100 people picked from a movement now made up of tens of thousands in dozens of cities across the country, and buried since then under dozens of more recent polls like this one.

Or, as Gail Collins put it:

I wouldn’t put too much trust in the polls. A wet kid in the street saying America is the same as Al Qaeda would be in the same unwelcome line as the New Hampshire Republican saying he wants Donald Trump for president. This is not a policy position, it’s a cry of despair...

Of course, this didn't matter in the slightest, because the poll didn't matter in the first place: it was just one more sniper's nest from which Mr. Brooks could pour out his vitriol against his favorite targets without getting his hands dirty or losing his Reasonable Man status among his fellow Beltway Lilliputians.

Vitriol like this:

"I actually do think America is morally superior to Al Qaeda. I wouldn’t want to associate with a group in which a third disagree. I’m sort of surprised that so many mainstream liberals are completely unbothered by this. I’m also surprised there aren’t more liberals like Arthur Schlesinger in days of yore, willing to draw lines between liberalism and radicalism, between themselves and Noam Chomsky."

(By the way, If you have ever wondered WTF is it with David Brooks' weird obsession with Noam Chomsky --

[From the NYT, 2010]:

The ’60s left developed elaborate theories of how world history was being manipulated by shadowy corporatist/imperialist networks — theories that live on in the works of Noam Chomsky.

[From "Bobos in Paradise", 2000]

The main job of radicals in the Noam Chomsky or G. Gordon Liddy mode is to go around from one scruffy lecture hall to another reminding audiences while they may be disdained or ignored by the mainstream culture, they are actually right about everything.

-- I think it has something to do with the fact that Chomsky absolutely gutted William Buckley -- Our Mr. Brooks' Conservative Godfather and first massive Right-wing mancrush -- and Mr. Brooks has never forgiven Chomsky for making Daddy cry.)

And vitriol like this:

"I confess this is why I dislike most protest movements. Occasionally you get an admirable one infused with moral discipline and led by adults (the civil rights movement). But mostly they are occasions for people to luxuriate in their own righteousness without having to deal with the difficulties of actually doing something good."

Which, in case you are unfamiliar with his case file, features one of Our Mr. Brooks' favorite words:

"Luxuriate"

He loves the damn word. Loves the oozy decadence it conveys. Loves it so much that he cannot resist hauling it out like a favorite holiday ornament on every Hippie Punching occasion, such as here , in an article from back in March of 2003 at the height of George W. Bush's Operation Endless Clusterfuck and just before the Sulzberger family promoted him out of his job helping Bill Kristol ruin America at "The Weekly Standard" and into a job-for-life at the New York Times on the strength of Our Mr. Brooks being repeatedly, loudly and horribly wrong about, well, everything (emphasis added):

"Meanwhile, among the smart set, Hamlet-like indecision has become the intellectual fashion. The liberal columnist E. J. Dionne wrote in The Washington Post that he is uncomfortable with the pro- and anti-war camps. He praised the doubters and raised his colors on behalf of 'heroic ambivalence.' The New York Times, venturing deep into the territory of self-parody, ran a full-page editorial calling for 'still more discussion' on whether or not to go to war.

"In certain circles, it is not only important what opinion you hold, but how you hold it. It is important to be seen dancing with complexity, sliding among shades of gray. Any poor rube can come to a simple conclusion -- that President Saddam Hussein is a menace who must be disarmed--but the refined ratiocinators want to be seen luxuriating amid the difficulties, donning the jewels of nuance, even to the point of self-paralysis."

Or here -- where Our Mr. Brooks nearly sprained his back giving himself the full, Neocon reacharound by cramming both "Chomsky" and "luxuriate" into the same paragraph -- in an article he wrote shortly after he had been handed his job-for-life at the New York Times where Our Mr. Brooks explains why anyone who questioned the motives or honesty of his fellow pro-Bush Neocons was obviously an Anti-Semitic prick who was also "unhinged from reality".

Oh my! Was America's Greatest and Most Reasonable Conservative Public Intellectual really spouting stupid, lying shit like that just a few short years ago?

Yes. Yes he was (emphasis added):

"You get to feed off their villainy and luxuriate in your own contrasting virtue. You will find books, blowhards and candidates playing to your delusions, and you can emigrate to your own version of Planet Chomsky. You can live there unburdened by ambiguity."

In fact, back in The Olden Days it seemed that Our Mr. Brooks could not go five fucking minutes without sneaking the dreaded "Chomsky" into the conversation ("David Brooks: Wanker Elite" from Crooks & Liars) --

Brooks: I mean on one hand he's a malevolent guy who killed three thousand Americans, but you read this thing and it's like he's been sitting around reading lefty blogs and one of these childish people posting rants at the bottom of the page (garbled) Noam Chomsky and all this stuff.

-- which must have made him very happy.

Or at least as happy as an emotionally-decapitated Conservative automaton can ever be.

Meanwhile back in the here-and-now...

... Our Mr. Brooks and Ms. Collins finish off their ridiculous weekly "Conversation" with a happy-clappy game of Barbie's Dream Congress in which they both agree to play nice with each other and compromise.

Ms. Collins diplomatically avoids mentioning the rude and inconvenient fact that any and all such compromise is being deliberately sabotaged by Mr. Brooks' Republican Party.

In return, Our Mr. Brooks uses his permanent resident status at the New York Times to take one more lying, gratuitous shot at those damn, dirty hippies:

Just so long as you understand this whole exercise is in direct violation of the spirit of the Occupy movement. You shouldn’t be negotiating with me. You shouldn’t even be talking with me.

Which Charles Pierce of "Esquire" effortlessly eviscerates here:

...
David Brooks was born in 1961. He'd just turned four when the March on Washington happened. (Nice of him to bestow his blessings on the civil-rights movement 40 years later. I'm sure Dr. King and the three kids who were dug out of the dam, and the four little girls who were blown up in Birmingham are resting more comfortably knowing that their sacrifice has his seal of approval.) He was just turning seven when the Democratic Convention in Chicago erupted. He'd just turned eight when the Vietnam Moratorium occurred, and he was nine when four students were slaughtered by the National Guard at Kent State. Only two of them were "luxuriating in their righteousness" when they took M-1 rounds that killed them, by the way. The other two were simply walking to class.

What David Brooks learned about "protest movements," he learned the hard way, from all the people who ignored him in the 1980's. What he knows about "protest movements," he could stick in his ear ass and still have room for a week's provisions. (Gail, a good Marquette gal, at least went to Woodstock.) David Brooks's great act of rebellion was to join The Weekly Standard in order to stick it to The Man, who I believe was Fritz Mondale at that point.
...

Future historians will not look back on the Occupy Wall Street movement as an example of what was broken with America.

Instead they will look to the New York Times and see a bitter, talentless mediocrity who, year after year, was paid a regal salary to wallow -- to positively luxuriate -- in his ludicrous opinions in America's newspaper of record.

And then they will begin to understand what was wrong with us.

Fundraiser is on.
The dough goes here!