...he operates under the assumption that a redistribution will prove isomorphic to an “Operation Twist” and restore full employment equilibrium.
-- of "In Time".
However, for all of their many very large and impressive words, one item that none of the reviewers noted was that before it was 2011's breakthrough, visionary whatever, this story was called "'Repent, Harlequin!' Said the Ticktockman".
It was written by Harlan Ellison.
In 1965.
It is one of the most famous and reprinted short stories in the English language.
It's plot --
"...a dystopian future in which time is strictly regulated and everyone must do everything according to an extremely precise time schedule. In this future, being late is not merely an inconvenience, but a crime. The crime carries a hefty penalty in that a proportionate amount of time is "revoked" from one's life. The ultimate consequence is to run out of time and be "turned off." This is done by the Master Timekeeper, or "Ticktockman," who utilizes a device called a "cardioplate" to stop a person's heart once his time has run out.
-- appears to have been cut from and lifted bodily out of Harlan's famous short story, then implanted into a Justin Timberlake vehicle without a backwards glance.
Ellison, a writer who is rightfully proud of the lengths he’ll go to to protect his intellectual property, attempted to prevent the release of In Time, claiming that it shamelessly rips off “Repent, Harlequin! Said the Tick Tock Man,” Ellison’s own short story.
In Ellison’s story, an impish rebel named Harlequin, jokingly modeled after Ellison himself, rebels against a futuristic society where the time that people have left in their lives is methodically monitored and even policed by the government. Residents in Ellison’s future have internal clocks that get processed by “The Master Time Keeper,” a heartless martinet that never hesitates before punishing tardy civilians by robbing them of precious hours or even years of their lives.
I’m no legal expert, and it is important to note that Ellison’s suit, which has not reached an official judgment yet, has not successfully stopped the theatrical release of Niccol’s film. Yet his case seems to have merit. In Time has the same exact set-up as “Repent, Harlequin! Said the Tick Tock Man.”
the outcome of which I am not 100% up-to-speed on.
The similarities were so striking and obvious that upon seeing just the trailer 4-5 weeks ago, I whispered to my wife (for I am a considerate movie patron) words to the effect that I was delighted that Harlan had finally been able to get one of his most famous short stories made into a Big Time Hollywood Movie.
"After all," I reasoned, "who is there left in the world of cinema still damn fool enough to steal from this guy?"
I find this completely unsurprising: maybe it is simply another lethal side-effect of a culture whose economics, politics and entertainment all depend entirely on almost everyone forgetting almost everything that happened before yesterday, but (for example) the number edgy, "new" insights that pop up on science fictionally illiterate blogs these days (and then run like a rash through the blogosphere) that are nothing but 3rd generation carbon copies of edgy insights that first appeared, fully articulated, in "Astounding Magazine" in the 1950s is both amazing and depressing.
By 2020, America's new All Hallows Eve tradition will have citizens gathering in town squares around bonfires of Chinese-made junk to tell scary stories about the bad old days when a loose NeoConfederation of vampire bankers, Bible-clutching demons, sheet-wearing bigots and zombie politicians came thiiiiiis close to destroying the country.
"But didn't the people see the monsters coming?" the children will ask.
"Some did. Saw them coming clear as day from miles and miles away." the grownups will explain.
"Then why didn't they warn people about the monsters?" the children will ask.
"Some tried. Tried for years and years." the grownups will reply.
"Then why didn't the grownups stop them?"
"The monsters had lots of very, very rich friends who owned newspapers and radio stations and teevee networks. The friends of the monsters used their teevee and radio and newspapers to call everyone who disagreed with them a traitors."
"But once the monsters started to fuck everything up, why didn't they stop them them?" (Thanks to the Triumph of the Hippies, the word "fuck" had long since been welcomed into the public square.)
"The friends of the monsters used their teevee and radio and newspapers to tell the people that a better way to deal with the monsters would be to give them everything they wanted, and throw bags of money at them whenever they asked. They called it "Centrism"."
"Seems pretty fucking stupid."
"It was pretty fucking stupid, and after awhile all kinds of people from all over the place got sick and tired of the monsters fucking everything up, And they got really sick and tired of the monster's friends telling them to the only solution to every problem to keep giving the monsters everything they wanted, and keep throwing bags of money at them no matter what."
"And that's when the people made them stop?"
"Yes, that's when the people made them stop."
Then the children will hurry back home to dress up in the holiday's tradition horror costumes -- Fox News reporters, Wall Street bankers and New York Times op-ed columnists -- before scattering into the night to extort the traditional Flat Tax Cookies and candy-coated credit default swaps from the happy, unforclosed-upon homes of their friends and neighbors.
Until then, enjoy Edgar Allan Poe's "The Valley Of Unrest" as read by Elizabeth Ashley reading Lou Reed's "The Raven".
In lieu of diving into the toxic Mouse Circus gazpacho and reporting back once again that, yes, our media is owned by soulless corporations who put well-paid humanlike husks in front of the cameras to guard against anything remotely resembling the shattering blasphemies of unvarnished truth to accidentally leak into our public dialogue...
...I took a birthday break to go to church and watch my wife read the liturgy and receive a much-deserved public pat on the back for being one of the community's most stalwart doers, watch the girls sing and stomp, stand with the family as middle child was given her own Bible, then ice cream, presents and teaching the girls a few of the finer points of blackjack.
Later, our horde will descend on a local theater for something G-rated, after which there will be some home-made cake.
I also want to thank you all for your many kindnesses, support, emails, comments and well-aimed jabs.
Two roads diverged in a wood, and today I took the one less traveled by Dick Cheney, David Gregory and George Will.
... This will not be for tender eyes or sensibilities.
Ok, when you have a team, people bring different things to it, but the goal is to fucking win. You don't get anywhere by cutting down your fucking teammates. You don't like Mike Moore and Move On, you bitch about them in a private e-mail, you don't run to those fucking bitches at the WSJ and proclaim them the problem. The only thing those assholes at the WSJ editorial page can do for a liberal is break their hands in a skiing accident and not work for a few weeks. That's the only help they can provide. Any asshole who runs to them to whine isn't on MY fucking team. They're out for their own fucking selves and realizing that doesn't take the genius a five year old uses in McDonalds.
A lot of people wanted to buy into the bullshit that the GOP was beating us like a trailer park wife. Well that's horseshit. Our problems is that our coaches suck. They not only don't know how to win, they act like they don't want to win. Yeah, yeah, Clinton won, but this is a different team playing a different fucking game. The public likes clear choices. You may hate George Bush, but you know where he stands, and that's why John McCain will NEVER be president. He's too many things to too many fucking people. And Hillary is marching down that same fucking road.
A lot of you blame John Kerry for losing. Well, that's also horseshit. Even Tucker fucking Carlson thought Kerry had in the bag. We fucked up by discounting the church offensive of Rove. That's where those votes came from. It wasn't any fucking Swift Boat either. They fucked up, according to Zogby, and people didn't believe them. But that was one fine magic trick, taking out Rather and neutralizing the draft dodging issue against a bona fide war hero. They played a better ground game. Did Kerry fuck up? Sure, but it wasn't about any vote fraud shit. That battle was lost when Ken Blackwell decided to play for the home team. Once he decided to Tom his way to popularity, that was a done deal, Diebold or no, wacky Bev Harris or no. Part of the problem is that Kerry was saddled with the same losers everyone else had to deal with. Coaches who can't fucking coach and try to win using the old playbook. They KNOW that playbook and hand our asses to us when we use it. They didn't want to win bad enough. They thought there were rules. Our old friend Hunter Thompson knew that politics had one set of rules, do anything to win which you can get away with. The fact that Kerry got close is a miracle, given the team he had.
But the real blame belongs in Congress. Anyone want to tell me how that wacko Tom Coburn is a Senator? It's like Theodore fucking Bilbo rose from the dead and took back his seat. He should have been carted off to await the rapture in a mental hospital.
The DLC should be called the dumbass losing coaches. Al From couldn't coach his way out of a fucking paper bag. His day is done.
Here's the deal: Americans like the lives liberals gave them. There have been fundamentalists since 1740 and, like roaches, they pop up, fuck up a few things and scurry away. Rapture? Every century brings out those wackos. Left Behind is Star Wars for Bible thumpers. Fucking fiction. But what they don't like is our unwillingness to stand for something. The GOP has lied and bullshitted so many times, it's a miracle people can wipe their asses after listening to them.
And how do liberals react? Oh, Americans are sheep, let me move to Toronto, Bush is a fascist.
Which is just an excuse for cowardice. Conservatives don't say that shit in public, they act like they're protecting the poor while fucking them in the ass. They sure talked up Jesus during the election, and then fucked them good with tort reform and bankruptcy laws. They talked up the marrying faggots and then picked their pockets. The oldest hooker scam on the planet, get you thinking about your dick, while picking your pocket. Yet, how do we react, what do we do? Whine about Fox. Fuck Fox. Fox is for morons. Ignore fucking Fox, turn it into a fucking echo chamber. Thank God Bush decided to overplay his fucking hand.
The bankruptcy bill is a fuck up, a fuck up assisted by the party of the rich, which is, of course, bipartisan. And it will be such fodder for good news stories and legal challenges that they will regret passing it. But why did it pass? Because we let it slide and didn't demand a fight. Now we have to get the horse and put it back in the fucking barn. And praise God that Bush has always had a hardon for Social Security. If some dumbasses don't lose their nerve, Bush will ride this puppy to defeat, a brutal asskicking defeat. Stopping Bush is the ultimate validation of liberal idealism and its effectiveness, if people seize that and ram it up against the bullshit free market ideology they never bother to practice themselves., What the fuck does some think-tank asshole know about work. he spends his day bullshitting about ideas he'll never live under. I say give them some field experience. Max Boot thinks the military is so fucking great, well, there's a job in Iraq for his ass and the rest of the warmongering chickenhawk pussies who jerk off to big guns and use the Military channel as their porn. Milton Friedman would have been a communist if he had to live under his own ideology. he spouted that bullshit from a professor's desk in a country which granted generous social protections.
The simple fact is that the America we have today is the result of liberalism. You get to jerk off to Halle Berry and dream about Denzel Washington because of liberals. The idea that liberals are pussies is bullshit, bullshit that we help promote because we let these lunatics define us. Ann Coulter is a fucking nut job, but everyone treats her like she's sane.
And to all the liberals who would say:, we can't be like them, it doesn't matter what we do, I have a simple fucking reply: FUCK YOU.
Let me drop a little history lesson on you: the Blitzkrieg was effective when the Germans used it. It was brilliant. But you know the problem, they never had enough equipment or men to do it full out. Having been taught well, guess who did? The Russians. They not only had tanks and planes, but more of them, in more places. They chased the Germans with the venegence of the wronged. The Blitz in German hands got them to Moscow, in Russian hands, it got them to Berlin for 50 years.
We use our tools against the GOP and will split them and win. The Bible Thumpers will always be with us, and after a while, people get sick of them. They did in the 20's and they will now. The GOP has one fucking thing holding them together, power. In 2007, a lot of fiscal conservatives are going to find their nominees for president are a high grade of wacko, like Rick Santorum. People who are too crazy to win, but because the Jesus freaks control the GOP street game, they will have to decide what to do. Just like we listened to Jim Carville four years too long, the GOP will curse the name of Karl Rove for letting the Jesus freaks think the GOP is God's Own Party. Personally, I plan on handing them anvils and watching the fucking bubbles hit the surface.
And about the media: subvert it where you can, provide alternatives when you can't. We have to challenge them when they are wrong. We can't let them get away with bullshit and then whine about it. And we have to start picking friends and enemies. No law says you have to talk to the Weekly Standard or NRO and I wouldn't bother. Let them say what they want, racist thugs, the lot of them. We don't have to make their job easier.
The GOP workd the refs to the point that they shit themselves. It's time to do the same. Someone ought to be deconstructing David Brooks and sending out PR releases highlighting his fucking errors and sexism weekly. This is not a game to win on defense. Sulking about how things don't go your way gets in the way of making them go your way. You have to assume that they're against you and you have to hammer them. I don't care if they say they're liberal or not, their owners aren't. They're greedocrats.
Which is why as much as I respect Lauire Garrett, it's clear she suffers from newspaperitis. You can't make newspapers better. When they go, they go and don't come back. But you can make print better, you can use different tools. Anyone trying to save newspapers is trying to revive the dead. TV? TV is about money even more. If selling cat fur was a fad, TV would endorse it. Expect nothing from them that you do not fucking make them do.
Oh, and one final fucking point: if you are not with us, you are against us. If Al From wants to suck Wall Street cock, that's fine. If Hillary Clinton wants to make nice with Man on Dog Santorum, that's also fine. But if you step to us, try to blame us for your failures, we will stomp a fucking mudhole in your ass. The GOP wins because we didn't fucking fight back. Now? We fight. And if you don't want to fight to win, we're gonna make you sit the fuck down and shut the fuck up. We won't be asking, either. This isn't the hippie left of peace and love. This is a left with money and balls and we're gonna fight. Fuck Peter Beinart and his neocon friends. Fucking asshole licking PNAC ass like a prison punk. Every time he goes on a show as a liberal, we should be calling the bookers, e-mailing them, saying he's not. We have to work the room, get to the editors and the show bookers and the people who run the machine. Not just bitch about how unfair it all is.
Because it isn't unfair. It's life. It's only unfair if we sit around with our dicks in our hands doing nothing. You want to change this country, you change it. You change the terms of debate, how it's debated and who gets to debate. And you stop whining how it's all against us. In 1972, a lunatic like Rick Santorum wouldn't have gotten on Firing Line, much less the US Senate. Now, we have to do what they did, but meaner, faster, harder. The Germans started with the Stuka, but it was the Sturmovik which ruled the skies at the end of the day. The GOP may have started this fight, but we'll be the ones to finish it, if we have the will to.
From Santorum to Neocons, from the Wall Street fuckers to Occupy the Newsroom, from the Quislings inside our perimeters to call for a weekly deconstruction of the lies of David Fucking Brooks...it's all there.
‘Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness Thou foster-child of Silence and slow Time ---‘
That’s the sort of thing she would have written before the rise of advertising.
The correlation is perfectly clear. Advertising up, lyric poetry down. There are only so many people capable of putting words together that stir and move and sing. When it became possible to earn a very good living in advertising by exercising this capability, lyric poetry was left to untalented screwballs who had to shriek for attention and compete by eccentricity.
is a multi-billion dollar real estate empire (Caution: Huffington link)
... As the July edition of the Washingtonian Magazine notes, Friedman lives in "a palatial 11,400-square-foot house, now valued at $9.3 million, on a 7½-acre parcel just blocks from I-495 and Bethesda Country Club." He "married into one of the 100 richest families in the country" - the Bucksbaums, whose real-estate Empire is valued at $2.7 billion.
...Far from the objective, regular-guy interpreter of globalization that the D.C. media portrays him to be, Friedman is a member of the elite of the economic elite on the planet Earth. In fact, he's married into such a giant fortune, it's probably more relevant to refer to him as Billionaire Scion Tom Friedman than columnist Tom Friedman, both because that's more descriptive of what he represents, and more important for readers of his work to know so that they know a bit about where he's coming from.
Mind you, I don't think everyone needs to publish their net worth. But Friedman's not everyone. He's not just "doing pretty well" and is not just any old columnist. He's not just a millionaire or a multimillionaire - he's member of one of the wealthiest families in the world...
...I suppose every problem looks like a bad sub-prime mortgage (From the Mustache of Understanding):
Barack Kissinger Obama By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN Published: October 25, 2011
... In his own way, President Obama has brought the country to the right strategy for Bush’s “war on terrorism.” It is a serious, focused combination of global intelligence coordination, targeted killing of known terrorists and limited interventions — like Libya — that leverage popular forces on the ground and allies, as well as a judicious use of U.S. power, so that we keep the costs and risks down. In Libya, Obama saved lives and gave Libyans a chance to build a decent society. What they do with this opportunity is now up to them. I am still wary, but Obama handled his role exceedingly well.
No doubt George Bush and Dick Cheney thought that both Iraq and Afghanistan would be precisely such focused, limited operations. Instead, they each turned out to be like a bad subprime mortgage — a small down payment with a huge balloon five years down the road. They thought they would be able to “flip” the house before the balloon came due. But partly because of their incompetence and lack of planning, it took much longer to flip the house to new owners and the price America paid was huge. Iraq may still have a decent outcome — I hope so, and it would be important — but even if it becomes Switzerland, we overpaid for it. ...
A bad sub-prime mortgage that everyone who graduated Villager Courtesy Class will now obligingly forget that you, Tom Friedman, were leveraged into up to your fucking Pornstache.
And which you, Tom Friedman, remained leveraged into up to your fucking Pornstache while calling for shoveling ever more blood and treasure -- other people's blood and other people's treasure -- into the maw of Operation Clusterfuck for one, agonizing Friedman Unit after another...
The Friedman, or Friedman Unit (F.U.), is a tongue-in-cheek neologism coined by blogger Atrios (Duncan Black) on May 21, 2006.
A Friedman is a unit of time equal to six months in the future. The Huffington Post cited it as the "Best New Phrase" of 2006.
The term is in reference to a May 16, 2006 article by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) detailing columnist Thomas Friedman's repeated use[10] of "the next six months" as the period in which, according to Friedman, "we're going to find out...whether a decent outcome is possible" in the Iraq War. As documented by FAIR, Friedman had been making such six-month predictions for a period of two and a half years, on at least fourteen different occasions, starting with a column in the November 30, 2003 edition of The New York Times, in which he stated: "The next six months in Iraq—which will determine the prospects for democracy-building there—are the most important six months in U.S. foreign policy in a long, long time."
...long after it was perfectly clear to the rest of the sentient Universe that you and your Neocon cuddle buddies never had the slightest fucking clue what you were talking about, and were just making shit up to postpone your day of reckoning; that day that managing editors and producers began either throwing you ass-over-Pornstache out the door for daring to show your face in an American news outlet ever again, or at a minimum insisted that every time you tried to sneak a sentence like this
"No doubt George Bush and Dick Cheney thought that both Iraq and Afghanistan would be precisely such focused, limited operations."
into an American news outlet, you be required to change it to
"No doubt George Bush and Dick Cheney and I, Thomas L. Friedman, thought that both Iraq and Afghanistan would be precisely such focused, limited operations."
followed by a solid , three-column wall of 75 point, Railroad font "I am so fucking sorry"'s before permitting it to be published or aired under their masthead.
Well, you needn't have worried, Tom: your day of reckoning never came and will never come.
You are rich beyond the dreams of Avarice and in the Mainstream Media, that is all that matters.
Like Jethro Bodine being indulged his every whim and crackpot fantasy
-- from playing at guru to "double naught spy" -- because of his uncle's fabulous wealth, no matter how many times you publicly and spectacularly trip over your own dick, your media pals will continue to invite you back onto their teevee shows and into the pages of their publications forever.
Continue allowing you to ramble on like a four-year-old on acid while you pimp your latest heaving mound of terrible prose to clueless American CEOs, who -- because you are rich and will continue to appear on your pals' teevee shows forever -- will continue to look to you to explain to them in keening bursts of lobotomizingly-bad metaphors that Technology is Good, Innovation is Important, Centrism is Awesome and a laundry list of other things are either as completely ass-end-up wrong as your "Suck On This" foreign policy, or were obvious to everyone else 20 years ago.
(Mr. Friedman might have had more to say after those two paragraphs, but after allowing them into my head, my optic nerves went on a wildcat strike and refused admittance to any more of The Stupid. My vision slid harmlessly down the rest to the page like olive oil down a glass mountain...
...until it slammed into Mr. Friedman's final, fetid sentence:
"So, Mama, tell your children not to grow up to be secretary of state or a foreign policy president — not until others have done more nation-building abroad and we’ve done more nation-building at home.
At which point I staggered -- stiff-legged, glassy-eyed and stone-tongued -- away from the computer, mourned silently that such a gargantuan pit of bromide assfoam as Tom Friedman was allowed anywhere near the language of Shakespeare, and did not regain the power of speech until I had rinsed out my head with some Raymond Carver.)
At this point it goes almost without saying that Our Mr. Brooks' latest column amounts to yet another act of indecent public exposure by a pathologically dishonest man: another bag of flaming offal dropped with a smirk into the American political conversation from Mr. Brooks' well-protected sinecure high atop the ramparts of America's Newspaper of Record.
Like some ancient, malfunctioning robot fry cook which can no longer do anything but mindlessly prepare an inedible slurry of crap and gravel over and over again, Mr. Brooks' column is nothing more that another slab of his stale, standard-issue "Obama Should Capitulate More!" bilge with a steaming dollop of exactly the same obsessive anti-Occupy hippie punching and deliberately false conflation that has been rotting in Mr. Brooks New York Times display window for the last two months (and which has already been roundly mocked and eviscerated) on top.
All of which is, of course, bulwarked by the same cherry-picked results from polls which, if read fairly and in their totality, blow right up in Mr. Brooks' face and make him out to be either brain-damaged or just too fucking lazy to be bothered to dissemble as craftily as he used to back when he was lying about Iraq for the "Weekly Standard".
For example, here is Our Mr. Brooks citing "a Congressional Connections poll" to undergird his major point that "the American people" hate gummint and redistribution and, basically, everything else that makes Mr. Brooks pee his bed in terror. And that given these "facts", if President Obama wants to be re-elected he needs to begin sucking John Boehner's dick much harder, because anything less than groveling capitulation would be, in Bobo's words, "suicide":
According to a Congressional Connections poll, 55 percent of adults said they believed government regulation has been a “major factor” in the current economic slowdown.
And while that snippet of context-free data may be true, let us read on and see what the rest of that same poll -- the part the Our Mr. Brooks did not think you would be interested in -- looks like (from "The Atlantic" with emphasis added):
A new survey shows that Americans overwhelmingly support the self-styled Occupy Wall Street protests that not only have disrupted life in Lower Manhattan but also in Washington and cities and towns across the U.S. and in other nations. Some 59 percent of adults either completely agree or mostly agree with the protesters, while 31 percent mostly disagree or completely disagree; 10 percent of those surveyed didn't know or refused to answer.
What's more, many people are paying attention to the rallies. Almost two-thirds of respondents--65 percent--said they've heard "a lot" or "some" about the rallies, while 35 percent have said they've heard or seen "not too much" or "nothing at all" about the demonstrations.
The results appear in the latest edition of the United Technologies/National Journal Congressional Connection Poll.
When it comes to the question of how to pay for the Democratic jobs bill, most respondents were more than willing to place a special burden on the wealthy. Those surveyed were asked about a possible 5 percent surtax on those earning more than $1 million annually. The idea got considerable discussion earlier this fall when Congress considered President Obama's jobs package. Senate Republicans united against the bill and were joined by some Democrats, making it impossible for the measure to pass in a chamber where 60-vote majorities have become the norm because of filibustering. Still, a whopping 68 percent of adults support the Democratic surtax to pay for the cost of their jobs plan. Only 27 percent opposed the tax, while 5 percent didn't know. Men and women split almost identically on the issue, and black non-Hispanics were more supportive of the surtax than white non-Hispanics, with 84 percent supporting the idea.
Congressional Democrats and Obama can also take comfort from Americans' reaction to Senate Republicans blocking the nomination of Richard Cordray, the former Ohio attorney general, to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, an agency created in the wake of the financial crisis to look out for the interest of citizens. More than 40 Republicans--enough for a filibuster--have signed a letter vowing to block his appointment unless changes are made to the bureau that the GOP feels, in its current construct, is inhibiting financial institutions and lending that could spur the economy. A majority of those surveyed said that the Senate should confirm Cordray, and 39 percent said that it should not confirm him, while 15 percent either didn't know or refused to say. ...
As I wrote back in 2005, when Our Mr. Brooks actually turned to Newt Fucking Gingrich for advice on the de-sleazification of the Republican party (No. Really. He really did that.) --
... "First, they need to hold new leadership elections. As Newt Gingrich and Vin Weber told me yesterday, Tom DeLay needs to take care of his own legal problems and give up the dream of returning as majority leader."
-- Our Mr. Brooks' big, stupid lies mount up so damn high and reek so damn bad that there is just no sport in kicking them to atoms.
It's like hunting legless mouse babies.
In a teacup.
With an RPG.
Of course, not everyone sees it that way, which brings us 'round at last to the actual subject to today's sermonette: The gentle art of the Conservative suck-up.
And wrote about it, just as I -- a mere amateur scratching away off in the weeds at the edge of the blogosphere -- did.
And what did he make of it?
Well, it turns out that as much as he brands himself as an firebrand, when it comes to critiquing those in his professional circle, Mr. Sullivan quiuckl and predictable reverts to his default setting is "career-minded Conservative Tory".
Mr. Sullivan is a blogger who likes his targets -- Sarah Palin, Fox News, Limbaugh and the Limbaughettes, Imaginary Liberals -- outsized, cartoonishness and singularly lacking in any career-threatening blowback potential, but when the lies and depravity come from within Mr. Sullivan's small community of professional Conservative public intellectuals, his critiques tend to lose their edge entirely and start sounding like this:
Strategically, I think David is right that Obama's strengths do not lie in polarization. In my ideal world, the conciliatory, reasonable Obama would have reached some accords with a reasonable, chastened GOP and then fought an election on the future direction of the country. In the actual world, it seems clear...
The flaw in the case, however, seems to me that, after a while, Obama's conciliatory response to a bunch of ideological thugs - especially after they tried to send the country into default - made him look weak and impotent...
My own view is that the dichotomy David draws is too stark. ...
...I agree with David that the Grand Bargain is almost perfect Obama policy.
No, Mr. Brooks is neither drawing a dichotomy to starkly nor looking through a glass too darkly. He is l-y-i-n-g. He is adding one more mendacious tuckpoint the Great Big Lie on which he has based his entire career.
So why does Mr. Brooks' latest stinky addition to his massive, multi-decade-long record of lies, gross revisionism and generally being fucking wrong about everything rate this genteel reacharound with a tiny nip on the shoulder instead of, say, the kind of apocalyptic rebuke Mr. Sullivan once meted out to filthy, America-hating Liberals like me?
"The middle part of the country—the great red zone that voted for Bush—is clearly ready for war. The decadent Left in its enclaves on the coasts is not dead—and may well mount what amounts to a fifth column."
Or even the kind of treatment which Mr. Sullivan himself has adamantly insisted is the basic fucking responsibility of "professionals" like Mr. Sullivan (From February, 2010)?
It is our job to look like assholes. We are professional assholes. We get paid to be rude. In order to expose the truth.
One reason this country is in a fiscal crisis is that journalists are not doing their job.
They chase ratings and politician "gets" more than they chase the truth. Why did it take the president to expose the Republicans' appalling fiscal record and lack of seriousness on spending rather than the press? Why are these politicians allowed to go on the air without being pressed relentlessly for their actual proposals."
And by relentlessly, I mean - if they fail to answer, or offer vague generalizations, ask again. And again. And again. And again. On air. Refuse to move on. Put them on the spot. ...
Because David Brooks holds a +AAA status rating within the professional food chain up which Mr. Sullivan has been climbing lo these many years. And you don't get ahead in This Man's Army without knowing the the proper method of ball-washing the brass hats who outrank you.
In other words, there is a Club.
And as I wrote last year, this Club is full of Fake Centrists, Conservative Exiles and Beltway Villager douchbags who all help each other to...
...pretend that the Palinites, the Bushies, the Cheneyites and all the other slavering, wingnut zombie hordes from which Mr. Sullivan now cringes in horror are some random freaks of recent vintage
... It's also a function of Fox News creating a national ideology through a national propaganda arm of the RNC. Well, they will reap what they sow. At least I hope so if real conservatism is going to one day find a comeback in American political discourse. ...
and not a generation of stunted, smug, pig-ignorant Conservatives who were deliberately spawned and suckled by the Republican Party in the radioactive wasteland created by Mr. Sullivan's beloved Reagan Revolution.
Because any Acknowledgment of Paternity which establishes Ronald Reagan's as the political father of George Bush, Dick Cheney and Sarah Palin would completely fuck up Mr. Sullivan's lucrative scam. ...
Is this infant (pictured here in an Exclusive! Fox News artists' sketch) actually Herman Cain's long rumored out-of-wedlock-white-rape-baby?
Will "Baby Deepdish" (as he has been nicknamed by some Beltway wags) come forward to confirm the shocking Herman-Cain-out-of-wedlock-white-rape-baby rumors?
Stay tuned to Fox News for more details on this developing story.
Cain says Rove attacking his campaign to help Romney By Justin Sink - 10/24/11 05:10 PM ET
Presidential candidate Herman Cain hit back at Karl Rove's criticism of his campaign Monday, saying the former adviser to ex-President George W. Bush was deliberately attacking him for being a non-traditional Republican candidate. Cain also said he believed that Rove wanted rival Mitt Romney to earn the Republican nomination.
"It's a good thing the voters are not looking at Karl Rove's little whiteboard," Cain told The Washington Examiner. "I believe it is a deliberate attempt to damage me because I am not, quote unquote, the establishment choice. But why not go with the choice that the people seem to like?"
Rove, in an appearance Monday morning on Fox News, used a a whiteboard to list a number of Cain's gaffes that could hurt his campaign, including his comments last week on abortion that raised eyebrows among some conservatives, his Afghan and Palestinian foreign policy positions, and statements in an interview that he was unfamiliar with the neoconservative moment. ...
Meanwhile, in what another deep-background spokesman for Rove's shadowy, democracy-killing, crackpot-billionaire-funded Deadly Viper Assassination Squad insists is also an unrelated story, unnamed insiders speaking on condition of anonymity have begun to wonder if the reason Herman Cain refuses to address the rumors of his out-of-wedlock white baby might have something to do with his misleading, flip-floppy "answer" to the question of whether rape victims should be forcibly compelled to bear the out-of-wedlock children of their rapists.
It is also rumored that Karl Rove's employer -- Fox News -- will faithfully "report the controversy" of these shocking! shocking! allegations...
...24 hours a day...
...seven days a week...
...until Herman Cain either takes their offer or is reduced to a smudge on Roger Ailes' carpet.
So I burned down his house, killed all his friends, and sold his kids into slavery.
This is the "reasoning" behind Joe Nocera's ridiculous column in the New York Times, in which he faithfully transcribes Petulant Wingnut Excuse for being a Dick #237: You were mean to Robert Bork 30 years ago! (Since he has decided to troll in these waters, perhaps in the future Mr. Nocera would like to tackle such topics as "Al Gore is fat", "Robert Byrd was a Klansman." and "Watergate was a 3rd-rate burglary.")
From Mr. Nocera:
The next time a liberal asks why Republicans are so intransigent, you might suggest that the answer lies in the mirror.
Balloon Juice commenters had fun making sushi out of Mr. Nocera's assertion that there is a straight line between the Senate Judiciary Committee's rejection of reactionary, Federalist Society tool, Robert Bork, while Steve Benet also took a few minutes to kick Joe around the block in the Washington Monthly:
It’s hard to overstate how remarkably wrong this is. Indeed, nearly every paragraph in Nocera’s piece includes a fairly significant error of fact or judgment.
Bork denounced the civil rights and liberties protections granted by Chief Justice Earl Warren’s Supreme Court in the 1950s and 1960s (even while pledging fealty to Brown v. Board of Education), and even was on the record as endorsing Southern states’ right to impose poll taxes, which were historically used as a means of suppressing black voter turnout. His service in the Nixon Justice Department, given that administration’s record on the rule of law, was also a bit disconcerting.
In the conservative myth – now apparently accepted by the generally moderate-to-liberal Nocera – Bork lost his confirmation vote because of unfair efforts by the likes of Sen. Ted Kennedy to malign the judge as a bigot and misogynist. But when the Senate defeated the Bork nomination on a 58 to 42 vote, six Republicans – Sens. John Chafee (Rhode Island), Bob Packwood (Oregon), Arlen Specter (Pennsylvania), Robert Stafford (Vermont), John Warner (Virginia), and Lowell Weicker (Connecticut) voted against confirmation. Before dismissing these men as a bunch of liberal RINOs, it’s worth remembering that Specter, as the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, was one of the foremost defenders of now-Justice Clarence Thomas when he faced credible accusations of sexual harassment in 1991. For 13 percent of the Senate Republican caucus in 1987, Bork’s extremism and poor civil rights record were too much to countenance.
And what of the claim that divisive judicial politics started nearly a quarter century ago with Bork? Nocera, who’s 59, is old enough to remember the late 1960s effort by conservatives to impeach Chief Justice Earl Warren. ...
And just for the record, one of Robert Bork's many, many, many sins that does not seem to have been dragged back into the light by the rebutters and refuters of Mr. Nocera's terrible column was Bork's involvement in terminating the Fairness Doctrine, which I have touched lightly on once or twice in the past:
Seriously, it is one of those questions that just nags at me: In a world quite literally overflowing with talented, literate, pungent writers, how in the world do utterly talentless, debased hacks like Friedman and Brooks find themselves at the very pinnacle of the mediaverse?
I know the general answer -- Market forces compacting competent journalism into the ever more Procrustean Bed of Entertaining InfoHappyBytes. The rise of the Hatekrieg Xian Right blasting away at the press for 30 year, shellshocking them into giving the out lame, the crazy and the outright liars ever more column inches and prime time space in the name of Holy “Balance”. The deliberate murder of the Fairness Doctrine by Reagan, Bork and Scalia (That was just for you, Ivory Bill Woodpecker). -- but I still think the particular, specific answers would be interesting.
Finally, for you hard-core Bork-heads, at around the 22:00 minute mark of this clip from the "Power of Nightmares" you will find Robert Bork explaining why (per his expert diagnosis, based presumably on the "evidence" of the 101 "scandals" which his Neocon pals had ginned up out of thin air) Bill Clinton was a sociopath and a threat to America:
Why there are so many bad, damn-fool columns in the NYT these days all focused relentlessly on the same, absurd false equivalency claptrap I have no idea.
Why the NYT keep permitting its creative typists to stitch together asinine "Both sides are to blame" columns out of moonshine, Wingnut lore and goof pulled straight out of their asses, I have no idea.
But I do know that watching Joe Nocera trying burnish his Villager credentials by charting a straight-line course between some imaginary Liberal calumny 30 years ago...
...and this crowd:
Gretchen Carlson Steve Doocy Brian Kilmeade Tony Perkins Gary Aldrich Mark Alexander Bruce Bartlett Pat Robertson John Hagee James Dobson D. James Kennedy Jerry Falwell Rush Limbaugh Bill O'Reilly Laura Ingram Sean Hannity Mark Levin David Koch Charles Koch Ralph Reed Franklin Graham Neal Boortz Denis Boyles Jay Bryant Pat Buchanan Michael Barone Tony Blankley Brent Bozell William F. Buckley Zev Chafets Mona Charen Jane Chastain Linda Chavez Richard Z. Chesnoff Chuck Colson Ann Coulter Newt Gingrich John Derbyshire Lou Dobbs Tom DeLay Jack Dunphy Larry Elder Jesse Helms Trent Lott Jerry Falwell Rick Santorum Edwin J. Feulner Suzanne Fields Frank J. Gaffney, Jr. Maggie Gallagher Doug Giles Jack Abramoff Eric Cantor G. Gordon Liddy John Fund Neil Cavuto James K. Glassman Mitch McConnell Rand Paul Allen West Dick Cheney David Frum Jonah Goldberg Dana Loesch Paul Greenberg Andrew Breitbart Rebecca Hagelin Bill Kristol Paul Jacob Jeff Jacoby Terence Jeffrey Paul Wolfowitz Liz Cheney Max Boot Erik Son of Eric Les Kinsolving Dave Kopel David Brooks Charles Krauthammer Larry Kudlow Stanley Kurtz Michael Ledeen John Leo Hal Lindsey David Limbaugh Rich Lowry Ross Mackenzie Michelle Malkin Clifford D. May Michael Reagan Ross Douthat Oliver North Michael Novak Robert Novak Ted Nugent Kate O'Beirne Marvin Olasky Bill O'Reilly John O'Sullivan Roger Ailes P.J. O'Rourke Kathleen Parker Rupert Murdoch Micheal Medved Neal Boortz Pam Geller Ramesh Ponnuru Doug Powers Dennis Prager James P. Pinkerton George Will Karl Rove Richard Mellon Scaife Alan Reynolds I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby Norman Podhoretz Peggy "Mai Tai or the Highway" Noonan Jeff "Manwhore" Gannon Lee Atwater James S. Robbins Debra Saunders Phyllis Schlafly Ben Shapiro Ed Rollins Barbara Simpson Thomas Sowell Ben Stein Mark Gerson The Entire Kagan Family Cal Thomas Rich Tucker Mary Matalin John Yoo Emmett Tyrrell Alberto Gonzalez Diana West Armstrong Williams Kyle Williams Gary Bauer William J. Bennett Donald Rumsfeld Walter Williams Dick Cheney Byron York Etc Ad Nauseum*
is kind of hilarious.
*(Thanks for corrections/updates to Tengrain, Suzan & the Captain!)
"I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial by strength, and bid defiance to the laws of our country."
Day 2,912 of David Brooks' lonely, one-man quest to use his privileged position at the New York Times to insist that everyone is paying too much damn attention to those damned dirty hippies.
David Brooks: Gail, can we talk about the overhyping of the Occupy Wall Street movement?
This time around, Bobo has gone Full Metal Ahab because #OWS combines the three things Our Mr. Brooks hates most in the world:
The aforementioned hippies.
People saying mean things about the plutocrats to whom he has pledged his life, his fortune and his sacred honor.
Some members of the press shifting their attention temporarily away from the obsessively focusing on Villager accommodationist agenda of OMFG!deficits!, "Both Sides Do It" and how President Obama really needs to compromise just a liiiiittle more.
And so, gravid with bile, Our Mr. Brooks deploys every weapon at his command against the unkempt horde of conspicuously non-millionaire, non-Republicans, beginning with the ever-popular condescending-contempt-seasoned-with-vague-implications-of-great-danger...
Sure, they are photogenic, and they do have some grievances, but it is extremely dangerous to extrapolate from the protests to the wider country.
...followed by reading his own biases into the results of dubious polls (emphasis added)...
Kuziemko and Norton explain the unpopularity of redistribution among the working class to “last place aversion.” People in second to last place in any ranking system don’t want to help the people at the bottom because then they themselves would fall to last. I think that’s the wrong explanation. It goes back to values. Americans, especially those in precarious circumstances, want to see the moral fabric restored, and the essence of this — that effort should be linked to reward and redistribution — seems to muddy that moral fabric, even in harsh times like these
...followed by plain old lying:
All of this fuels my general rule about covering protest movements, of whatever stripe. Don’t watch the people doing the marching. Watch the people watching the marching. Among the boomers, it wasn’t the people at Woodstock who ended up shaping history the most. It was the people who saw it and didn’t like what they saw who fueled the Republican revival between 1980 and 2008.
And...that's about it.
Really.
Just as with his fierce support of the Republican disaster that was the invasion and occupation of Iraq, Our Mr. Brooks' entire arsenal consists of little more than viperish contempt, ominous hints of Grave Danger if we don't do things Our Mr. Brooks' way, cherry-picking data, and lying.
Oh, and the one tool 99.9999999999999999% of the rest of us do not have in our toolbox: the ability to repeat his bullshit year after year -- unchecked and unchallenged -- using one of the largest media megaphones in the world.
For a wealthy, craven, gated-suburb, melanin-challenged Conservative like Mr. Brooks, the actual record of his Movement and Party -- its long, well-documented and very successful history (Hi, Rick!)
of courting an entire menagerie of racists, crackpots and borderline mentally-ill religious freaks in order to win election -- is like Sybil's Green Kitchen: a horrifying truth about how they got to be who they are that they dare not admit even to themselves.
And so David Brooks -- University of Chicago history major, David Brooks -- simply ignores history.
Just as he simply ignores the myriad polls that show overwhelming support for taxing ultrawealthy Americans to help pay for some of the upkeep on infrastructure of the country that made them wealthy in favor of one poll that says people don't like "redistribution".
Ignores the plain, clear language of the GOP's Master Racist -- Lee Atwater -- when he described exactly what GOP base-voter buttons are being pushed when their leaders wink and nod and dog-whistle about redistributive programs:
You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger." By 1968 you can't say "nigger" — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. ...
Likewise, Mr. Brooks ignores his Conservative Movement's virtually perfect record of being loudly on the wrong side of every important social, political, cultural and economic issue during his entire adult life by simply collapsing all of America's civil rights, worker's rights and anti-war movements into a single word -- "Woodstock" -- and then asserts that "Woodstock" was the reason for the the rise of his New Republican Party.
An assertion which Ms. Collins effortlessly eviscerates like so:
However, the people who were there were the same folks who gave the country a good chunk of the civil rights movement, the women’s movement and the anti-war movement. I’d rather take credit for that than Ronald Reagan and the Bushes.
A quick review, Mr. Brooks (who I know reads these little missives of mine):
Here is a picture of some people participating in one of those "protest movements" that makes you so squirmy.
And here is a picture of some people who watching and disapproved of those protests.
Marchers.
Watchers.
Marchers.
Watchers.
Marchers and Watchers.
Marchers. and Watchers.
And that is Mr. Brooks' real problem: his reflexive hatred for people who raise their voices coupled with his feverish fealty to a sack full of utterly-discredited Centrist hokum demands that he remain in a constant state of cowering denial about everything vital and important that is going on in the world around him.
Like any other Conservative con artist -- like Limbaugh or Beck or Palin -- without his lies, Brooks has nothing and is nothing.
But unlike Limbaugh or Beck or Palin, the harshest condemnation for Mr. Brooks' particular brand of puerility can come not just from dirty, irrelevant hippies like me out on the be-fringed edge of nowhere...
...but from the dead hand of the patron saint of the Far Right herself (about whom I have also written once or twice things):
There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil. The man who is wrong still retains some respect for truth, if only by accepting the responsibility of choice. But the man in the middle is the knave who blanks out the truth in order to pretend that no choice or values exist, who is willing to sit out the course of any battle, willing to cash in on the blood of the innocent or to crawl on his belly to the guilty, who dispenses justice by condemning both the robber and the robbed to jail, who solves conflicts by ordering the thinker and the fool to meet each other halfway. In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win. In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit . . .
When men reduce their virtues to the approximate, then evil acquires the force of an absolute, when loyalty to an unyielding purpose is dropped by the virtuous, it’s picked up by scoundrels—and you get the indecent spectacle of a cringing, bargaining, traitorous good and a self-righteously uncompromising evil.
-- Ayn Rand, "Atlas Shrugged"
Or, if you prefer your David Brooks in smaller doses:
Norman Corwin, American radio’s ‘poet laureate,’ dies at 101
Norman Corwin, who wrote, produced and directed scores of award-winning radio dramas for CBS in the 1930s and 1940s and came to be known as the “poet laureate of radio,” died Oct. 18 at his Los Angeles home. He was 101.
The death was confirmed by his nephew, William Corwin. No cause of death was given. ...
Often called the “poet laureate of radio,” Mr. Corwin wrote euphonious prose that stoked the imaginations of more than 60 million Americans with his inspirational wartime productions “We Hold These Truths” (1941) and “On a Note of Triumph” (1945).
His most enduring radio drama, “On a Note of Triumph,” debuted coast to coast on May 8, 1945, the day the Allies declared victory in Europe after the surrender of the Germans. Poet Carl Sandburg called the program one of the all-time great American poems.
“So they’ve given up,” the program began. “They’re finally done in, and the rat is dead in an alley back of the Wilhelmstrasse. Take a bow, GI. Take a bow, little guy. The superman of tomorrow lies at the feet of you common men of this afternoon.” ...
This driftglassian takedown of David Brooks got me all hot and bothered. A sample:
He does, however, interview some very well-spoken poll results, and proceeds to interpret them in ways that make you wonder if he’s dropped in from Alpha Centauri. He notices that poor people are having fewer babies, which makes him sad. But, things are looking up! People have stopped using their “bank-issued” credit cards as much. (These would be the cards they used so as to support the overstuffed suburban lifestyle that David Brooks so celebrated in his earlier, funnier work.) This means, to Brooks, “Quietly but decisively, Americans are trying to restore the moral norms that undergird our economic system.” ...
So I've got that going for me.
Commenter "srv" writes, "Wait, driftglass is at Esquire?"
No. srv.
No I am very definitely not.
Currently I am unemployed.
For the fourth time.
In three years.
Which is kinda scary.
Or, in Brooks-speak, I am "quietly but decisively...trying to restore the moral norms that undergird our economic system."
On the slightly different subject of our nearest solar neighbors, I must confess that, like Mr. Pierce, I, too, have abused poor Alpha Centauri in the past:
In case you are just skimming past en route to Alpha Centauri and have no idea about who or what a "Newt Gingrich" is, he is a multiply-humiliated Republican personality who gloms onto whatever wingnut conspiracy theory or demagogic lunacy Fox News is peddling this week and lends it a portion of his ever-diminishing credibility.
And I, too, have wonder aloud if perhaps Our Mr. Brooks' complete absence of humanity might lie in his extra-terrestrial origins:
Of course, in the process of becoming David Broder, David Brooks has merely added one more thin coat of varnish to his own, time-honored method of meeting his 800-word, bi-weekly contractual obligation to the New York Times: namely, observing-America-with-alarm as if he were an alien.
Or a robot.
Or (a trope I have leaned on before) one of the time travelers from C.L. Moore's wonderful "Vintage Season" -- A jaded connoisseur on a "Disasters of the Past" tourist junket, taking up temporary residence at the edge of each of history's great catastrophes long enough to savor its distinct terrors and tragedies...and then moving on to the next plague. ...
But had I ever been pressed to name the planet of Bobo's origin, I'd have chose Tau Ceti Prime, not Alpha Centauri, for dark and terrible reasons known all-too-well to the xenojournalism community, but which remain hidden from the average Earth-born civilian for their own safety and sanity.
This is really nothing more than a minor quibble between Mr. Pierce and myself, which I raise here only because -- in one of those linguistic ironies which is surprisingly common in our jerkwater exurb of the Milky Way galaxy -- a "minor quibble" on Tau Ceti Prime is a nine-inch long, slow moving, sexless, eyeless parasitic invertebrate with a tiny brain and metabolism consisting of 90% mouth and asshole which nonetheless manages -- in defiance of all terrestrial rules of natural selection -- to continue landing highly sought-after positions at prestigious Tau Ceti newspapers.
Where it writes about how "Quietly but decisively, Tau Cetians are trying to restore the moral norms that undergird our economic system."
Once again came down to a lively exchange among a group of people who clearly have no worries whatsoever that their declarative assertions regarding economics, politics, taxation, environmental policy, energy policy, foreign policy and the real words and deeds of the President of the United States do not interact with reality at any point.
Here it my record of the mess, in easy-to-mule-across-the-border Twitter form:
OK, why is Michele Bachmann dressed like a villainess from an episode of The Avengers?
Rick Santorum: the tax code should encourage human reproduction
Cain: In Opportunity Zones, pizza delivery will be free
Perry loves Herman Cain like the crazy black "brother" he never invited up to N*ggerhead.
Herman Cain will tax new apples, but used oranges will be tax-free.
Herman Cain: a loaf of bread builds strong taxes 12 ways!
Overfed Texas teabaggers cheer for no income taxes. Texas Republicans love people who stand by their crazy.
Mitt Romney is now the moderator. Another good American job taken away by Romney.
Mitt Romney is worried that Herman Cain's apple-picking tax will make American energy privately unregulated. Or something
Newt is gonna fundamentally basically complexify your taxes, but where does he stand on apples?
Michele Bacmann advocating charging poor people one dollar to be Americans
Perry: We need to get focused on stuff. Under our feet. In America.
Perry: Murrica, 'nergy, 'nergy, 'nergy, Murrica!
Santorum acknowledges the existence of Europe. This will doom him
Moderator Mitt is mad that he is being treated like a mere participant.
Santorum sucking up to Cain and sucker punching Mittens. Angling for Secretary of Uteruses under Pres. Cain,
Newt: Riding with the top-down will shatter my wife's hair which will fundamentally basically destroy the space/time continuum.
Bachmann: Oh! Oh! Mister Kotter! Call on me!
Perry: My anti-immigration space platform will stop everyone from entering anything.
Santorm: I will build a virtual electrified space platform around the uteri of loose, Godless women.
As Anderson Cooper finally just gives up...
Perry: Suck it, fashion boy.
Bachmann proposes a border volleyball net to bounce anchor babies back to Mexico.
Santorum: Won't someone think of the families!
Newt proposes using science to solve a problem. This would doom him if he weren't already the walking dead.
Ron Paul proposes letting the Invisible Hand of the Market fling nuclear waste into the sun.
Mitt: Let the lowest bidder worry about what to do with nu-kew-lur waste.
Mitt: "People in Washington" think they know better than my robot Wall Street army. Fools! We will destroy you!
Bachmann implies that some people lose their jobs thru no fault of their own. This would doom her if she still had a pulse.
Rom Paul implies that bankers might be evil. This would doom him if he weren't a hologram beamed in from Galt's Gulch.
Mitt: we could waste our time going over stuff that happened in the past that makes me out a liar, no let's not do that
Deficits? Fuck deficits!
Under his suit, Anderson Cooper's mood t-shirt grows tighter and more v-necked.
Santorum comes out strongly pro-Muslim.
Newt comes out very strongly pro-Muslim.
Perry demonstrates his faith by speaking in tongues. Very dumb tongues.
Mittens comes out very strongly pro-Muslim.
Bachmann: Iran disrespects us and the President is sending troops overseas. This is unprecedented!
Bachmann: The President put us in Libya. Now hes put in Africa... Anyone want to loan Congreswoman a non-flat Earth Atlas?
Newt is killing Santorum...with his mind
Santorum: We cannot negotiate with terrorists. Support, create and fund them...yes, but not negotiate.
Mittens: Foreign aid two elements -- fear, surprise and an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope. Three! Three elements!
Mittens: We will not pay soldiers more than their private sector equivalents. Oh. Wait.
Paul: The poor people who pay no taxes are being taxed to send money to rich people abroad. What?
Newt: Oh Lord, Forgive Reagan for Reagan said Reagan did not know what the fuck Reagan's people were doing on behalf of Reagan. Winning!
The sound you heard was every other GOP candidate crapping their Reagan Underoos as Ron Paul broke Wingnut Rule Number One: saying ungoodthinkful things out loud. Things every Liberal knows and has been saying for years.
Mittens: My advisers told me that "sporting" metaphors poll well
Departing momentarily from the mechanical efficiency of his "Beinart says but Ross disagrees..." format, Andrew Sullivan ventures an opinion:
"I know Straussians. Straussians are friends of mine. David Brooks is not a Straussian."
Not like I give a damn which brand of perfume Mr. Sullivan wants to dab on this particular turd today, but card-carrying Straussian or not, Our Mr. Brooks certainly rutted happily with them during those all but forgotten (by Conservatives) Good Old Days when being blindly pro-Iraq War was a resume builder and to get in on the GWOT Media Gravy Train all one had to do was call out Liberals as filthy, America-hating fifth columnists a little bit louder than the rest of the mob.
Card-carrying Straussian or not, the fact that David Brooks and Strauss Superfan Bill Kristol (jump to the 5:00 mark)
each parlayed their fierce Yellow Elephant warmongering and lapdog loyalty to Operation Endless Clusterfuck into gigs at the "New York Times" was one of the most powerful lessons we filthy, America-hating fifth columnists learned during those ugly years.
Learned way down deep in our bones.
As with the Iraq War, most Conservative public intellectuals like Mr. Brooks maintain their place in the food chain by continually rewriting American history and the history of Conservatism through a series professionally-useful lies.
As with the Iraq War, these lies are repeated constantly and are virtually never challenged by the Very Serious People in the media, who also find them professionally-useful.
As with the Iraq War, Mr. Brooks freaks right out whenever reality penetrates the antiseptic fantasy of his carefully constructed Barbie's Dream House America.
As with the Iraq War, Mr. Brooks walls up his nearly aphenphosmphobic disdain for the real concerns of real people behind an unshakable faith in government ruled by Very Serious plutocrats and Neoconservative elites who all just happen agree with David Brooks.
As with the Iraq War, all of this is very well documented, including Mr. Brooks' famously full-throated support for the means and ends of Mr. Paul Wolfowitz, yet another Leo Strauss Superfan and poster-boy for the blind, smirking, catastrophic arrogance of the Cult of Neoconservativism (from March of 2005):
Giving Wolfowitz His Due
Let us now praise Paul Wolfowitz. Let us now take another look at the man who has pursued - longer and more forcefully than almost anyone else - the supposedly utopian notion that people across the Muslim world might actually hunger for freedom...
Mr. Brooks also saw fit to use this same column to call out anyone who stood in way of he and Wolfie's Glorious Cause as bitter, anti-Semitic babies:
Let us look again at the man who's been vilified by Michael Moore and the rest of the infantile left, who's been condescended to by the people who consider themselves foreign policy grown-ups, and who has become the focus of much anti-Semitism in the world today - the center of a zillion Zionist conspiracy theories, and a hundred zillion clever-Jew-behind-the-scenes calumnies.
Which would almost certainly have been a public bed-shitting of career-killing proportions for a mere mortal, but as has been amply documented time and again, year after year, there is literally no failure or fraud or fuck-up so spectacular that it can put a dent in Mr. Brooks career as America's Leading Conservative Public Intellectual.
All we are given to know is that he is protected from his many flops and failures from on high by the Prince of Darkness and, as with the Iraq War, no one on the Right appears to care about it in the slightest because any-fucking-thing is permissible as long as as it pisses off those god-damned America hating Liberals, right?
If, in the 1960s, you had tried to judge America by looking at the sit-ins and Woodstock, you would have had a very distorted picture of where the country was heading.
Similarly, if you look only at the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street movements that have been getting so much coverage in the news media, you know very little about the wider America.
While the cameras surround the flamboyant fringes, the rest of the country is on a different mission. Quietly and untelegenically, Americans are trying to repair their economic values.
-- until the Bastille is stormed.
Because no matter what the Occupiers say or do...no matter how honest their fears...no matter how deeply rooted in the American tradition their actions...and no matter how many cities they spring up in or how many streets and parks and buildings they peacefully occupy in their millions, David Brooks will not fucking permit them to be the story.
Not!Not!Not!
Instead Our Mr. Brooks does his little magic trick. Rub a couple of polls together,
According to the latest Allstate/National Journal Heartland Monitor poll, three-quarters of Americans said they’d be better off if they carried no debt whatsoever. Not long ago, most people saw debt as a useful tool for consumption and enjoyment. Now they see it as a seduction and an obstacle.
use the wisp of smoke they create to conjure a Silent Majority out of thin air
Quietly but decisively Americans are trying to restore the moral norms that undergird our economic system...
which that just so happens to embrace every one of David Brooks' precious Villager Values!
The third norm is that loyalty matters. A few years ago there was a celebration of Free Agent Nation. But now most people, even most young people, would rather work long-term for one company than move around in search of freedom and opportunity.
And then round out this weeks' Serious Centrist Sermonette with a directive that we all need to look the fuck away from the dirty hippies in a plea media modesty that sounds terribly heartfelt --
America went through a similar values restoration in the 1820s. Then, too, people sensed that the country had grown soft and decadent. Then, too, Americans rebalanced. They did it quietly and away from the cameras.
-- until you notice that this directive is coming from a man whose godawful opinions come dribbling at you every week from microphones of NPR, the cameras of NBC and PBS and the pages of the New York Times.
Because what Our Mr. Brooks' is really saying is that that everyone but Our Mr. Brooks' needs to sit down and shut up.
Also that he does not seem to know that the modest folk of the 1820s might well have stayed "away from the cameras" because the practice of using photographs to illustrate news stories did not come unto being until 60 years later:
The practice of illustrating news stories with photographs was made possible by printing and photography innovations that occurred between 1880 and 1897. While newsworthy events were photographed as early as the 1850s, printing presses could only publish from engravings until the 1880s. Early news photographs required that photos be re-interpreted by an engraver before they could be published. Train wrecks and city fires where a popular subject in these early days.
In 1847, an unknown photographer took daguerreotypes of the U.S. troops in Satilo, Mexico, during the Mexican-American War. The first known photojournalist was Carol Szathmari (Romanian painter, lithographer, and photographer) who did pictures in the Crimean War (between Russia and Ottoman Empire, 1853 to 1856). His albums were sent to European royals houses[citation needed]. Just a few of his photographs survived. William Simpson of the Illustrated London News and Roger Fenton were published as engravings. Similarly, the American Civil War photographs of Mathew Brady were engraved before publication in Harper's Weekly. Because the public craved more realistic representations of news stories, it was common for newsworthy photographs to be exhibited in galleries or to be copied photographically in limited numbers.
On March 4, 1880, The Daily Graphic (New York) published the first halftone (rather than engraved) reproduction of a news photograph. Further innovations followed. In 1887, flash powder was invented, enabling journalists such as Jacob Riis to photograph informal subjects indoors, which led to the landmark work How the Other Half Lives.[6] By 1897, it became possible to reproduce halftone photographs on printing presses running at full speed.
You know, I'll bet its just a typo: I'll bet Our Mr. Brooks he meant that the 1920s was a Golden Age of shutting the Hell up about getting screwed over by capitalism gone wild!
Or maybe not.
You don't suppose Our Mr. Brooks was thinking of the 1930s do you?
Because that would be kind of hilarious.
Perhaps rather than posting footage of every labor action, march on Washington and "I welcome their hatred" speech by FDR, we can just agree that, as is true of so many other subjects on which Bobo pontificates with borrowed authority, when it comes to American labor history, Our Mr. Brooks -- a history major from the University of Chicago -- is once just talking out of his ass: inventing a fake, David-Brooks-friendly American labor history in exactly the same way he has tried in the past to in invent a fake, David-Brooks-friendly American Conservative history (Me from 2007 in the prologue of my "A Rose for Bobo" cycle):
Part 1 of 4: Prologue.
I’ve circled David Brooks’ now-infamous NYT column for several days in what can only be called wonder.
Because I cannot recall reading a more remarkably, unintentionally and humiliatingly-revealing essay in a very long time.
For the record (Wait a minute? There’s a record?) it is the column entitled “History and Calumny” (although it would probably be better named “Hysteria and Columnist”) and it appears here if you want to read it for yourself.
Visiting further demolition on it would probably be gratuitous, since watching good writers from all over crank one round after another into Bobo’s wheelhouse has been like unto
Bob Herbert, also of the New Yawk Times, pounds another fistful of ten-penny nails into Bobo’s coffin with “Righting Reagan’s Wrongs?" which begins thusly --
“Let’s set the record straight on Ronald Reagan’s campaign kickoff in 1980.”
So let's get past all the maudlin bullshit and discuss what Reagan really did.
First, Reagan rode to power on a wave of reaction to the Civil Rights struggle. California, a state with a deep well of racial resentment, supported Reagan, who would protect the establishment and call for students to be murdered on their campuses. Reagan was regarded as a crank by many on the left, but his appeal to middle America was strong. It wasn't that Reagan was a racist, as fas as is known, he wasn't. But he sure could pander to them, as he did in 1984 1980 at Philadelphia, MS. For those of you unaware, that is the place three civil rights workers were murdered by the Klan. It would be like a British Prime Ministerial candidate going to Amritsar to talk about the glory of the British Army (the site of a 1921 massacre of peaceful Indian protesters). Reagan pandered to the racist right with ease, even as Barry Goldwater, the man he supported in 1964 with a convention speech, slowly backed away from many of his reactionary views. Instead, Reagan depicted blacks as "welfare queens" leeching off the society, when in reality, white women are the largest recipients of AFDC. Reagan used race like a club to hammer minorities and pander to the racist right.
We need to ask what hath Reagan wrought. His economic policies crippled this country, preventing the kind of long term structural changes which are still needed. How long will American businesses have to foot the bill for health insurance? How long will unequal funding for schools exist? How long will the right of women to control their bodies be subject to restrictions? This is the real, domestic legacy of Ronald Reagan. His breaking of the PATCO strike began the road to anti-Union policies across business. Once, businesses wanted labor peace, after Reagan, strike breaking was permitted, hell encouraged.
Reagan began the road of crippling America's ability to care for Americans. Now we have this failed trickle down economic policy pushed by yet another President. One that leaves Americans in record debt and record bankruptcies. Instead of tax rates which fairly distribute the burden of funding America, the rich have been encouraged to avoid their fair share. Ronald Reagan began the bankrupting of America and the creation of a super wealthy CEO class, one where their great grandchildren will never have to work, an aristocracy of trustifarians. Under Reagan hypocracy and selfishness became the rule of the road. Not just in public life, where his staff routinely lied, eventually leading to Iran-Contra.
But if Reagan started to ruin America, his foreign policy left the dead around like fallen leaves. His foreign policy was a disaster by any standard. Dead nuns in El Salvador, murdered school teachers in Nicaragua, the tortured in Argentina, the seizure of Grenade, the failed intervention in Lebanon, the aerial assassination attempt on Khaddafi, which led to the bombing of Pam Am flight 103. Reagan's policies left a trail of failure and disaster at every turn.
How to explain funding the deeply corrupt Contras? Former Somocista generals who funded their war by the drug trade? Who murdered the innoncent. Or the war in Guatemala and the genocide of the indian population. Or the war in El Salvador, where American nuns, among many others, were raped and murdered. A government so callous that it murdered an archbishop in his church.
Reagan's foreign policy left a trail of death and fear wherever it touched.
…
Silent complicity was the hallmark of Reagan's policy towards dictatorships. From Indonesia to El Salvador, the innocent died and the US said nothing, did nothing, except make their lives worse.
We backed the guerrilla groups in Afghanistan, funding the most radical ones and then leaving the country in disarray.
Reagan's legacy is a dark one, one of backing murderers and robbing America of a fairer future. It wasn't that he was an evil man, or a bad one. It is what he believed and what he supported caused so much pain and misery for so many people, who had to live with the results of his policies. …
Which demonstrates, if nothing else, the true, sad state of American journalism: that a deceased and relatively obscure blogger named Steven Gilliard is still a vastly more vital, thoughtful, passionate and powerful writer from inside the Narrow House than is the allegedly-living New York Times columnist named David Brooks.
And which, in the end, leaves nothing left standing to debunk or refute.
Indeed all of the above would be an embarrassingly one-sided exercise in bouncing the rubble of where Bobo’s career used to be were it not for this simple fact: Bobo still works for the NYT.
Punching most days so desperately far out of his intellectual weight class that he can barely climb up the Big Boy stairs into the ring, Bobo nonetheless continues to punch clock every damned day on the most valuable piece of real estate at the New York Fucking Times.
He worked for them last year.
Works for them this year.
Will work for them next year.
And through the smoke of Hellfire prose tearing his idiocy to flinders, this became the part of the story-behind-the-story which began to fascinate me.
And so, having amply dispensed with that, let us move onto polls he cites to note that that the word "loyal" appears nowhere in them, even though he goes out of his way imply that this characteristic of his awesome Silent Majority is gleaned from them.
Other important concepts which do not appear in either poll: "effort" and "reward".
Investment firms and banks making risky loansand investments, especially in home mortgages.
The economic policies under former President Bush, including tax cuts for the wealthiest families.
American companies not investing their profits in creating jobs in America.
You'd think the most famous newspaper on Earth would fact check little things like this, but then again, given that Mr. Brooks is in the pulling-Broderite-opinions-out-of-his-ass business as opposed to the reporting business, perhaps they have simply fallen out of the habit of checking Our Mr. Brooks' facts altogether.
After all, the last time I can remember Our Mr. Brooks logging any actual shoe-leather reporting among the commoners was when spent a few moments chatting up a group of people during a jog one day in the summer of 2010:
I was out jogging on the mall. I was at a Tea Party rally, Tea Party rally. Also there was a group called the Back-- Black Family Reunion, celebration of African American culture. I watched these two groups intermingle. Sitting at the same table, eating-- watching concerts together. Among most of those people, there was a fantastic atmosphere of just getting along on-- on a warm Sunday afternoon.
From this fleeting encounter came several ooey-gooey column inches of Conventional Beltway Wisdom lightly frosted with the thinnest possible gloss of on-site verification: Conventional Beltway Wisdom which, as always, proved to be buffoonish wrong about its assessment of the Tea Party, while those damned Dirty Hippies once again proved to be correct.
Like his New York Times colleague Tom Friedman, rather than working up a sweat actually "reporting" on "events" Our Mr. Brooks prefers to masticate the work of others to finds slivers and nuggets and hints tat appear to ratify his deeply perverse world view, and then regurgitates it in 800-word Conservative Owl Pellets of Conventional Beltway Wisdom onto the pages of the New York Times.
Which is why David Brooks has now written four columns in a row in America's Newspaper of Record explaining -- explicitly or implicitly -- why everyone needs to ignore the Occupy Wall Street movement, move along to something else and stop paying those damned hippies any mind.
Explaining as clear as can be that Johnny Fontane never gets that movie!
Because the dirty hippies, with their olive oil voice and guinea charm, have climbed out of Mr. Brooks' nightmares and onto the street outside his window where they keep loudly insisting on talking about the one thing in this world that Our Mr, Brooks does not want to talk about.
Because the Occupy Wall Street movement makes Our Mr. Brooks look ridiculous.
And a man in Our Mr. Brooks' position can't afford to be made to look ridiculous.
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Side note: I'm pretty sure there are at least a couple of typos here which I'll get to when I comb this all out and prepare it for Glorious Posterity. Until then, I'd only note that this kind of column is the product of a little contest I have with myself. Typically, a New York Times column appears to drop between 10:00 and midnight my time.
First I read it for content and pacing as soon as practicable, then re-read for structure and facts. Then I give myself a couple of hours (shorter if I just can't keep my eyes open and longer if it opens up into something else or if I just don't have any sap in my paws) to research and construct a long-form response from scratch, retrieve or (as is the case here) create some original artwork, and hit publish.
More polish means fewer, longer posts. Probably a lot fewer.
Less polish means more fortune-cookie-length posts. Probably a lot more.
Just at the moment I am trying to figure out how much longer this Middle Way is sustainable.
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End note: Going over what I wrote last night, this morning I felt compelled to add/modify the content of this post in way that roughly doubled its length.
Because even though it'll roll off the end of my blog in a week an disappear into oblivion, I would have been irritated with myself all day if I hadn't.
Hell, I'm still not entirely happy with it, but I'm OCD-aware enough to know when to walk away with Leonardo da Vinci's "Art is never finished, only abandoned." as my umbrella :-)
