Me, yesterday:
David Brooks today:I'm sure David Brooks will write his 1,000th more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger column bemoaning the lack of civility on Both Sides.— driftglass (@Mr_Electrico) January 12, 2018
Then he'll roll around in a pile of NYT money.
How Democracies PerishMeh.
Everybody agrees society is in a bad way, but what exactly is the main cause of the badness? Some people emphasize economic issues: The simultaneous concentration of wealth at the top and the stagnation in the middle has delegitimized the system. People like me emphasize cultural issues. If you have 60 years of radical individualism and ruthless meritocracy, you’re going to end up with a society that is atomized, distrustful and divided.
But some emphasize the intellectual. The people who designed our liberal democratic system made fundamental errors, which are now coming home to roost...
I'll give myself a gentleman's "C+" since the purpose of Mr. Brooks' pathological Both Siderism has always been to deflect blame for our country being systematically wrecked by explicitly Republican atrocities and depraved Republican policies away from his Republican Party and onto anyone or anything else. The 60s. Hippies. Both Sides. Social Justice Warriors. Poor little brownshirt man-babies like Ben Shapiro and Milo Yiannopoulos being shouted down on some campus somewhere. Doesn't matter. As long as the discussion is shunted the hell away from Mr. Brooks' Republican Party, Mission Fucking Accomplished.
It has gotten so nakedly ridiculous that even Salaried Media Person Jonathan Chait sat up and took notice:
It has gotten so nakedly ridiculous that even Salaried Media Person Jonathan Chait sat up and took notice:
David Brooks Picked a Bad Week to Say Trump ‘Runs a Normal, Good Meeting’
...
Brooks’s [Tuesday column, about which your humble scrivener has already written] used his observations about Trump’s surprisingly impressive focus and mental acuity to conclude that Trump’s critics had been overreacting and losing their dignity. Anti-Trumpers, he argued, were “getting dumber” and reducing themselves to “monotonous daily hysteria.”
This is essentially the position Brooks has taken about every step in the Republican Party’s long march into extremism and madness. After having depicted Trump as a final break, Brooks was returning to his natural condition.
It is obviously true that, in a large country, a broad spectrum of opinion will inevitably produce excesses on every side. Even a president as deranged and racist as Trump will be talked about, by somebody, in excessively harsh terms. Yet Brooks’s conclusion that Trump critics have on the whole exaggerated his flaws, that Trump is in fact reasonably well informed, affable, and sane, does not seem to be a reasonable conclusion at all. Instead it is an expression of Brooks’s unavoidable tendency to impose a sheen of normality on a political party that is anything but.
On a related note, yiou humble scrivener can only assume that House Sulzberger must shit platinum ingots since they continue to pay Mr. Brooks a king's ransom to extrude this drivel into their family' newspaper year after year after year.
Behold, a Tip Jar!
8 comments:
Good afternoon, Mr. Glass.
Concerning "How Democracies Perish," I noticed that not only does the word "conservative" never appear, but Mr. Brooks seems like he's trying to call himself a liberal.
Be seeing you.
"Some people emphasize economic issues....People like me emphasize cultural issues"
DFB saying humbling saying don't bothering me with actual reasons or data, and don't touch my stuff or my tax cut!
Democracy's perish when an empowered fourth estates hire assholes like you Mr. Brooks to constantly spin fairy tales about America being some "fallen society" ever since the browns, women, and liberals got uppity about their place in our democracy. Because this crap fuels the very "we need to break it to save it" ethos that drives the Republican voter.
It never fails to amaze me, how BoBo continues believing that if we just rebuild some fantastical past that never existed-- where, say, churches were civic-minded enough to build and staff care centers for thousands of severely ill folks so that evil "state" didn't have to, and gay couples could convince hateful bakers they're not pervs by inviting said hateful bakers over for wine and gnocchi-- we wouldn't need government at all!
Both Sides have failed that social contract. He's so upset about it, he'll have another artisanal mojito.
"Everybody agrees..." "Some people emphasize"... "But some emphasize..."
Bullshit, David. Just who are these everybodies, some peoples, and somes and where do they live?
I think you pulled them out of your butt, again.
They must exist, no, or else your column idea doesn't hold water.
You bought into this claptrap a long time ago, and every day since then has been chock full of opportunities to come clean and serve the damn truth.
You are a farce, David. A well compensated farce, but a farce nevertheless.
-Doug in Oakland
Some day in the future. An NYT editor visits Brooks in his old folks home at the age of 103. To tell him the " Gig " is up.
To soften the blow. They tell him both sides are let go.
Bullshit, David. Just who are these everybodies, some peoples, and somes and where do they live?
I think you pulled them out of your butt, again.
Don't you know? He met them at the Applebee's salad bar.
(Note for the novice: Back in the Year of Our Fraud 2008, Our Mr. Brooks wrote "Obama‘s problem is he doesn‘t seem like a guy who can go into an Applebee‘s salad bar and people think he fits in naturally there." Alert readers at Crooks and Liars pointed out that Applebee's did not, as indeed it still does not, have a salad bar. Implicit in this observation was that, from now on, any time David Fucking Brooks chides literally anyone else including literal newborn babies for being "out of touch", any intelligent aware person is not only legally authorized, but morally obliged, to jump up and down and laugh like a donkey at him.)
"... they continue to pay Mr. Brooks a king's ransom ..." I see this assertion often and at many places, but it just occurred to me, I have never seen anyone claim they actually know how much Brooks gets paid for his sinecure. Do you know? I suppose I could try Googling it, but that seems like cheating. Anyway, if it's more than $100 a week it's way too much.
@cvmbner -- "It never fails to amaze me, how BoBo continues believing ..." You seem to be saying here that you think DFB writes what he actually believes. For myself, I do not think he writes in good faith. I think he claims to believe things he knows full well to be false and absurd.
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