Tuesday, April 29, 2014

Sociopaths of Glory



I predict that, pound for pound, nothing else I read or see or hear this week will top the grotesque hilarity of the following nine words from Mr. David Brooks:
I help teach a grand strategy course at Yale...
Wow.  And since we know that since the post-Bush David Brooks is biologically and contractually incapable of writing any column expressing any opinion on any subject without a big, steaming load of Both Siderism right in the middle, you will be unsurprised to find this razor in the apple (emphasis added):
The weakness with any democratic foreign policy is the problem of motivation. How do you get the electorate to support the constant burden of defending the liberal system?

It was barely possible when we were facing an obviously menacing foe like the Soviet Union. But it’s harder when the system is being gouged by a hundred sub-threshold threats. The Republicans seem to have given up global agreements that form the fabric of that system, while Democrats are slashing the defense budget that undergirds it.
You know, once upon a time, either Harlan Ellison or Hunter Thompson suggested that the most karmically apt fate post-resignation Richard Nixon deserved was to be shackled hand-and-foot and perp-walked in sackcloth and dung through every American city and town as he was mocked and laughed at and spit on by children.  After that he would be chained to a block in the public square and every American would entitled to one slap.

If you lost a limb or a loved one in Vietnam, you could use your closed fist.

Now I would not presume to judge what level of karmic justice Mr. Brooks has coming to him. Nor can I say in what way it should manifest itself.  But I can say that if this Bush-humping, Iraq-War-Pimping Neocon's participation in teaching a Grand Strategy course at an American Ivy League university does not at least involve being forced to sit in a glass booth wearing this button --


-- while students take turns reading aloud from giant, FoamCore enlargement of his infamous "National Greatness", "Jewels of Nuance" and "Dream Palaces" columns that are helpfully arrayed on the wall behind him, then the Moms and Dads who are spending small fortunes to send their kids to Yale really aren't getting their money's worth.

13 comments:

Horace Boothroyd III said...

Well, yeah.

In my experience, about forty percent of the Sons of Eli are good decent people who care about peace and justice and equity and sound scholarship and all that dirty hippie stuff.

Which leaves sixty percent to be the stone cold sociopaths who would shoot your grandmother to get ahead and sustain Yale's well deserved reputation as a launching pad for successful careerists. This is why mothers send their sons to New Haven: to get ahead.

If taking a course in Grand Strategy with some well connected media insider advances the program, then God is in His Heaven and Billy's down by the bay.

Anonymous said...

I think in regards to DFB’s punishment, it appears to be somewhat covered in what would be termed, in the parlance of our time, “the money shot” of his self fellating word hash-up: “The liberal pluralistic system is not a spontaneous natural thing. Preserving that hard-earned ecosystem requires an ever-advancing fabric of alliances, clear lines about what behavior is unacceptably system-disrupting, and the credible threat of political, financial and hard power enforcement”. (I have discount cards on Brain Bleach for all of you actually read that DFB quote).

The money shot of the money shot is “…hard power enforcement”. I mean, really, the dude is just asking for some serious S&M bondage type action with all the necessary accoutrements. Of course in his case this would likely be pleasure instead of actual humiliation and punishment for his never ending slob-gob of mind numbing glop.

Bill Smith said...

Our Mr. Brooks has made some serious intellectual progress lately: he's gone from teaching a course on Humility to helping out with that Grand Strategy thing in just about a year. Let's pray that he doesn't find his way to the medical school; he could do some real harm teaching there.

Pinkybum said...

"...Democrats are slashing the defense budget..." - that is just flat out wrong. Not wrong in a nuanced way wrong - wrong really wrong.

Neo Tuxedo said...

either Harlan Ellison or Hunter Thompson suggested that the most karmically apt fate post-resignation Richard Nixon deserved...

Either one's possible, but I'm going to go (tentatively) with Ellison, because either one of us could be thinking of the left-handed whipsong HST unleashed on the occasion of Nixon's death:

"If the right people had been in charge of Nixon's funeral, his casket would have been launched into one of those open-sewage canals that empty into the ocean just south of Los Angeles. He was a swine of a man and a jabbering dupe of a president. Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning. Even his funeral was illegal. He was queer in the deepest way. His body should have been burned in a trash bin."

Yastreblyansky said...

It's the Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy and Studies in Grand Strategy Graduate Seminar. By the looks of it a special place for recruiting staffers for the George W. Bush administration (wait till they find out, huh?). Brooks was hanging out there last year too, though I doubt he was doing much teaching. More cocktails. My post is here.

Charles Pierce said...

Romper-bomper-stomper-boo!
Well played, sir.

dinthebeast said...

My pot connection in high school had one of those "I'm a good do-bee" plaques on his wall.
I vote that DFB should be buggered. To death. By a sheep. Then of course the poor sheep would have to be euthanized. My tolerance for these creeps is at an all time low.

-Doug in Oakland

the cheese eater said...

It's everywhere you fuckin look. The evidence is overwhelming and damning. The "Both Sides Don't" lens Driftglass uses to dissect our political arrangements casts more shadow than light.

Sure, it IS true that:
"America... has a powerful, crazy right wing. There’s nothing equivalent on the left... nothing like the organized, lavishly financed madness on the right."

and that:

"...Centrists have a very hard time acknowledging this asymmetry; they love to assert that both sides are equally wrong — and often seem to feel the need to invent extreme positions when they don’t actually exist." (Thanks PK)

The above analysis does NOTHING explain this from Charles Pierce:
http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/haji-gulalai-in-united-states-042914

What DOES explain the torturer next door is a different lens. It's the one that allows us to see tat when it comes to consequential policy decisions, "Both Sides Do" and they do it all the time.

It takes a Nixon to go to China, a Clinton to dismantle the welfare state, and an Obama to pass a trade bill that will decimate the vestiges of our working class population.

J-Phresh said...

"The Republicans seem to have given up global agreements that form the fabric of that system, while Democrats are slashing the defense budget that undergirds it."

So...democrats don't think that maintaining the international system requires that we buy the newest and fanciest jet. Republicans have dedicated themselves to detonating the entire system. But both sides are equally at fault.

Holy hell, I wish I knew what David was smoking and how to contact his dealer.

Capt. Bat Guano said...

Now I would not presume to judge what level of karmic justice Mr. Brooks has coming to him. Nor can I say in what way it should manifest itself.

Let me help you out. I would go full Mao an his pampered, lilly white ass and send him to Capt. Bat Guano's Holiday Re-education Camp. fun in the Mississipi sun...with shovels, iron handled shovels.

Smut Clyde said...

being forced to sit in a glass booth wearing this button

We can have Bacon's "Pope" photoshop plz?

JerryB said...

I was a Romper Room Do-Bee.

Prophetic...in a way.