10 Years After: 2008 -- David Brooks: King Of All Pimps

The 10th blogiversary fundraiser continues with the Hope and Change year of 2008.

During 2008, David Brooks continues to grow into a top-shelf thought-leader in the "Let's All Pretend The Last Eight Years Never Happened" movement.

A phenomenon which almost no one chose to notice or care about at the time.

The Alert Reader with far too much time on her hands will probably want to compare the 2008 column below -- in which Mr. Brooks frantically jettisons all party and ideological labels to describe exactly how things got so fucked up and shit over the previous eight years -- with a number of his Weekly Standard columns in which Mr. Brooks applauds the explicitly Republican policies which caused thing to become all fucked up and shit ... and explicitly mocks Democrats as stupid and deranged for not backing the Republican policies which caused thing to become all fucked up and shit.

And both of these pair nicely with Mr. Brooks very next column in 2008 in which he insists not emphatically that the results of the 2008 election do not signal that the country wants to move even one millimeter to the Left.

And for the sake of future historians, please note that during the very short period during which it might have been possible to take a substantial bite out of the Right by simply telling the fucking truth, Mr. Brooks and his colleagues were busy using their positions of power and influence to construct an entirely fake and self-serving alternate American.

They did it right out in the open where everyone could see it.

And virtually NO ONE but a few, despised Liberal bloggers dared to call them out on it.

David Fucking Brooks Worries

That with all the mountains of debt and failure that David Fucking Brooks piled up by electing and re-electing The Worst President in History, the new generation of political leadership will not have nearly enough money to repair the failures and catastrophes that David Fucking Brooks will bequeath to them as a result of his decision to elect and re-elect The Worst President in History.

Of course he doesn't say it quite that way, and being a notorious Responsibility Socialist, he uses lots of passive, pastel language to redistribute the blame the Hell away from himself...

A Date With Scarcity

By DAVID BROOKS

Nov. 4, 2008, is a historic day because it marks the end of an economic era, a political era and a generational era all at once.

Economically, it marks the end of the Long Boom, which began in 1983. Politically, it probably marks the end of conservative dominance, which began in 1980. Generationally, it marks the end of baby boomer supremacy, which began in 1968. For the past 16 years, baby boomers, who were formed by the tumult of the 1960s, occupied the White House. By Tuesday night, if the polls are to be believed, a member of anew generation will become president-elect.

So today is not only a pivot, but a confluence of pivots.

...

Yet, at the same time, the public sphere has not flourished. Despite decades of affluence, longstanding issues like health care, education, energy and entitlement debt have not been adequately addressed. The baby boomers, who entered adulthood promising a lifetime of activism, have been a politically undistinguished generation. They produced two presidents, neither of whom lived up to his potential. They remained consumed by the culture war that divided their generation. They pass their political supremacy today having squandered the fat years and the golden opportunities.

Month by month, frustration has mounted. Americans are anxious about their private lives but absolutely disgusted by public leaders. So change is demanded.

Republicans nominated an old warrior with a record of making hard decisions and absorbing the blows that ensue. Many of us regard him — and always will — as one of the heroes of our time. But the public demand for change was total, and if the polls are right, voters will elect the man who breaks from the recent past in almost every way.

...

Obama is not only a member of this temperate generation, but of its most educated segment. He has lived nearly his entire adult life within a few miles of one or another of the country’s top 10 universities.

His upscale, post-boomer cohort has rallied behind him with unalloyed fervor. Major college newspapers have endorsed him at a rate of 63 to 1. ...This cohort will soon become the ruling class.

And the irony is that they will be confronted by the problem for which they have the least experience and for which they are the least prepared: the problem of scarcity.

Raised in prosperity, favored by genetics, these young meritocrats will have to govern in a period when the demands on the nation’s wealth outstrip the supply. They will grapple with the growing burdens of an aging society, rising health care costs and high energy prices. They will have to make up for the trillion-plus dollars the government will spend to avoid a deep recession. They will have to struggle to keep their promises to cut taxes, create an energy revolution, pass an expensive health care plan and all the rest.

As Robert J. Samuelson writes in his forthcoming book, “The Great Inflation and Its Aftermath,” “Already, Americans face far more claims on their incomes than can be easily met.”

...

We’re probably entering a period, in other words, in which smart young liberals meet a stone-cold scarcity that they do not seem to recognize or have a plan for.

In an age of transition, the children are left to grapple with the burdens of their elders.

When he turns his watery ink to the subject of American politics, Bobo has two, basic columns:

1. The personal and triumphal when he finds occasion to flaunt his ridiculous, bankrupt ideology. And,
2. The moon-faced alien anthropologist, orbiting the Earth and noting the fall of American civilization from the safe distance of wealth and privilege that this relentlessly mediocre man has somehow been afforded when confronted with the cratered wasteland he and his beliefs have created.

This column would be a so-so example of #2.

Notice that all failures are somehow the non-denominational fault of "the baby boomers" and "They" because of a "culture war", and not "Conservatives", "We" and "Reaganomics".

Like the announcers of pre-dawn farm reports reading off pork belly statistics, Bobo dryly notes that it was this same, amorphous "They" that "produced two presidents, neither of whom lived up to his potential" instead of "We Republicans" who spent "eight years trying every filthy, ratfucking trick in the book to destroy Bill Clinton, and then another eight gleefully unleashing the Bush/Cheney Furies."

No, according to Bobo's Cliff's Notes version of recent American political history, the only action identified as specifically Republican in his arid list of failures and lost opportunities was the nomination of "an old warrior" with "a record of making hard decisions and absorbing the blows that ensue" offered up as "one of the heroes of our time."

And it wasn't Conservatism that fucked us all, it was was the "elders".

In the end, of course, Bobo is right about one thing: instead of being a prosperous nation gliding into the future on a bullet train, we're broke and have a long, hard slog down a rotting WPA road ahead of us.

However I can't help thinking that if every smug dimwit who voted to elect and then re-elect our Failure-in-Chief were stripped of every fucking nickel, and if the assets of every well-heeled columnist, pundit and media organization who carried water for degenerate Neocon wreckers were seized, and if every creationist-themed "Church of Jesus Christ, CEO" were taxed like any other whorehouse, I bet we'd have enough to meet our obligations with money left over to buy everyone a really nice, double-scoop cone down at the Baskin-Robbins.

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