Friday, December 02, 2016

David Brooks Is Out Today And The Triumphant Return of Tom Waits Friday


Mr. Brooks is presumably skipping the heavy lifting of writing a column in order to continue rolling through America's heartland, lending an ear to the sad stories of Real American's, touching Indians and so forth.

So you're spared that.

But in light of Mr. Brooks' post-1109 advice to all us losers to humbly suck it up and listen to the folk wisdom of the rubes and bigots a completely imaginary Trump voter that Mr. Brooks made up out of whole cloth --
Fellow Trump Critics, Maybe Try a Little Listening

...
I’ve been thinking a lot about the best imaginable Trump voter. This is the Trump supporter who wasn’t motivated by racism or bigotry. This is the one who cringed every time Donald Trump did something cruel, vulgar or misogynistic. 

But this voter needed somebody to change the systems that are failing her... 

...It’s tempting to get so caught up in his outrage du jour that you never have to do any self-examination. But let’s be honest: It wouldn’t kill us Trump critics to take a break from our never-ending umbrage to engage in a little listening.
-- I thought it might be Fun!Fun!Fun! to step into the Wayback Machine and see what sage advice Mr. Brooks was handing out back in 2008 to the winners and losers in that election.

From yours truly, eight years ago...
King Pimp


Over in the Better Universe, pundits are required to dress in the rags of their actual profession.

November 7, 2008

Change I Can Believe In
By DAVID BROOKS

I have dreams. I may seem like a boring pundit whose most exotic fantasies involve G.A.O. reports, but deep down, I have dreams.

The administration of my dreams understands where the country is today. Its members know that, as Andrew Kohut of the Pew Research Center put it on “The NewsHour,” “This was an election where the middle asserted itself.” There was “no sign” of a “movement to the left.”

Only 17 percent of Americans trust the government to do the right thing most or all of the time, according to an October New York Times/CBS News poll. So the members of my dream Obama administration understand that they cannot impose an ideological program the country does not accept.

They’ll invite G.O.P. leaders to the White House for real meetings and then re-invite them, even if they give hostile press conferences on the White House driveway.

They’ll do things conservatives disagree with, but they’ll also show that they’re not toadies of the liberal interest groups. They’ll insist on merit pay and preserving No Child Left Behind’s accountability standards, no matter what the teachers’ unions say. They’ll postpone contentious fights on things like card check legislation.
And so forth.

Before the NYT welded the dumpster lid closed on this reeking pile of hackslag, over 600 citizens had commented on this column. Most, bless their hearts, sounded like “Lisa, Oakland, CA”:
And you asked the Republicans to do this how many times over the last eight years? Funny how a Democratic Congress and President can suddenly make "bipartisan" look like something other than a cuss word from Republicans, who were trying for eternal one-party rule for most of the last dozen years.
In addition to being pissed, a large number of commenters seemed genuinely baffled by David Fucking Brooks' dealing out so much hypocrisy from the bottom of his stacked deck, so fast, so dizzyingly divorced from any reality-based context, and all in one, short essay.

As I mentioned last week, 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 is, yet again, a towering example of #2.

For people who were mystified that Our Mr. Brook's is now suddenly and loudly militating for behaviors about which he was conspicuously silent during the Republican Dark Ages, the answer is simple.

Money.

As every cop who ever walked an honest beat knows, people just aren’t that complicated.

Mr. Brooks does not get paid for being insightful or honest: he gets paid for feigning insightfulness and honesty. He gets very, very handsomely compensated for performing exactly the same function as a hooker: telling the Pig People how attractive and strong-like-bull they are regardless of what the mirror says, or how depraved their demands.

Without his Conservative hobby-horse to ride, the relentlessly mediocre David Brooks would be unemployed and unemployable, and this is not a man to risk derailing the gravy train just for the fleeting thrill of telling some ugly, unvarnished truth about his party and his politics.
So there you go.

And now, Tom Waits...

10 comments:

Tom Shefchik said...

Wow. No wonder I find you to be one of our two greatest commentators. (Also Digby) You could have written this about Don the Con:

DON THE CON did not get ELECTED for being insightful or honest: he got ELECTED for feigning insightfulness and honesty. He WILL GET very, very handsomely compensated for performing exactly the same function as a hooker: telling the Pig People how attractive and strong-like-bull they are regardless of what the mirror says, or how depraved their demands.

Without his Conservative hobby-horse to ride, the relentlessly mediocre DON THE CON would be JUST ANOTHER FAILED BUSINESS MAN, and this is not a man to risk derailing the gravy train just for the fleeting thrill of telling some ugly, unvarnished truth about his party and his politics.

--------
Keep up the good fight!

Neo Tuxedo said...

He turned and opened his arms in a wide gesture. “Do I look rich?” he said.
“Don’t know,” said the girl. “Maybe, maybe not. Maybe you’ll get rich. I have a very special service for rich people…”
“Oh yes?” said Ford, intrigued but careful. “And what’s that?”
“I tell them it’s OK to be rich.”
Gunfire erupted from a window high above them, but it was only a bass player getting shot for playing the wrong riff three times in a row, and bass players are two a penny in Han Dold City.
Ford stopped and peered into the dark doorway.
“You what?” he said.
The girl laughed and stepped forward a little out of the shadow. She was tall, and had that kind of self-possessed shyness which is a great trick if you can do it.
“It’s my big number,” she said. “I have a Master’s degree in Social Economics and can be very convincing. People love it. Especially in this city.”
“Goosnargh,” said Ford Prefect, which was a special Betelgeusian word he used when he knew he should say something but didn’t know what it should be.

-- Douglas Adams, So Long and Thanks for All the Fish (1984)

trgahan said...

Yeah, clearly a memo went around on election day that the Trump vote was going to framed as "working class disaffection with Democrats and the establishment...oh and anxious about the economy or NO CHRISTMAS BONUS DAMN IT!" Brooks et al. have been charged with keeping that shitpile moving down hill until Trump declares a 1,000 year Reich in January.

Like Gore in 2000 and Kerry in 2004, the votes Hillary got have been either de-legitimized (just the result of Identity Politics!) or stricken from the record by no one talking about them.

dinthebeast said...

Speaking of "Lost in America", here's a band called Crack The Sky doing a song of that same name:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4G8utXSar0
If you like it, check out the Bowie tribute they did right after he died, it's on YouTube.

-Doug in Oakland

duquesne_pdx said...

"I’ve been thinking a lot about the best imaginable Trump voter. This is the Trump supporter who wasn’t motivated by racism or bigotry. This is the one who cringed every time Donald Trump did something cruel, vulgar or misogynistic.
But this voter needed somebody to change the systems that are failing her... "
There's been a few stories out there talking about a woman who is pretty much exactly that.
"When Donald Trump named his Treasury secretary, Teena Colebrook felt her heart sink.
She had voted for the president-elect on the belief that he would knock the moneyed elites from their perch in Washington, D.C. And she knew Trump’s pick for Treasury—Steven Mnuchin—all too well.
OneWest, a bank formerly owned by a group of investors headed by Mnuchin, had foreclosed on her Los Angeles-area home in the aftermath of the Great Recession, stripping her of the two units she rented as a primary source of income.
“I just wish that I had not voted,” said Colebrook, 59." (via TPM)
And then she got fucked over by the fascist oompa loompa.
The best imaginable Trump voter is a rube.

duquesne_pdx said...

Oh, and just one thing about Waits Friday: goddamn, it's been too long! And starting with such a classic is the icing on the cake.

Unknown said...

David Brooks writes only one type of column--the "I'm paid to be a narcissistic blowhard" with "a natural disposition towards shallowness" column.

And he does it very well.

[quotes are his]

Robt said...

Just another one of Trump's beloved uneducated. Trying to educate ( because he knows more than the teachers).

I am sure he feels/ believes igig to lie is part of hiss 2nd Amendment rights. That you just don't understand. Because Freedom (or something like that)..............!

Buttermilk Sky said...

People may get the impression that Albert Brooks is somehow related to David Brooks. You should correct this.

Neo Tuxedo said...

I just had an insight about DFB while playing Fruit Smash, and I'm sharing it here because this is the most recent post to mention him.

David Brooks is less Edmund Burke, more William.