From Niebuhr to Nabokov: How Mr. David Brooks of The New York Times...

...conned the Times and PBS and NPR and Yale and NBC and The Aspen Institute and Oprah into underwriting his midlife crisis.

From Lisa Miller's efficient vivisection of Mr. Brooks in New York Magazine:

...
Brooks worries, a little, that his new book will be considered “woo-woo,” but he also knows that his base — the senior executives who hear him speak at the end of a three-day retreat on corporate health-care costs — will “eat it up more than any other audience. They have nobody in their lives who talks this way. I’m exaggerating, but the country is hungry for ‘How do you do relationship?’ ‘How do you lead a good life?’ ”

I ask Brooks whether he can see the irony: the pundit preaching on holiness, the public intellectual holding forth on humility, the middle-aged divorcé lecturing on love, the defender of the Republican aristocracy writing a book about the sacred poor. But self-knowledge has never been Brooks’s particular strength — or rather, in its mix of self-mocking, striving, and naïveté, his view of himself can fail to come into focus. “I don’t see myself as a privileged person,” he says, hesitating. “I make more than people — well, maybe I should take that back. Yeah, I do take that back.”

For America's most clueless, cloistered plutocrats, David Brooks truly is their anointed savior.

Their Bullshit Buddha.

The Leo Buscaglia of the Leisure Class.

Their Putz Who Was Promised:

The Prince That Was Promised", sometimes called "The Prince Who Was Promised" or "The One Who Was Promised" (also known as the Lord's Chosen, the Son of Fire and the Warrior of Light) is a prophesied savior in the religion of the Lord of Light. According to the prophecy, this figure would be born "amidst salt and smoke" and pull a sword named Lightbringer from flames, which they would use to combat an impending darkness.

Behold, a Tip Jar!