This is sentence that Mr. David Brooks of The New York Times actually wrote in his column today:
"I worry there’s a great historical amnesia going on."
I read that.
Then I laughed for an hour.
Then I drank some pretty good scotch.
Then I sat down to try to encompass the surpassing weirdness of a world in which Mr. David Brooks -- who's entire career is so utterly dependent on every one of his colleagues agreeing to continually memory-hole the horribly wrongheaded crap David Brooks writes as soon as it begins to rot on the vine that the process has become known as the Beltway Iron Rule of David Brooks -- could begin to write such a sentence without his hand striking itself off and scuttling away to begin a new career in the gritty reboot of either The Crawling Hand or The Beast With Five Fingers --
-- or even The Hand.
But that is the world in which we live, so onward we shall go. However I'll spare you the Brooks-brand, on-the-one-side-but-on-the-other equivocating, the tedious Wikipedia recitation of the History of Budgets and the overall damp hand-wringing of the entire column and instead just embed this Tweet
This is the same David Brooks who, 20 years ago, was 100% certain that Stupid Liberals ("The New Stupid Party") had finally gone of the deep end with their crazy "brainless, self-destructive" fantasy that the policies of the George W. Bush administration were about to wipe out the Clinton surplus, run up a gargantuan deficit and put Social Security under the gun.Ten years ago, I would have been aghast at this leftward shift. But I’ve seen inequality widen, the social fabric decay, the racial wealth gap increase. Americans are rightly convinced that the country is broken and fear it is in decline. https://t.co/DNBB292awb
— David Brooks (@nytdavidbrooks) March 26, 2021
But I worry about this new economic philosophy that asserts you can have everything you want without trade-offs.
Yes, There Is a New Economy
Thanks to once-in-a lifetime productivity gains, Bush's plans are easily affordable
MAR 19, 2001
...
This year's tax and budget debate really comes down to one essential question: Is the money going to be there? The Congressional Budget Office projects surpluses of about $ 5.6 trillion over the next 10 years. The Republicans insist that those projections are conservative, so the government can afford to return $ 1.6 trillion to the taxpayers and still have money left over for Social Security, Medicare, and an $800 billion contingency fund. The Democrats cry that projections are notoriously inaccurate, that the tax cuts will blow a hole in the budget, and that the Bush administration's risky scheme (which sailed through the House last week) would cast us back into the days of piling debt.
....even if today's productivity improvements are only on the scale of, say, the improvements our economy saw after World War II, we may be in for a long and sunny ride. There is a rough historical pattern here. A new technology is invented. It takes a long time before people figure out how to use it. The electric motor was invented in the 1880s, but it didn't transform factories until the 1920s, economist Paul David has noted. Once the technology is fully deployed, however, there are decades of positive results. Daniel Sichel of the Federal Reserve points to previous technology-driven surges that lasted 10 and 25 years. That suggests we may still be near the beginning of this particular period of bounty.
If we are, an occasional period of slower growth or even a recession may occur, but the U.S. economy is fundamentally strong, and both laymen and legislators have good reasons to believe it will remain strong for many years. Industrial productivity is surging. Americans are not only the hardest working people on earth (the average American works about 10 weeks a year more than the average European) but also the most productive workers -- by far. If you measure value added per hour worked, Americans do about 20 percent better than Germans and the French, and 40 percent better than the Japanese.
In other words, if you wade through the economic literature, it's hard not to agree with the Cleveland Fed's Jerry Jordan: We are living at a once-in-a-generation moment of economic opportunity. As productivity grows, the economy will grow. As the economy grows, revenues will grow, maybe beyond what the CBO projects. The real question about the Bush tax cuts, then, is not, Can we afford them? The real question is, Why are they so small?
The big Republican accomplishment is that they have detoxified their brand. Four years ago they seemed scary and extreme to a lot of people. They no longer seem that way. The wins in purple states like North Carolina, Iowa and Colorado are clear indications that the party can at least gain a hearing among swing voters. And if the G.O.P. presents a reasonable candidate (and this year’s crop was very good), then Republicans can win anywhere. I think we’ve left the Sarah Palin phase and entered the Tom Cotton phase.
-- David Brooks, November 5, 2014.
The Post-Trump Era
As awful as Donald Trump is, it will be exciting to witness the coming re-creation of the Republican Party.
So quite honestly I don't much care what would or would not have appalled or thunderstruck or frightened Mr. Brooks' horses in the street ten years ago because Mr. Brooks' opinion on virtually all important matters have been so uniformly terrible for as long as I can remember.
Don't get me wrong. If after decades of continuous, spectacular and very public failure as a haver-of-opinions Mr. David Brooks is actually, slowly verging on catching up on this one issue with where the average Liberal was decades ago when he was slagging us all as whiney commie idiots, well that's just great.
Someone should definitely give him a cookie and a participation ribbon.
But what no one has ever explained to my satisfaction is why the Sulzberger family employed him at heavy expense as a haver-of-opinions in the first place and why, after nearly two decades of continuous Both Siderist bed-shitting, he is still on their payroll.
7 comments:
The Sulzbergers keep Brooks on the payroll because they desperately need just-so stories to keep the monsters of reality at bay. A dysfunctional government and country teetering on the edge of collapse is not good for investment or a stable stock market. The monied class requires a narrative that we're in a rough patch, but Everything Is Fine. Any alternative cannot be tolerated.
DFB
You know, someone who's ALWAYS wrong, reliably, is actually a valuable asset. If you can somehow get him to predict the stock market you could make a killing.
the answer is the same as it was for edmund burke. there are terrible oppressions..
the oppressors 'feel' bad, just a teeny bit...how can we help them feel better?
never ever ask the oppressed...they always want more.
Sulzbergers bathe in CPB/RFE* approval of emissary david fucking brooks producing 30min/wk Pinoccio content in the channel. That's 1 out of 336 (one-third a percent) half-hrs weekly 'Public Broadcasting' can hawk for a million (1,000,000) Ameros and thank you, 'NYT-guests' assignments desk. (* Corp for Public Broadcast/Radio Free Europe.)
If NYTimes had to pay for its own promotion spots on Public Broadcasting Sulz.b would be bankrupt.
As for fucking dumb david brooks the "amnesia" projection is confession, his own self-seen guilt, the very subjective sense of being wrong so long, when
conjured spells (NY weed-legal) objectively pose in view a righteous moral manner so long, forgettably long, regrettably long, you've been wrong from.
As much as I mean compliment to brooks fuckcluck that he might be finally come to see personal deplorable there just is no value left in it since he pinched it so long.
Not only were libs there forty years ago, so were normal children. dumb fucking brooks
has nothing to write
As far as 'respectable society' is concerned, particularly the self-appointed arbiters of public opinion, one can always be forgiven for being wrong, even after the fact (as Brooks is with the consistency of the tides), while one can never be forgiven for being consistently right, especially before the fact.
I learned this from an old Communist (a close friend of my late father) who served in the US contingent of the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War. As with other volunteers, upon his return to the US, he was blacklisted and hounded by the FBI and local officials, for the 'crime' of being a "premature anti-Fascist", which is to say, opposing Nazis and Falangists before it became politically acceptable to do so.
That's the problem with being a leftist in the US: When we're right about anything (everything?) before everyone else, we're ignored, ridiculed and/or vilified. And after having been proven right (e.g., when everyone else figures it out years and decades later), we're still ignored, ridiculed and/or vilified for having been correct all along.
My mother doesn't understand why I find it so enraging that she listens to his BS during his PBS NewsHour appearances. Even more enraging that she gets all excited when he say something she thinks I'll agree with and tries to make me listen to him as well.
Can I have some of that Scotch?
(My mother is 87, so there's only so much I can convince her of. She did leave the Republican Party though, but it long predated Trump.)
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