David Brooks' Friday Column Is So...

...vapid and lazy, it doesn't warrant the expenditure of even the few words it would take to kill, skin it and serve it up on the good china.

Well, maybe a few words. Just for posterity.

First, Brooks takes the jejune opinions of 13!Count!Em!13! "undecided" young voters --

-- and extrapolates their tapdancing-'cause-I-didn't-do-my-homework reactions to the vice presidential debate out and out and out until they encompass the world.

Second, Mr. Brooks pulls I-don't-know-which-or-how-many writing How-To manuals off the shelf and snatches a few quotes from famous people talking about "story".

Did he borrow from "Writer's Guide to Using Brain Science to Hook Readers from the Very First Sentence" by Lisa Cron?  Chris Baty's "No plot? No problem!"?  Annie Dillard's "Talk"?  The classic "The art of fiction" by John Gardner?  "Creative Writing For Dummies" by Maggie Hamand? "Braiding Sweetgrass" by Robin Wall Kimmerer?

Can't say for sure.

I can say that my own copy of least one of these was in one of the four boxes of books I just donated to my local library.   I can say that, as Mark Twain once noted, "Stringing together a bunch of quotes by notable people to pad out your column when you really have nothing to say is a great way to technically fulfill your 800-word contractual obligation without breaking a sweat."*

Here are a few of the "As so-and-so said" chunks from Mr. Brooks' column.

The playwright David Mamet once wrote...

Hold it right there, because Mr. Brooks might've wanted to catch up with where Mamet is today before copy/pasting him into his column.  From Forward:

Embracing Trump’s politics, David Mamet has become the Kanye West of American letters

The author of ‘Recessional’ offers up a bevy of conspiracy theories

Yeah, he's nuts now.  Orthogonal to reality.  Which is sad.

And as much as I would love to hear Kamala Harris dress down Donald Trump using pre-gone-bugfuck bone-shredding Mamet  language similar to this --

-- should that ever even come close to happening, I am 100% sure that David Brooks' employers at The New York Times would ask Aaron Sorkin to come back and write another dumbass guest editorial demanding that she drop out of the race.  

And speaking of...Mr. Brooks continues:

The screenwriter Aaron Sorkin builds on that definition. He says that strong drama...

Does Mr. Brooks even remember the last time Sorkin entered the 2024 presidential election chat?  It was when he decided that Democrats were idiots who didn't understand how politics works, so he offered the following helpful advice to Democrats about how they should run their campaign:

Aaron Sorkin: How I Would Script This Moment for Biden and the Democrats

It was 9/10ths him ruminating on a West Wing episode and what-iffing its plot.  And then, this:

But there’s something the Democrats can do that would not just put a lump in people’s throats with its appeal to stop-Donald-Trump-at-all-costs unity, but with its originality and sense of sacrifice. So here’s my pitch to the writers’ room: The Democratic Party should pick a Republican.

At their convention next month, the Democrats should nominate Mitt Romney.

Subsequent events proved that advice to be so goddamn punishingly stupid and awful that Sorkin asked the public to please, please, please forget he ever wrote it.  Y'know, give it the ol' "Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip" treatment and ease it down the memory hole as if it had never been.  

 Brooks went on:

Christopher Booker wrote a book called “The Seven Basic Plots,” arguing that...

And on:

As the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre argues

And on

 ...the novelist Mary Gaitskill once told The Atlantic.

And on:

As the novelist and New York University writing professor Darin Strauss has put it...

And on:

 Compelling characters have what the British author and writing instructor Will Storr calls...

And on:

But, as the psychologist Jonathan Haidt told Storr for his book...

And on:

The novelist E.M. Forster reminded us...

Having digested this no-calorie, no-protein, no-flavor poached cake of nothing on your behalf, two things come through loud and clear.

The first is that the Kamala Harris which you and I see out there on the hustings every day bears no resemblance to the Harris which the "undecided" children in the Times focus group -- 

-- are bitching about.

And second, Brooks and the rest of his ossified professional-opinion-having colleagues in the dying legacy media are desperate for Vice President Harris to pay them the kind of tribute that Obama offered them during the Before Time of January 2009.  

From Olivia Nuzzi's future ex-fiance, Ryan Lizza.

The Obama Memos

The making of a post-post-partisan Presidency.

In a frigid January evening in 2009, a week before his Inauguration, Barack Obama had dinner at the home of George Will, the Washington Post columnist, who had assembled a number of right-leaning journalists to meet the President-elect. Accepting such an invitation was a gesture on Obama’s part that signalled his desire to project an image of himself as a post-ideological politician, a Chicago Democrat eager to forge alliances with conservative Republicans on Capitol Hill. That week, Obama was still working on an Inaugural Address that would call for “an end to the petty grievances and false promises, the recriminations and worn-out dogmas that for far too long have strangled our politics.”

Obama sprang coatless from his limousine and headed up the steps of Will’s yellow clapboard house. He was greeted by Will, Michael Barone, David Brooks, Charles Krauthammer, William Kristol, Lawrence Kudlow, Rich Lowry, and Peggy Noonan...

However, having learned from Obama's grave error in judgement, Vice President Harris is having none of it.  

*Also, Mark Twain never said that.  

In fact, he said that "Scoundrels who make up false quotes and put them in the mouths of dead men to prove some point are lower than frog-cheating thimble riggers and should have their internet access revoked."**

**Mark Twain never said that either.

I Am The Liberal Media