You can take the boy out of [checks notes] The Wall Street Journal, The Neocon Weekly Standard, The New York Fucking Times, Meet The Press, PBS and NPR...
...but you can't take The Wall Street Journal, The Neocon Weekly Standard, The New York Fucking Times, Meet The Press, PBS and NPR out of the boy.
From The PBS NewsHour yesterday:
David Brooks: Voters in almost every presidential race, I think, in every one of my lifetime, have always said, who's closer to the center? And they vote for that person. Trump seemed closer to the center than Kamala Harris. Biden seemed closer to the center than Donald Trump.
Donald Trump over the last few years has run away from the center. He is handing this election to the Democrats. All they have to do is sit there and be couch potatoes. They do not have to support Medicare for all so that Republicans can go to them and say, you like your private health insurance? Mr. El-Sayed's going to take that away from you.
That is politically bad news, and that's only one of the issues on which the party is moving further and further away from the center, and therefore...
Jonathan Capehart: I mean, I disagree that the Democratic Party writ large is moving far away from the center, and that a few races won by Democratic Socialists or people who identify as progressive, like Dr. El-Sayed, that -- to me, I just don't -- I do not see it that you can put this -- make this blanket argument that the Democratic Party is running far left.
Let's hold on that a moment, because yesterday on the BlueSky Ana Marie Cox asked:
What are David Brooks' worst columns? Everyone can cite the sandwich one, and the Epstein one but of the top of dome--what else? He did say that wearing a Mets hat could save democracy once? (I'm making a video.)
My Bat Signal lit up and I replied as follows:
I'd ask "alphabetically or chronologically", but it's a trick question, since David Brooks has only ever written one column -- the same column -- over and over again. But if I had to choose...it's "Collapse of the Dream Palaces" April, 2003, excerpted here.
A close second is the full-blown freakout when his very good friend & fellow Iraq war pimp, Joe Lieberman. lost to Ned Lamont in the Democratic primary in 2006. And then lied about it later.
Now back to his PBS performance.
It is a matter of public record that David Brooks has never had any workable definition of "the center" beyond: "What I, David Brooks, happen to think at this moment".
It is also irrefutably true that he has spent the past quarter-century publicly demonstrating that he knows fuck-all about what "voters" think about anything.
All of which says a whole lot more about the people who keep paying him to confidently spout his poisonous claptrap decade after decade than it does about David Fucking Brooks himself.
DFB.
ReplyDeleteHe's such a coward too. DFB has enjoyed an extremely successful career being wrong and never being held accountable for it. One of the things I hate the most is that PBS clips on YT never allow for comments. Brooks never gets to see genuine feedback from the great American centrist that doesn't exist because he's too scared of the audience he's puking on.
ReplyDeleteIn a post at LG&M, Robert Farley actually says, with his bare face hanging out,
ReplyDeleteI don’t want to wax nostalgic for the days in which I read the entire NYT opinion page, but William Safire and David Brooks were both talented writers who could say something thoughtful that was actually worth disagreeing with.
I think he deserves to learn from experience that, as a great American philosopher once said, it's hard on a face when it gets laughed in.