Two Facts

[Content Note: Discussion of harassment and threats.]

1. David Brooks is still being employed by the New York Times to write a garbage column.

2. David Brooks's latest garbage column is as insulting to his readers as it is embarrassing for him, confirming as it does how wildly out of touch he is with human beings who are not undilutedly privileged straight white cis men.

Entitled "How to Engage with a Fanatic," Brooks gives us this hot advice:

[T]he more I think about it, the more I agree with the argument Yale Law professor Stephen L. Carter made in his 1998 book "Civility." The only way to confront fanaticism is with love, he said. Ask the fanatics genuine questions. Paraphrase what they say so they know they've been heard. Show some ultimate care for their destiny and soul even if you detest the words that come out of their mouths.

You engage fanaticism with love, first, for your own sake. If you succumb to the natural temptation to greet this anger with your own anger, you'll just spend your days consumed by bitterness and revenge. You'll be a worse person in all ways.

If, on the other hand, you fight your natural fight instinct, your natural tendency to use the rhetoric of silencing, and instead regard this person as one who is, in his twisted way, bringing you gifts, then you'll defeat a dark passion and replace it with a better passion. You'll teach the world something about you by the way you listen. You may even learn something; a person doesn't have to be right to teach you some of the ways you are wrong.

Second, you greet a fanatic with compassionate listening as a way to offer an unearned gift to the fanatic himself. These days, most fanatics are not Nietzschean supermen. They are lonely and sad, their fanaticism emerging from wounded pride, a feeling of not being seen.

If you make these people feel heard, maybe in some small way you'll address the emotional bile that is at the root of their political posture.

Spoken like a man who doesn't routinely receive missives in his inbox from "fanatics" telling him that he should raped and murdered, and who hasn't even begun to reckon with the fact that our biggest problems isn't "fanatics," but resurgent Nazis.

The "fanatics" I deal with email me photos of bullets onto which they've photoshopped my name and publicly post offers of a reward for proof of my rape and/or murder and say things like "Too bad that terrible rapist didnt kill your fat ass. Cunt."

David Brooks thinks it would make me a better person if I responded to those people with "love." That I should respond with compassion and a willingness to learn how I'm wrong, presumably about how I have the right to exist in this life without being repeatedly subjected to threats of harm and actual physical violence.

Hard pass.

To extend "love" to fanatics is a luxury only of those who aren't in imminent danger at the hands of those fanatics. And conceding they have a point just to make them "feel heard," for the benefit of your own self-image, puts the rest of us at risk.

Surely David Brooks can find a better way to fluff his own ego than at the cost of our safety.

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Two Facts

1. David Brooks is still being employed by the New York Times to write a garbage column.

2. David Brooks is a terrible journalist.

You might imagine that second fact is actually just my opinion, but I assure you it is not. Brooks confesses that he is a terrible journalist right in the opening paragraphs of his latest garbage column, which is all about how the Russia investigation is overblown, and has been filed under the headline "Let's Not Get Carried Away." It begins thus:

I was the op-ed editor at The Wall Street Journal at the peak of the Whitewater scandal. We ran a series of investigative pieces "raising serious questions" (as we say in the scandal business) about the nefarious things the Clintons were thought to have done back in Arkansas.

Now I confess I couldn't follow all the actual allegations made in those essays. They were six jungles deep in the weeds. But I do remember the intense atmosphere that the scandal created. A series of bombshell revelations came out in the media, which seemed monumental at the time. A special prosecutor was appointed and indictments were expected. Speculation became the national sport.

Because Brooks is a terrible journalist, it isn't clear what the actual nature is of the pieces that confused him. Were they "investigative pieces" or were they "essays"? I'm not professor of garbage columns, but I'm pretty sure that "investigative essays" aren't a thing.

One might argue that Brooks' inability to follow the allegations made in his paper's "investigative essays" rendered him unfit to oversee its op-ed section, which was the playing field on which the national sport of speculation was played at the professional level.

One might further argue that Brooks' inability to understand details of presidential investigations renders him unfit to continue writing a column for the paper of record. Because, terrible journalist that he is and admits being, he does not make clear that the investigation of Team Trump's possible collusion with Russia is an outgrowth of an investigation into Russia's interference in our election, which is not in doubt. Ostensibly, the investigations are meant to tease out the various ways in which that interference was accomplished.

The investigation may or may not find evidence of collusion among the president's campaign staff and/or administration. But that's just part of a much bigger whole. And only a very, very terrible journalist would advise against "getting carried away" when there is so much at stake.

But maybe he just can't follow all the allegations being made. Perhaps the Times should hire someone who can.

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Two Facts

1. David Brooks is still being employed by the New York Times to write a garbage column.

2. [Content Note: 'Splaining; privilege] This week, David Brooks retroactively trolls the Women's March, saying it "can never be an effective opposition to Donald Trump," because: "In the first place, this movement focuses on the wrong issues. ...All the big things that were once taken for granted are now under assault: globalization, capitalism, adherence to the Constitution, the American-led global order. If you're not engaging these issues first, you're not going to be in the main arena of national life."

LOLOLOLOLOLOL fuck you.

Every single thing about this column is indefensible trash, but perhaps my favorite (ahem) part is in this juxtaposition:

Finally, identity politics is too small for this moment. On Friday, Trump offered a version of unabashed populist nationalism.

It's so cute that David Brooks imagines that Trump's brand of "unabashed populist nationalism" (i.e. white supremacy) somehow isn't "identity politics."

Because it is. In fact, it is the original identity politics.

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Two Facts

1. David Brooks is still being employed by the New York Times to write a garbage column.

2. This week, David Brooks is mystified by why Hillary Clinton is disliked. He's mystified by so many things! But he's got lots of solid theories. His theory on why Clinton is so disliked is that we don't know what she does for fun.

I guess it was time for another round of: Hillary Clinton is a huge failure for not letting us access every aspect of her personal life, despite the fact that she is shredded every time she gives us access to her personal life. Everyone's favorite game!

But obviously the best part of the entire piece is this:

[S]he was popular not long ago. As secretary of state she had a 66 percent approval rating. Even as recently as March 2015 her approval rating was at 50 and her disapproval rating was at 39.

It's only since she launched a multimillion-dollar campaign to impress the American people that she has made herself so strongly disliked.

She's made herself disliked! What a silly lady! She definitely shouldn't have done that to herself, don't you agree?

*thatface*

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Two Facts

[Content Note: White male privilege; racism.]

1. David Brooks is still being employed by the New York Times to write a garbage column. I am not going to link to that column, because fuck that, but here is a piece by Scott Eric Kaufman for Salon about that column, and there's a link from there, if you want to read the source.

2. David Brooks is the worst, has always been the worst, will always be the worst. A hostile bigotry machine, cloaked in an aw-shucks demeanor.

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In the News

Here is some stuff in the news today...

[Content Note: Racism; appropriation] Following the discovery that Rachel Dolezal, president of Spokane's chapter of the NAACP and a professor of African studies, has been misrepresenting herself as a black woman for years, a lot of information has come out about the lengths to which she went to perpetrate her fraud and how extensive that fraud really was. She counterfeited black women's lived experiences and art about black lives, and she consciously, deliberatively coerced her younger brother into giving credibility to her ruse. And, in a Facebook post in which she never apolgozies but lists all her supposed accomplishments, she has announced her resignation as president of the Spokane NAACP. Well, that's a start.

In presidential news, Jeb Bush is running for president. Officially. And I don't give a fuck. Officially.

In other presidential news, Hillary Clinton's campaign is being criticized for denying the US political editor at The Daily Mail access to the traveling press pool, and then giving contradictory reasons for it. They should have just said, "Sorry, we didn't want you here because The Daily Mail is undiluted fucktrash," and I don't think anyone would have blamed them for it.

[CN: Rape culture] Two-time presidential loser Mitt Romney reviewed Clinton's first speech on MSNBC's Morning Joe and found a remarkable way of calling her a phony: "Well, I thought the text touched the various places she needs to touch to try and keep her base intact. Somehow when you see her on a stage or when she comes into a room full of people, she's smiling with her mouth but her eyes are saying, 'Where's my latte?' It just doesn't suggest that she believes everything she's saying." If the "her mouth is saying X, but her eyes are saying Y" sounds familiar, that's because it's disgusting rape culture language, commonly quoted as "her mouth is saying no, but her eyes are saying yes." Fuck off, Mitt Romney.

Whoa. Brave guy: "A teenaged North Korean soldier walked across the world's most heavily militarized border on Monday in a bid to defect to South Korea, South Korean Defense Ministry officials said. While there are more than a thousand defections from North Korea to South Korea every year, most defectors come via China and it is rare for a North Korean to crossing the heavily mined Demilitarized Zone (DMZ). The last such crossing was in 2012. The soldier approached a remote South Korean guard post in Gangwon province's Hwacheon county, in the central area of the peninsula, at about 8 a.m. on Monday, one Defense Ministry official said. There was no exchange of fire or warning shots as the soldier clearly expressed his desire to defect, the official said. The soldier was being held in custody while officials ran checks."

[CN: Clergy abuse] Good riddance: "Ten days after prosecutors charged the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis with mishandling repeated complaints related to clergy sex abuse, the archbishop and another top bishop there resigned Monday in a rare public fall for U.S. church officials. Archbishop John Nienstedt and Auxiliary Bishop Lee Piché were not charged individually in the case and said they were stepping down to remove distractions from the archdiocese as it faces a crisis." I guess "to remove distractions" is what you say when your employer prohibits you from having a family to spend more time with.

[CN: Guns] Goddammit: "Ignoring opposition from university leaders throughout the state, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R) visited a gun range on Saturday, where he signed legislation permitting concealed firearms to be carried at public colleges and universities in Texas. Although the new law does give these schools some power to set rules regarding guns on campus, the new law specifically prohibits university presidents from 'establish[ing] provisions that generally prohibit or have the effect of generally prohibiting license holders from carrying concealed handguns on the campus of the institution.'" Yeah. Everyone will be safer now. (Nope.)

[CN: Guns; death; misogynist terrorism; disablist language at link] In totally unrelated news (ahem), Alex Kozak, a 20-year-old Iowa man who is an open-carry advocate, has been arrested for shooting and killing a female coworker after she filed sexual harassment complaints against him. My sincerest condolences to Andrea Farrington's family, friends, and colleagues.

Guess what? It turns out that David Brooks is not a very good journalist. Huh.

Welp, here is just a picture of a raccoon hitching a very temporary ride on an alligator's back! (Because he jumped off, not because he got eaten!)

And finally: Reasons to adopt a greyhound. OBVIOUSLY.

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David Brooks Never Learns

[Content Note: Iraq War; World War II/Nazi reference.]

David Brooks' latest garbage column for the New York Times is titled "Learning from Mistakes," and it's all about how he doesn't do that. Basically.

He was the head cheerleader of the Iraq War, right atop the pyramid in the middle of the Neocon Gymnasium during the warmongering halftime show, and now instead of just saying, "Holy shit, I was so wrong, I was terribly wrong, and what have we done? I AM SO SORRY," which is really the only acceptable thing to say at this point, he's written some smarmy trash about data points and outcomes and calibrations. He's got mad skills at using the most reprehensibly anodyne language to describe the monstrous things he has advocated.

Anyway.

His mendacious history-telling has been thoroughly taken down by Simon Maloy, Judd Legum, Echidne, and Scott LeMieux. Go read them!

I just want to note that this is how Brooks starts this appalling column, that this is how he makes the case that, hey, it's tough to judge whether war is a bad idea because "history is an infinitely complex web of causations":

If you could go back to 1889 and strangle Adolf Hitler in his crib, would you do it? At one level, the answer is obvious. Of course, you should. If there had been no Hitler, presumably the Nazi Party would have lacked the charismatic leader it needed to rise to power. Presumably, there would have been no World War II, no Holocaust, no millions dead on the Eastern and Western fronts.

But, on the other hand, if there were no World War II, you wouldn't have had the infusion of women into the work force.

I mean, listen: I obviously love EVERY SINGLE THING ABOUT THAT, including and especially the disappearing of all the women of color and poor white women on whose backs "the work force" was built and sustained. But what I think I love most is how I could go back and find countless Brooks columns in which working women have been demonized as a family-destroying scourge.

It's pretty cool how we're cultural plague garbage except when he wants to defend his own significant role in promoting an unnecessary war that has left thousands of people dead, displaced millions, and fundamentally undermined the safety and security of an entire region.

This fucking guy. He doesn't even have the decency to be ashamed of himself.

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Two Facts

1. David Brooks is still being employed by the New York Times to write a garbage column.

2. This week, David Brooks is mystified by why, in the wake of the Republicans' midterm win, President Obama is not rolling over and making it easier for them to steamroll him with their terrible nightmare policies.

They say failure can be a good teacher, but, so far, the Obama administration is opting out of the course. The post-midterm period has been one of the most bizarre of the Obama presidency. President Obama has racked up some impressive foreign-policy accomplishments, but, domestically and politically, things are off the rails.

...Usually presidents at the end of their terms get less partisan, not more.

OFF THE RAILS!

I'm no highly paid pundit for the New York Times, but maybe the lesson that President Obama learned from the midterms is that capitulating to a Republican agenda, even slightly, even for the grand golden objective of bipartisanship, is not a winning strategy for Democrats. Just a thought!

Brooks, who loves to Concern Troll on behalf of the Democrats, wrings his hands about the President's plan to enact immigration reform via executive action.

I sympathize with what Obama is trying to do substantively, but the process of how it's being done is ruinous.

Republicans would rightly take it as a calculated insult and yet more political ineptitude. Everybody would go into warfare mode. We'll get two more years of dysfunction that will further arouse public disgust and antigovernment fervor (making a Republican presidency more likely).

Hahahaha thank you for your concern that governing like a Democrat might make a Republican presidency more likely, David Brooks! You're so thoughtful!

As for me, I fully support President Obama insulting the Republicans as often and as thoroughly as possible for the next two years.

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David Brooks Says President Obama Has a "Manhood Problem"

[Content Note: Gender essentialism; racism; misogyny.]

David Brooks continues to be the absolute worst:

New York Times columnist David Brooks on Sunday claimed that President Obama's foreign policy isn't "tough" and that he has a "manhood problem" in the Middle East.

Pivoting off Sen. Bob Corker's (R-TN) charge on NBC's Meet the Press that Russian President Vladimir Putin's actions in Ukraine have showed an "era of permissiveness" under Obama, later in the program, Brooks — while noting that he doesn't necessarily agree with the charge — said this issue extends to the Middle East:

BROOKS: Basically since Yalta we've had an assumption that borders are basically going to be borders and once that comes into question if in Ukraine or in Crimea or anywhere else, then all over the world all bets are off. And let's face it, Obama, whether deservedly or not, does have a — I'll say it crudely — but a manhood problem in the Middle East. Is he tough enough to stand up to somebody like Assad or somebody like Putin? I think a lot of the rap is unfair but certainly in the Middle East there is an assumption that he's not tough enough.

NBC's Chuck Todd agreed. "By the way, internally they fear this you know it's not just Corker saying it, questioning whether the president is being alpha-male," he said. "That's essentially saying 'he's not alpha-dog. His rhetoric isn't tough enough.'"

Leaving aside the evident issue that conservatives never think diplomacy and/or non-military interventions are "tough enough," because they favor an aggressive, militaristic foreign policy, this shit not only plays into gender essentialist narratives equating maleness with toughness, but also invokes a racist history of policing and questioning black male manhood, which has long written black men out of the stereotypical definitions of the "alpha male."

(I suspect if Brooks were obliged to address such criticism, there would be a whole lot of intent argumentation, but the point is not whether Brooks explicitly intended to invoke racist tropes. He did, and his intent is irrelevant.)

Meanwhile, I expect we will be hearing an increasing number of overt and thinly veiled gender essentialist attacks on the current president, as conservatives seek to preemptively discredit presumed candidate Hillary Clinton on the basis that she is not a man.

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Two Facts

[Content Note: Privilege; bootstraps.]

1. David Brooks is still being employed by the New York Times to write a garbage column.

2. This week's garbage column is like a trophy to garbage.

Under the headline "The Employer's Creed," David Brooks metes out advice to employers about who they should and shouldn't be hiring. Now, generally speaking, I agree with the advice that the perfect résumé does not axiomatically translate into the perfect employee, and I enthusiastically advocate abandoning the idea that someone with a less traditional résumé should be reflexively rejected. Sometimes people with the most interesting lives and experiences have the least impressive résumés.

But. BUT. Bear in mind that David Brooks has long been a proponent of BOOTSTRAPS! and a denier of the advantages of privilege when you read this shit:

Bias hiring decisions against perfectionists. If you work in a white-collar sector that attracts highly educated job applicants, you've probably been flooded with résumés from people who are not so much human beings as perfect avatars of success. They got 3.8 grade-point averages in high school and college. They served in the cliché leadership positions on campus. They got all the perfect consultant/investment bank internships. During off-hours they distributed bed nets in Zambia and dug wells in Peru.

When you read these résumés, you have two thoughts. First, this applicant is awesome. Second, there's something completely flavorless here. This person has followed the cookie-cutter formula for what it means to be successful and you actually have no clue what the person is really like except for a high talent for social conformity. Either they have no desire to chart out an original life course or lack the courage to do so. Shy away from such people.

So, basically, now anyone who precisely follows the model that "lifting yourself up by the bootstraps" has always required (within the confines of Corporate America) is either unoriginal or cowardly. Perfect.

That's maybe the kind of thing that makes some sort of sense to say in the brainpan of someone who pictures "middle class, able-bodied, thin, white, cishet male" as the default human job applicant, but it starts making a lot less sense when you take into consideration that pool of applicants may include, as but a few examples:

• People who are not able-bodied, thin, white, cisgender, straight, and/or male, for whom approaching a vanilla "perfection" has been their only means of being competitive.

• People who are first-generation travelers through the middle-class process, for whom the "cookie-cutter" model may be the only model to which they have access, simply by virtue of its ubiquity, as opposed to people whose parents and other relatives have provided multiple models of navigating middle-class access to them.

• People with names that indicate a background, ethnicity, religious affiliation, etc., prejudiced responses to which have "othered" them throughout their lives, who have learned that conformity in other ways is required to balance their very names.

• People who have overcome learning disabilities, social anxiety, illness, neglect, oppression, and/or other limitations to achieve what they've long been told (by people like David Brooks) is the right résumé of accomplishments to achieve success, whose arrival at this "boring" result is, in fact, indicative of a bravery paper cannot convey.

That's not a comprehensive list.

I'm sure David Brooks would balk at the suggestion that he seems to be moving the goalposts, now that people from marginalized classes are scoring goals in larger numbers. But if he doesn't like that accusation, then perhaps he should stop writing garbage that invites it.

[H/T to Shaker Mod aforalpha.]

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Quote of the Day

"Some on the left have always tried to introduce a more class-conscious style of politics. These efforts never pan out. America has always done better, liberals have always done better, when we are all focused on opportunity and mobility, not inequality, on individual and family aspiration, not class-consciousness."—David Brooks, in his latest garbage column for the New York Times.

LOL. Shut up, David Brooks.

Dean Baker's response to this hogwash is perfect: "Funny, I thought Social Security, the Fair Labor Standards Act (i.e. the 40-hour workweek), the National Labor Relations Board, and other products of the New Deal were pretty big accomplishments. Much of this was done quite explicitly with a sense of class consciousness. These were all measures that were backed by mass movements that sought to ensure that working people got their share of the economic pie."

Brooks wants us to stop talking about class and start focusing on "individual and family aspiration," because then we can keep having terrific conversations about how some individuals and families aren't "aspiring" hard enough, or don't have the right aspirations, or whatever.

It's a lot tougher to victim-blame when you're not tasking individuals with finding solutions to systemtic problems.

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Two Facts

[Content Note: Misogyny; patriarchy.]

1. David Brooks is still being employed by the New York Times to write a garbage column.

2. This week's garbage column is like a trophy to garbage.

You really have to read the whole thing, including his extended opening waxing romantic about the John Wayne movie The Searchers, to fully comprehend the scope of the garbagosity of his latest masterwank on the plight of male unemployment, because I'm only going to quote two bits:

The definitive explanation for this catastrophe has yet to be written. Some of the problem clearly has to do with changes in family structure. Work by David Autor of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology suggests that men raised in fatherless homes, without as many immediate masculine role models, do worse in the labor force. Some of the problem probably has to do with a mismatch between boy culture and school culture, especially in the early years.

But, surely, there has been some ineffable shift in the definition of dignity. Many men were raised with a certain image of male dignity, which emphasized autonomy, reticence, ruggedness, invulnerability and the competitive virtues. Now, thanks to a communications economy, they find themselves in a world that values expressiveness, interpersonal ease, vulnerability and the cooperative virtues.

Ha ha that sounds familiar! Except I'm not so daft invested in the Patriarchy as to misidentify as "dignity" that which is actually a rigid definition of binary gender performance that steals every human, irrespective of hir gender, of hir complex and complete humanity. That is: The complete opposite of dignity.

Surely, part of the situation is that many men simply do not want to put themselves in positions they find humiliating.

This is a particularly interesting observation, given that Brooks' "communications economy" is really a service economy. And women are entrained to serve, while men (at least privileged men, which are the only ones about whom Brooks gives a shit) are entrained to be served, so naturally taking a service job after the Patriarchy has assured you your whole life that you are entitled to service, to be expected to provide it instead, is humiliating.

Women, on the other hand, who have long filled service roles, while patriarchal forces conspired to keep women out of manufacturing, construction, and other traditionally "male" jobs, are not meant to find that work humiliating, but instead the natural outgrowth of a biological imperative.

As Erik Loomis notes here, the terrible irony is that the offshoring of traditionally "male" jobs is thanks to the politics of conservatives like Brooks: "The reason why male employment hasn't recovered is because the jobs men used to have no longer exist. That the 20th century economy was inherently sexist cannot be questioned. Men had industrial jobs that became high paying after decades of union organization. The middle-class of salesmen, middle managers, etc., was also dominated by men. Women were in service positions. Now you tell me, which jobs still exist in the United States in 2013? ...What remains is a service economy, with jobs long defined as female. Housekeeping, nursing, child care, entry level office work, Wal-Mart—these are jobs that are available."

Whoops.

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Two Facts

[Content Note: Homophobia.]

1. David Brooks is still being employed by the New York Times to write a garbage column.

2. This week's garbage column is like a trophy to garbage.

He spends the first part of the column sarcastically sneering at the libertine expansions of freedom "we've" won over the last 40 years, resulting in people being "much more at liberty these days to follow their desires, unhampered by social convention, religious and ethnic traditions and legal restraints."

(Note to David Brooks: People with uteri exist.)

He then goes on to note that the "big thinkers" have always warned about the "downsides" of too much freedom, and he laments that "the balance between freedom and restraint has been thrown out of whack. People no longer even have a language to explain why freedom should sometimes be limited. The results are as predicted. A decaying social fabric, especially among the less fortunate. Decline in marriage. More children raised in unsteady homes. Higher debt levels as people spend to satisfy their cravings."

I could spend the rest of the day detailing what's wrong with that, but I've NO TIME, because he immediately segues from this snide lamentation to observe:

But last week saw a setback for the forces of maximum freedom. A representative of millions of gays and lesbians went to the Supreme Court and asked the court to help put limits on their own freedom of choice. They asked for marriage.

Marriage is one of those institutions — along with religion and military service — that restricts freedom. Marriage is about making a commitment that binds you for decades to come. It narrows your options on how you will spend your time, money and attention.

Whether they understood it or not, the gays and lesbians represented at the court committed themselves to a certain agenda. They committed themselves to an institution that involves surrendering autonomy. They committed themselves to the idea that these self-restrictions should be reinforced by the state. They committed themselves to the idea that lifestyle choices are not just private affairs but work better when they are embedded in law.

And far from being baffled by this attempt to use state power to restrict individual choice, most Americans seem to be applauding it. Once, gay culture was erroneously associated with bathhouses and nightclubs. Now, the gay and lesbian rights movement is associated with marriage and military service.

Again, I could spend the rest of the day detailing what's wrong with that, but instead I will simply say: Everything. Every single thing is wrong with that.

(Note to David Brooks: Bisexual people exist.)

But the thing that really fucking gets me is this: Whether they understood it or not. Fuck you, David Brooks. Fuck you.

I have had just about enough of privileged men talking about marginalized people like we don't know our own lives. I have had enough for a lifetime, enough for six eternities. This is vile, hateful, infantilizing swill, and lest anyone mistake that I'm being uncharitable, that is the charitable version.

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Two Facts

1. David Brooks is still being employed by the New York Times to write a garbage column.

2. In this week's offering, which is about what's wrong with the GOP, Brooks manages to write this:

Since Barry Goldwater, the central Republican narrative has been what you might call the Encroachment Story: the core problem of American life is that voracious government has been steadily encroaching upon individuals and local communities. The core American conflict, in this view, is between Big Government and Personal Freedom.

While losing the popular vote in five of the last six presidential elections, the flaws of this mentality have become apparent.

—and then fails to address even obliquely that the "apparent flaw" is actually the profound hypocrisy of the Republican Party, who continue to narratively position themselves as the defenders of Small Government and Personal Freedom while recklessly spending enormous amounts of taxpayer money on bullshit and trying to use the power of government to compel forcible childbirth, deny basic equality, and crush workers' right to organize.

The GOP isn't even honest about who they are when they're navel-gazing. Americans expect politicians to lie to us, but we expect them at least not to lie to themselves.

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Two Facts

1. David Brooks is still paid to write a column for the New York Times.

2. This, apparently, is one of them.

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Two Facts

1. David Brooks is still being employed by the New York Times to write a garbage column.

2. That column gets more ridiculous by the week.

As always, there is much to love laugh at in Brooks' latest, in which he imagines what Mitt Romney's opening statement of tomorrow night's debate should be, but I think this is probably my favorite part:

I've tried to be on the level with you. This president was audacious in 2008, but, as you can see from his negligible agenda, he's now exhausted. I'm not an inspiring conviction politician, but I'll try anything to help us succeed. You make the choice.

LOL OKAY! Decisions decisions. I choose the inspiring guy with conviction, rather than the guy who reeks of desperation and will "try anything."

Great argument for your cool candidate, Mr. Brooks! Solid as always.

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Two Facts

1. David Brooks is still inexplicably being employed by the New York Times to write a garbage column that is full of obfuscations, simplifications, and lies.

2. David Brooks uses this week's garbage column to write a modern history of conservatism, which completely elides the shit-nightmare that is radical extremist social conservatism.

This is what that column would look like, if David Brooks were half as smart and honest as he imagines himself to be.

[As always, drifty is all over Brooks' bullshit, too.]

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Two Facts

1. David Brooks is still inexplicably being employed by the New York Times to write a garbage column that sounds like it's written for imaginary people in a town called Dodoville.

2. David Brooks actually starts his New York Times column this week with the line: "Why did God put Barack Obama on this earth?"

Shut up. Shutupshutupshutup. Shut up.

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Ted Cruz: Intellectual Intellectual

[Content note: Islamophobia, homophobia]

You may have heard that Ted Cruz (who is horrible) recently won the GOP primary to replace Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas in the Senate. You may also have heard of David Brooks (who is also horrible). Here are some things Cruz has said, juxtaposed with some things Brooks said last Friday on NPR.

Cruz: "Agenda 21 attempts to abolish 'unsustainable' environments, including golf courses, grazing pastures, and paved roads. It hopes to leave mother earth’s surface unscratched by mankind."

Brooks: "He will do and I think what a lot of these [recently elected Tea Party Congresspeople] will do, will put a very deep and pretty intellectually substantive and very Madisonian approach."

Cruz: "Sharia law is an enormous problem [in the United States]."

Brooks: "[These Tea Party Congresspeople] are going to be a very intellectually serious force with deep and firmly held sort of intellectual roots for a long time."

Cruz: "When the mayor of a city chooses twice to march in a parade celebrating gay pride, that's a statement. It's not a statement I believe in".

Brooks: "He's sort of a product of sort of the conservative, if you want to put it, Madisonian tradition, which is very, very small government, but a pretty deep intellectual tradition."

It's like James Madison said: "It's Adam and Eve, not Adam and Horatio."

I shit you not, were I not a regular Brooks watcher, I probably would have, in a state of shock and horror, driven my rusty 2002 Saturn into the Jell-O section of the local supermarket. Intellectual? For realz? That's when I decided to write this blog post.

A funny thing happened on my way to the Internet. I started doing some research (on the Internet, but that was a damn good line SO HUSH) on Ted Cruz. It turns out that pretty much everybody (by which I mean most conservative blowhards*) was proclaiming the, um, intellectualosity of Cruz's intellect.

Robert P. George, Cruz’s college advisor [AT PRINCETON] told the New York Times that the presumptative US Senator and budding conspiracy theorist was “intellectually and morally serious.” I grabbed this quote out of a NYT piece titled "A Republican Voice With Tea Party Mantle and Intellectual Heft."

I know you're wondering what Alan Dershowitz thinks. According to this National Review cover story, he recalls that “Cruz was off-the-charts brilliant.” Now you know.

I could go on, but nobody (and I mean nobody) wants to see me quote George Will.

In case you have a short attention span:

Cruz: "Sharia law is an enormous problem [in the United States]."

I don't really care if Cruz is "an intellectual" or not. He's a small-minded bigot. Of course, he could be a disingeous asshole who's only pretending to be a bigot in order to get elected and enact a disasterous agenda. That's certainly, um, impressive.

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*It's still not Adam and Horatio.

Open Wide...

Shut Up!

Two Facts

1. David Brooks is still inexplicably employed by the New York Times to pen a garbage column for them on a weekly basis.

2. David Brooks wrote this actual sentence in his most recent actual column: "I don't know if America has a leadership problem; it certainly has a followership problem."

"Question Everything Nothing!"—David Brooks.

Open Wide...

Shut Up!