Mock, Paper, Scissors

I’ve take a pleasant break from reading David Brooks, that armpit-sniffing pundit of note for the NYTimes and well-modulated, never angry, almost robotic voice of PBS fame. It’s been nice not having to think much about Bobo because he put on his Green Jacket last week, but duty calls. David Brooks wrote another crapacious column and now he must be punished.

As is always Davy’s style, it contains false choices, weighs them against each other, and then mushily he divides the difference and says that is where The One True Path lies. But what actually lies is David Brooks. And darlings, he does it beautifully.

Today’s topic is living a life that is well-considered. Now aside from the faux Brit-speak, what Brooks says/lies is that everyone has a basic choice in life:

• You can lead a life well-planned
• You can lead a life that reacts to your context

He cites an example for the well-planned life, a Xristian conservative, Clayton Christensen. Christensen, who is a professor at the Harvard Business School, writes an essay in the Harvard Business Review that Bobo admires. Christensen is so dedicated to Christ that he during his undergrad years, he would forgo his basketball team’s games on Sundays (he’s the starring center, Bobo tells us breathlessly). And when studying at Oxford (he was a Rhodes Scholar), he dedicated a whole hour each evening to praying and contemplating instead of studying economics. He wanted to understand his place and role in the Universe. A regular Thomas Aquinas, he is.

Christensen claims it helped him plan his life.

Then the fun begins: Bobo compares the real and monastic Christensen, fully grown now with children of his own to a present-day fictional 24 year old:

The person leading the Well-Planned Life emphasizes individual agency, and asks, “What should I do?” The person leading the Summoned Life emphasizes the context, and asks, “What are my circumstances asking me to do?”

Well, Bobo, perhaps the well-planned life also includes the luck of the well-planned birth? Someone who had the luxury and access to better schools, parents who were involved, money, etc., who can then go to Harvard become a Rhodes Scholar and spend an entire hour a day contemplating their role in the Universe while studying economics at Oxford. Because, you know, every good Xristian should be studying economics; I think it is one of the commandments, but I could be mistaken.

Anyway Brooks compares the very real Christensen to a fictional person of another generation in a different time — a classic Brooksian gambit.

Let us consider another 24-year old, a real one, though he remains nameless in The View From Your Recession at The Atlantic:

I’m an American in my early 20s, the ink on my Ivy League diploma not yet dry, plunging into my first job. I’m writing to say that I am doing just fine in the recession. My company is hiring, the economy is still growing at an impressive clip, and the hope and optimism that tomorrow will be even better than today is palpable.

I can say this because I didn’t follow my fellow college grads to Wall Street in search of money that was so abundant and so certain that it seemed too good to be true (as it turned out to be). While my friends went to Manhattan; I went to Mumbai, opting for a management trainee program at an Indian conglomerate that is looking for Americans to bring fresh ideas into the company.

How refreshing! Andrew Sullivan’s correspondent is also abroad, it’s just that there was no opportunity in America, and so he went to India.

I would be lying if I said every day weren’t a challenge in matters corporate, cultural, and even culinary. India is a sea of cultures wildly different from my own, and it is still a developing country that is rife with mind-numbing “Slumdog”-style poverty. Communal and class tensions simmer and occasionally boil over, exploited by greedy politicians for their own short-term gain. And I am getting paid Indian wages; while I live very comfortably here, the US government considers me to be living below the poverty line (which, as it turns out, doesn’t stop my beloved alma mater from asking for money!)

Oh, the joys of living on local wages in the third world. And how amusing that his ivy-league alma mater is hitting him up for spare Rupees.

You see, Bobo, sometimes you can arrange to have a well-considered and planned life, but then reality gets in your way. Something like the Great Recession pops up–you know, the result of the great lie you and your ilk have foisted on the innocent and unsuspecting over the last 30 years that deficits from tax cuts don’t matter and that rising tides lift all yachts–and wipes out those plans, and you find yourself, literally living in the third world on third world wages, because there is no future for you or your generation in the United States. It should also be noted for the record that our unnamed correspondent only got the job through connections, which not everyone is going to have.

David, please explain to me how to split that difference.

The Summoned Self, by David Brooks

Clothes make the man, but nothing makes a pundit.

Even for Bobo, today’s column is especially stupid, and that’s saying something. Anyway, Little Davy Brooks imagines what it is like to be a Democrat, and so of course he puts on a green army jacket (get the Vietnam Vet, homeless, drug-addled DFH reference? He’s so edgy!), and he experiences enlightenment, which of course he translates to his faux centrist-speak and shows us the disaster that waits ahead.

I dread Tuesdays. I know what awaits me, and its initials are D-F-B.

Today, we learn, without guile, who Bobo prefers to sit next to at lunch. He calls them Princes. He doesn’t mention the sucking-up portion of the menu, but I think with Davy that’s just a given, and hopefully he has a nice damask napkin to wipe up anything that might spill out of the corner of his mouth. Davy says he prefers to sit next to them because:

They are almost always charming, smart and impressive. They’ve read interesting books. They’ve got well-rehearsed takes on the global situation. They can drop impressive names as they tell you about their visits to the White House, Moscow or Beijing. If you’re having lunch or dinner with a prince, you’re going to have a good time.

Yup, that sounds like Davy’s cup o’ ($300/oz) tea. Anyway, he goes on to talk about who he doesn’t like to sit next to, he calls them Grinds, and he goes on at great length about why you don’t want to sit next to one:

Grinds, on the other hand, tend to have started their own company or their own hedge fund. They’re often too awkward to work in a large organization and too intense to work for anybody but themselves.

Over lunch, they can be socially inert. You try to draw them out by probing for one or two subjects of interest to them. But as often as not, you find yourself playing conversational ping-pong with a master of the monosyllabic response.

Every once in a while you’ll run into one who can’t help but let you know how much smarter he is than you or anybody else in the room. Sitting at this lunch is about as pleasant for him as watching a cockroach crawl up his arm. He’d much rather be back working in front of his computer screen.

So there you have it, Bobo would rather sit with the guys who rake in the cash doing nothing than sit with the worker bees.

But we knew that water seeks its own level.

So after his usual citation from an academic book (contractually required, we wonder?) — of which he’s only read the flap — but that’s more than a grind like you will ever read — he tells us that The recovery has been good for princes and terrible for grinds. Odd that. He seems mystified.

But this is the point where a column by Brooks always goes off the rails, the point in which the GOP talking points enter, and Bobo’s patented, NPR-approved reasonable centrist BS seeps out of his diaper and onto the printed page. Brooks will not tell us why the recovery was good for the Masters of the Universe and terrible for everyone else, it would destroy the narrative he has spent a life time to create, so instead he offers up the usual palliative that Very Serious People are spewing out:

For jobs to recover, the grinds have to recover, but it’s hard to see how that will happen so long as households are still so leveraged, government debt is still so unnerving and the business climate is still so terrible for entrepreneurs.

You see, it’s not the golden boys, the Masters of the Universe fault, it is the little guy. It is you. The little guy who has a mortgage that he probably should never have had. The government debt is too big because the government tried to stimulate the economy.

Bobo does not mention the eight years of letting George Bush, a hung-like-a-bee, dry-drunk, with an Oedipus complex, go on a credit card binge to finance two wars for Halliburton and the most incredible and irresponsible tax cuts and treasury raid since Saint Ronnie did it back in the ’80s. Bush, who would have used a Ouija Board instead of regulators, if he could have found a way, at whose feet lay the most incredible degradation of the environment (natural and fiscal) in our nation’s history. The same Bush who shredded the Constitution and the Bill of Rights at every available opportunity. He goes unmentioned.

Bobo will not tell us that for 30 years we’ve favored the rich-the Princes-in lieu of everyone else. By design, we have not invested in growing a strong economy that promotes high production and a higher standard of living for everybody. Through design and policy of the conservatives, we’ve created a structural problem, a laissez-faire environment for the rich to maximize their profits at the expense of everybody else.

Thirty years of Voodoo economics brought to this point, and Davy wants to blame it on us, the little guys.

…but circumstances beyond my control have forced my hand. You see, the gawd-awful New York Magazine profiled him.

Imagine you are a professional writer and your assignment comes in: Interview Bobo. Do you quit on the spot, defenestrate yourself, or accept the assignment and promise ritual seppuku for later, or perhaps a nice garotting? Well, those are the only choices I can think of, and Christopher Beam bylined the article, so look for his suicide note in the days to come.

The interesting things we learn about David Brooks in the article are small, but legion. He’s as boring as you might suspect. The word beige comes to mind (mental note to self: find a Medium to read Bobo’s aura. We have suspicions), and it is immediately backed up in this passage (emphasis mine):

We’re sitting at the Best Buns Bread Company in the Village at Shirlington, a sort of prefab town square in Arlington, Virginia, designed to be quaint and homey. The streets are fresh red brick. The lampposts are faux antique. The trees are evenly spaced. A color-coded map explains the area’s layout, like a mall. The neighborhood’s culinary diversity—Aladdin’s Eatery abuts Bonsai Restaurant abuts Guapo’s—is matched only by its patrons’ ethnic lack thereof. We are sipping coffees and munching on identical Ginger Crinkle cookies, when it occurs to me: I am in a David Brooks book. We are Bobos. This is Paradise.

Or it could be a white-flight ‘hood that Davy landed in where everything is reasonable and centered, and nothing excites. Actually, the idea of excitement is one that is entirely missing from this profile. Brooks is like someone with Aspergers Syndrome who read Emily Post: no understanding of how people work and yet polite. Another quote:

Another time, he was sitting at an Orioles game with his kids when a bat flew into the stands. “A normal human being, when they get a ball, they go, Aaaah!” He waves his arms around. “Or when they get a bat, they hold it up. I just put it at my feet and sat there.

“I think inside I’m as emotional as anybody,” he says. “I just don’t emote it.”

OK, so we get it: Bobo is beige and he is constipated. What else do we learn? Let’s see, he has four shapeless suits, he sort of stumbled into his writing career while originally writing a humor column (yuks galore there, you can be assured), and allegedly the Obama White House (Rahm) calls him before his column is published to find out if it will be a good day or a bad day for them.

So you see, we learn a lot about Bobo and President Carebear.

One last quote which I think sums up Davy best:

Every column is a failure,” says Brooks. “I always wish I did something different.”

Me too, Davy, me too.

(Driftglass has more, too. Also.)

David brooks lifted up his right cheek again and stunk up the joint, his newest column which he calls A Little Economic Realism might as well be called Let’s Exhume Saint Ronnie. I don’t have the time or the will-power to take on his weak-tea of a column in total, so I’ll just cherry-pick a few of the more outrageous and stupid claims.

Bobo wants us to feel his pain upon seeing 30 years of Supply Siders washed down into the sewers of history:

The Demand Siders don’t have a good explanation for the past two years. There is no way to know for sure how well the last stimulus worked because we don’t know what would have happened without it.

Davey, the demand siders do know what happened the last two years: A housing crash led to a financial crisis, helped by unregulated Wall Street grifters. Global stimulus efforts helped create a global recovery, which is now threatened by European debt crises and austerity measures that focus on punishing its citizens via debt reduction instead of trying to grow their way to prosperity.

Bobo continues on his Bataan Death March of Logic:

Only 6 percent of Americans believe the last stimulus created jobs, according to a New York Times/CBS News survey.

Are you saying that you are right, Bobo, because the public is confused? The facts, Davey, are that the stimulus warded off a 1930s-style crash and did save or add millions of jobs. Just not enough because the stimulus was actually too small.

But the overall message is: Don’t be arrogant. This year, don’t engage in reckless new borrowing or reckless new cutting.

Arrogant, in Bobo’s dictionary, means anyone who does not agree with his patented genteel and reasonable centrism.

The most interesting part of my job is that I get to observe powerful people at close quarters.

It’s all about access, and when that bitchsquealer, David Brooks, talks about interesting people, he’s really talking about his own tribe of self-congratulatory amnesiacs who have not learned from their mistakes, and who continuously grab the wheel of the Great Conservative Clown Car and aim for the cliffs.

Spy Magazine, famous for being hated by all the people that they covered, used to endlessly call Laurence Tisch a churlish dwarf billionaire to the point that one of Tisch’s PR flacks finally got on the case and demanded a retraction. Graydon Carter, the editor at the time, recorded the conversation and published the retraction: “Graydon got a call from P.R. man John Scanlon, who was then working for Tisch: ‘Look, Graydon, you’ve really gone too far this time. To begin with, Larry is not technically a dwarf.’ Graydon jotted that down, and in the next issue Spy ran a clarification in which a CBS spokesman pointed out that Tisch was not ‘technically’ a dwarf.”

We need more Spy and less Bobo in our media.

We have another 800-word, sleep-written, reasonable centrist screed from Bobo! Rejoice!

Davy Brooks read another reasonable book from another reasonable political economist (there must be a book of the month club for reasonable people), Ian Bremmer. Bobo fails to mention that Bremmer is on the Faculty at the Hoover Institute (the hard right think tank at Stanford University) “where, at 25, he became the Institution’s youngest ever National Fellow.” In other words, Bremmer is a fellow traveler in the fine Brooksian tradition of wrapping hard right philosophy with a tasty chocolate coating. To make it more palatable.

Anyway, the theme today is that Capitalism is good. Statist Capitalism is bad. It seems to be an attempt to get us all to forgive BP for the gulf oil gusher, because, well, at least it was not Hugo Chavez.

But here is the key line that unfolds the whole origami swan covered in oil:

“Under state capitalism, market enterprises exist to earn money to finance the ruling class.”

Of course Bobo doesn’t mention that this is exactly what goes on under democratic capitalism. And I dare him to deny it.

So here in the US with our exceptional form of Capitalism, the schools are all failing, our infrastructure is crumbling, we have the slowest internet speeds in the developed world, most of our population is without healthcare (today), and we have officially about 10% unemployed and unofficially about 20% and above if you count underemployed. But thank god we give all our mineral rights to the extraction companies.

So, Davy, while the 2Big2Fail banks are all given bailouts (and giving themselves bonuses), Industrial Ag is kept alive with taxpayer subsidies, the Military-Industrial Complex gets as much of our taxpayer money as it wants while we slash benefits for our poorest and most fragile citizens, you want to lecture us that Venezuela, China, et al, who are using their economies to lift all boats are somehow evil?

You want to tell us that BP, who is only beholden to its shareholders, while the government is beholden to it’s citizens is a better model? Good luck with that.

The Larger Struggle, by David Brooks

Little Davey Brooks recovered from his bad acid trip with The Big Shaggy, but continues down the psycho rabbit hole, screaming that it is time for deficit reduction, in the middle of the Great Recession. And of course, being the driver of the Reasonable Centrist Clown Car, Brooks continues on with his delusional crap of that is is imperative to reduce middle-class entitlement programs, you know, for the good of the middle class.

So, to back up his thesis, Bobo gets out his favorite three-legged orchard ladder and picks some cherries. His first stop is his NYTimes colleague, Edward L. Glaeser, who received his degree from the University of Chicago (i.e., Milton Friedman disciple; think Shock Doctrine) who finds only a slight correlation between deficit spending and job growth. Notably, Brooks does NOT consult his other NYTimes colleague, the Nobel Prize winning one, Paul Krugman. Most assuredly an oversight.

Brooks also cites an economist from Harvard, Alberto Alesina, who wrote a paper that basically says that politicians who go into deficit reduction mode do not always get voted out at the next election. The paper, while it does boost the consequences of deficit reductions is really focused on the politicians, not on the economy.

This leads Stuck in the Middle Brooks to saying that economists are divided on the issue, which is a place where he usually finds succor and comfort. But not today. Brooks could have talked to Mark Zandi, chief economist for Moody’s Economy.com, who testified during a congressional hearing that preserving jobless aid is more important than deficit reduction in the short term, but that would disrupt his own thesis, which is that we need to tighten our belts for the good of everyone.

Bobo notes that “high-skill sectors saw no net loss of jobs during the recession. Middle-skill sectors like sales saw an 8 percent employment decline. Blue-collar jobs fell by 16 percent.” Davey, can you define high-skills sectors?

In other words, the recession exacerbated the inequalities we’ve been seeing for decades.

Yes, Davey, for 30-long, hard years. No where in his obligatory 800 words belched out twice weekly does Brooks mention how we got in this jam, there is no mention of the 30 years of unabated piss-on or voodoo economics started by Saint Ronnie that set us hurling down this path towards the abyss.

As wonky Ezra Klein tells us, “There has been zero net job creation since December 1999. No previous decade going back to the 1940s had job growth of less than 20 percent. Economic output rose at its slowest rate of any decade since the 1930s as well.

This was the first business cycle where a working-age household ended up worse at the end of it than the beginning, and this in spite of substantial growth in productivity, which should have been able to improve everyone’s well-being.

– Lawrence Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal think tank.

So how did the CEO and donor class do during the recession, Bobo? Can you tell us?

Prune and Grow, by David Brooks

Today Bobo laments the decline of the liberal arts major and the rise of the technology students, who are thinking pragmatically that getting a job might require having a skill set that might make them employable; such are the consequences of college during a Depression, one which Bobo helped to create through his advocacy of certain pernicious policies that transferred wealth from the bottom of the heap to the top (which you can learn about in the Liberal Arts colleges, by the way). Bobo wants students to learn analogies to help them to learn to think (like he does):

Studying the humanities will give you a wealth of analogies. People think by comparison — Iraq is either like Vietnam or Bosnia; your boss is like Narcissus or Solon. People who have a wealth of analogies in their minds can think more precisely than those with few analogies. If you go through college without reading Thucydides, Herodotus and Gibbon, you’ll have been cheated out of a great repertoire of comparisons.

And I suppose if your thinking is very shallow, you see Bobo’s point, and if you read Bobo for long you realize that indeed his thinking is that shallow.

But then he takes a big swig of sumpin’ Chimpy McStagger left in the Club House, and immediately, the wheels come off the bus:

Finally, and most importantly, studying the humanities helps you befriend The Big Shaggy.

Let me try to explain. Over the past century or so, people have built various systems to help them understand human behavior: economics, political science, game theory and evolutionary psychology. These systems are useful in many circumstances. But none completely explain behavior because deep down people have passions and drives that don’t lend themselves to systemic modeling. They have yearnings and fears that reside in an inner beast you could call The Big Shaggy.

Jeebus, Bobo is hallucinating and he sees Furries. Whatever. Anyway, the rest of his column is some sort of homage to a GOP version of Elwood P. Dowd and Harvey:

Few of us are hewers of wood. We navigate social environments. If you’re dumb about The Big Shaggy, you’ll probably get eaten by it.

Srsly, Dude, seek some help – use the NYTimes Employee Assistance councilor for psychiatric help or substance abuse. You are embarrassing yourself.

Good Grief, Charlie Brown! For farts and giggles I read Bobo’s column today and immediately had a flashback to Poli-sci 101 (which we used to call “nap time”) and burst into a cold sweat; could there be a quiz coming?

Anyway, for reasons unexplained, Bobo decides to compare and contrast the French and the British versions of the Age of Enlightenment. Yes, that magical period following The Age of Reasoning and preceding Modernity; do you see why I was having cold sweats?

Now, because it is a Bobo column, you can rest assured that after 700 words or so of mental masturbation and pedantry, he comes to his point. Professional journalists call this burying your lead, but in Bobo’s world it is essential to prove to everyone he is the smartest person reading his column. Plus he needed 700 words of foreplay first.

Today, if you look around American politics you see self-described conservative radicals who seek to sweep away 100 years of history and return government to its preindustrial role. You see self-confident Democratic technocrats who have tremendous faith in the power of government officials to use reason to control and reorganize complex systems. You see polemicists of the left and right practicing a highly abstract and ideological Jacobin style of politics.

This is just his round-about way of saying that isn’t it a shame that we’re so politicized.

And yes, Bobo, it is. And you have a lot to do with it.

It is amazing to me how week after week, David Brooks writes basically the same column, ever since Saint Ronnie’s Big Lie started to fall apart. The rising tide lifted all the yachts, but the little guys in the life rafts were cut loose and allowed to drift off to sea, the infrastructure was burned down like some sort of Roman warfare strategy to avoid retreats, and the Wall Street jackals were let loose to feast on whatever they wanted. Thirty years later, we are sitting jobless on the edge of a world-wide depression, we’re in Peak Oil and there’s a gushing, giant oil blob floating off the coast threatening a different kind of calamity that no one knows what to do about, and our government is having a commission that is discussing how to cut Social Security and Medicare benefits because we can no longer afford the social safety net; meanwhile across the globe we are fighting two wars that some would say are baseless, and others would say are religious, and we don’t have a clear understanding of why we are there or how to get out.

And David Brooks wants to know how we got to be so polarized? As the kneepad-wearing head cheerleader for the Visigoths, he can look in the mirror for answers.

(Two Theories of Change, by David Brooks)

UPDATE 1:Doughy Pantload, pontificating poltroon that he is, has had it with Brooks’ column, too -

What’s David Brooks Trying To Say? [Jonah Goldberg]
I liked Brook’s column, even if I have some objections (Jacobin, moi?) and despite the fact that it’s a fairly familiar Brooksian lament. But I have to wonder is this a continuation of the Obama must be a Burkean stuff? I have to assume that’s the case, but Brooks just doesn’t make it clear.

Today, Bobo starts off his wretched column with an unusual gambit: he gives us a tautology: Let A = A.

For some strange reason Bobo is comparing Swedes to Swedes, and he marvels at how alike they are. He could compare Irish to Irish or Dutch to Dutch, too, but he is fascinated by the Swedes, and who can blame him?

Now, Bobo having an inquisitive mind and being a man of science who yearns for knowledge, he then twiddles with some of the variables. In 1950, Swedes lived an average of 2.6 years longer than Americans. Over the next half-century, Sweden and the U.S. diverged politically. Sweden built a large welfare state with a national health service, while the U.S. did not. The result? There was basically no change in the life expectancy gap. Swedes now live 2.7 years longer.

Bobo is amazed!!! Amazed that Darwin’s Law of Natural Selection had not increased the life expectancy of Swedes in a single generation or two, from what is essentially an externality. Bobo makes me very glad he was never my lab partner, which is just about the kindest thing I have ever said about Our Miss Brooks.

Bobo stares at his raw Swede data, but suddenly he spots an Asian!

Nationally, 50 percent of Asian-American adults have a college degree, compared with 31 percent of whites, 17 percent of African-Americans and 13 percent of Hispanics.

Asian-Americans have a life expectancy of 87 years compared with 79 years for whites and 73 years for African-Americans.

Now while I’m sure that all of Bobo’s regular readers finds the Mutual of Omaha’s actuarial tables fascinating, we still wonder what his point is, and why doesn’t Bobo return to the Swedes in Sweden to see what their education status is compared to an American Swede’s education. You know, Let A = A, which in this case might actually tell us something about the effects of policy on the same population.

But instead we get a bowlful of mixed nuts. Asians in New Jersey are contrasted with Native Americans in South Dakota. He mixes and stirs, adds a pinch of this and a soupçon of that, and in the end serves up a word salad that looks a lot like a steaming puddle of vomit on the sidewalk: you have no idea what is in it, but you know not to step in it.

But here is the essential thing to take away from Bobo’s column, disingenuous as it is: Bobo cannot show that the policy of the last thirty years — the policies that Bobo championed with his Party of Visigoths — has resulted in anything positive. From the moment that the senile, shoe-polish haired Saint Ronnie of the GOP stormed the gates with his army of mouth-breating morons, and began the raping and pillaging of the United States, all we have to show for it is an infrastructure that is crumbling, a vivisected middle class, an underclass filled with despair, a destroyed economic engine, and a failed education system. Oh, we also have for all intents and purposes a caste system with nobles at the top. Let’s not forget the real purpose and real results of thirty years of Saint Ronnie’s class warfare.

(The Limits of Policy by David Brooks)

Senator Lindsey Graham, Our Hero

Our Miss Brooks, strikes again. Bobo and Gail Collins agree that Senator Graham is amongst the finest in the Men’s Club:

As far as I’m concerned Graham is the bravest politician in the country, bar none. When I get depressed about the nature of politics these days and am looking at the bottom of my nightly bottle of tequila (O.K., I’m exaggerating), I lift a glass to the voters of South Carolina and thank them for sending this guy to Washington. If every senator were like Graham, this country would be in excellent shape.

I think that Scissorheads everywhere already know my feelings about the meek and timid Lindsey Graham, but to hear Bobo give him a wet kiss just a bit above the belt is nauseating. What’s next, the praise for the principled stand of Traitor Joe?

Well, yes:

And while I’m praising Senator Graham, let me mention another senator who is willing to cross the aisle, Joe Lieberman. Some liberals love Graham because he’s willing to work with Democrats on some issues, but they hate Lieberman because he’s sometimes willing to work with Republicans. In other words, they only love independence so long as it’s only Republicans deviating from the party line, never Democrats. But I love ’em both.

Ah, Bobo sings praise to the quisling turds, the supposed squishy middle that Bobo so dearly wants to be part of. Traitor Joe, it should be noted, doesn’t cross the aisle to work with Republicans, or cross the aisle to work with the Dims. Traitor Joe only works for himself, being a Party of One. Well, correction: he works for AIPAC, and often times the Healthcare Lobby, Big Pharma, and many of the Finance interests. He goes where the money is, whether it is for him or his constituent: his wife.

So Bobo sings the praise of Drama Queens Miss Lindsey and Traitor Joe, but what of Grandpa Walnuts?

Well, Bobo does not discuss him with Gail, though Gail rightfully calls Walnuts out for being an opportunist and endorsing the Arizona draconian anti-immigration law. Bobo just reaches for his Tequila bottle.

Bobo regurgitates the talking point that the right so desperately wants to believe:

“Between 1997 and 2006, consumers, lenders and builders created a housing bubble, and pretty much the entire establishment missed it. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and the people who regulate them missed it. The big commercial banks and the people who regulate them missed it. The Federal Reserve missed it, as did the ratings agencies, the Securities and Exchange Commission and the political class in general.”

Well, Bobo, that is not exactly true. In fact, that is entirely untrue.

The entire establishment, meaning GOP-appointed head of the Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan, actually championed bubbles, the so-called irrational exuberance. Greenspan kept interest rates so artificially low that something was bound to happen. And I seem to recall him telling people that they should get out of their fixed rate mortgages (at extremely low rates) and refinance using some of the more exotic mortgage devices, that they should take money out of their homes and use it for vacations, cars, big teevee machines… And the innocent did, they believed Greenspan, and now many of them have either lost their houses or are in the process of losing their houses. Thanks, Alan!

His doppleganger, the disingenuous Ben Bernanke, carried forward the same policies, uninterrupted.

And Bobo, the regulators did not look for irregularities. In fact, they did not regulate at all.

Let’s not forget that our Xristian Xrazy President, Chimpy McStagger appointed Christopher Cox to the head of the SEC (after slashing their budget dramatically to make it and most other regulatory agencies a ghost town, and those regulators that remained were, um, watching a little porn, I’m told).

Let’s say Cox’ methods of regulation and investigation were, a-hem, a bit lax. (Artist rendition of Cox hard at work, you know, investigating –> )

Bobo, the point is that ever since the lunatics took over the asylum in the ’80s, it was not enough to just say that Government is the problem, they had to prove it, too. Anytime the government did anything right, or efficient, or (horrors!) better than the private sector, it laid waste to the demand from Saint Ronnie that the government must be destroyed, or as Grover Norquist said, made small enough to drown in the bathtub. They started by starving the beast, cutting off funding for departments that were actually doing their jobs. But that was not enough.

So Chimpy appointed a clown car-load of freak-show water heads to be in charge of the various agencies. It was not just political patronage (thought it was that, too), it was about ensuring massive, colossal failure in all areas. Our best example is of course FEMA, under the leadership of Heckuva Job Brownie, a horse-show promoter who was completely unprepared for Katrina. That was the expected result.

But back to Christopher Cox, a man you said that you have been covering for 20 years, the point man at the SEC when the whole house of cards collapsed. Here’s your opinion of him from The News Hour in 2005:

DAVID BROOKS: My broker is, I hope. But Chris Cox is one of the smartest people on Capitol Hill, so I have a lot of faith in him as a person. He went to Harvard Law and Harvard College but that not withstanding.

He strikes me as a sort of a Jack Kemp Republican — not quite in tune with the current House leadership Tom DeLay sorts, but he really goes back to the Reagan years and I think he was there with Jack Kemp.

JIM LEHRER: He worked in the Reagan administration.

DAVID BROOKS: He worked in the Reagan administration.

JIM LEHRER: He was one of the counsel –

DAVID BROOKS: And he’s just someone who, is on a policy level, extremely serious. And so I have a lot of faith in him, a lot of faith in his intelligence. And I would also say as a politician when there’s a scandal he will understand the importance of playing to the public about it and responding to public cries for reform

And the final thing to be said is there’s no contradiction being pro-free market and wanting to crack down on the bad guys. So I just don’t think it’s right to pre-judge him either way.

Yes, Bobo, there’s no contradiction on being pro-free market and wanting to crack down on the bad guys, but Cox was only pro-free market, as the records show. Cox fiddled while rome burned, so to speak. And it is amazing to me that to this day no one has called him on the carpet to testify.

So when you say, Bobo, that No one saw it coming, I think you are indulging your fantastic amnesia superpowers again. Everyone saw it coming. It was planned from the get-go. But to admit to anything other than complete surprise would be to admit to being part of the vast, failed experiment that is supply-side economics, deregulate everything, free-marketeering, and waiting for that rising tide to lift all boats. Funny how it only lifted the yachts.

But more importantly, it would mean that you, Bobo, would have to admit to being wrong again. Fantastically wrong.

They say that you end up with the face that you deserve, and in Bobo’s case it should be plural.

Today, Bobo again lays claims to the ideological center, which is amusing because he describes his political belief as progressive conservatism, a self-canceling phrase if ever there was one. I think what he really means is that he wants to luncheon with the ladies of the upper east side, if only they will have him. Here’s a clue, Bobo: they won’t.

Wistfully, Bobo says that he is to the Left of the Republicans, and to the Right of the Democrats, which he claims puts him in the squishy middle, a veritable no-man’s land, where the pure of heart and soul reside.

Like the Lucky Pierre in a Saint Ronnie and Newt Gingrich sandwich, this middle — of which he offers no evidence of existing — he says is powerless because the Dims have taken a hard-left ideological turn, which has left the Party of God no choice but to turn hard right. Bobo, you see, is the innocent man in the middle.

As government grew, the antigovernment right mobilized. This produced the Tea Party Movement — a characteristically raw but authentically American revolt led by members of the yeoman enterprising class…

As government grew, many moderates and independents (not always the same thing) recoiled in alarm. In 2008, the country was evenly split on whether there should be bigger government with more services or smaller government with fewer services…

During periods of government war, the Democratic Party also reverts to its vestigial self. Democrats don’t want to defend big government, so instead they lash out at business. Over the past weeks, President Obama has upped his attacks on Big Oil, Wall Street and “powerful interests,” sounding like an orthodox Reagan-era Democrat.

The government war is playing out just as you’d expect it to, strengthening those with pure positions and leaving those of us in the middle in the cross-fire. If the debate were about how to increase productivity or improve living standards, people like me could play. But when the country is wrapped up in a theological debate about the size of government, people like me are stuck crossways, trying to make distinctions no one heeds.

I’ve gone on at length about Bobo’s cheerleading role through the Reagan zombies’ dismantling of the country, the rape and pillage that started with the weakest amongst us and now has pretty much destroyed the middle class. The undeclared class war (and that is what it really is) is now threatening even his own privileged upper-middle class self as his precious media consumes itself and thrashes about like a dinosaur in quicksand: alive, doomed, and knowing it.

Police and Fire departments across the country are decimated and taking staff cuts, the roads are crumbling; bridges have already collapsed. The mad villagers have grabbed their teabags and stormed the federal government, demanding that Americans want less, please take more away from us. And meanwhile, in the castles, the CEOs laugh and laugh and laugh, making bets with the Wall Street Bankers on how to further put their heels on the necks of the little people. And Bobo laughs with them, and provides them cover, hoping that they will throw him a crumb.

Bobo cheered on the policies that have lead to the off-shoring of entire sectors of the economy, the tax breaks that encouraged them, the trade deals that codified the race to the bottom. Bobo enabled where he could, and used his dulcet, modulated civil tone to assure his readers that a country that no longer makes anything can survive. You know, as long as you do not want anything, anyway.

“I had 800 words to file to make my paycheck.”

I’m guessing that Bobo no longer even tries. This was just about as stupid as he gets in his patented technique to be seen as the squishy middle:

1. Make a declarative sentence and state it as a fact!
2. Introduce a new fact that contradicts the previous fact!
3. Declare your pragmatic centrism by saying both facts cannot be true, so it must be something else, but you don’t know what.
4. Cash your paycheck.

From The Opinionator:

Gail Collins: I’m sorry, when the difference is one weensy basket, I’d say Duke won neither by privilege nor hard work but by sheer luck. But don’t let me interrupt your thought here. I detect the subtle and skillful transition to a larger non-sport point.

David Brooks: Yes. I was going to say that for the first time in human history, rich people work longer hours than middle class or poor people. How do you construct a rich versus poor narrative when the rich are more industrious?

Bobo – you are a piece of work. But at least you mentioned that yes, Duke vs. Butler was about class warfare, if only in subtext. And I dare and defy you to tell me that Paris Hilton works harder at whatever the heck it is that she does than the lowliest janitor that cleans her hotels for minimum wage or probably less.

David Brooks reads business books, and then squirts them at us, and today’s onanism from Brooks is remarkably shallow, even for Bobo: Better Leaders Give Us Better Results.

The End.

Today I read with great interest — and great disbelief — David Brooks’ latest cliché column in which he tells us that everything is going to be alright, and in fact better than ever.

Better for whom, David?

As many regular readers know I live in San Jose, the tenth largest city in the country, the third largest in California. San Jose, as the Chamber of Commerce tells us, is the capital of Silicon Valley. For years, maybe decades, Silicon Valley has been the economic engine of California. When you think of high tech, you probably think of Silicon Valley, home to HP, Apple, Adobe Systems, and so forth. At one point it was home to the aerospace industry, too. And before all that, it was farmland. Most of the fruit sold in the rest of the country came from Santa Clara Valley. But that was long ago.

A quick look around the Valley today does not show signs of the next technological revolution; everywhere there are abandoned business parks. The quickly slapped together tilt-ups that optimistically defined the first wave of the technology revolution here now sit empty, or in some instances converted to evangelical churches.

(more…)

Anatomy of Column

Someone put a quarter into Bobo’s’ slot today, and he farted out a column of conventional wisdom on command. Here is the thesis of it:

The U.S. now has an economy shifted too much toward consumption, debt and imports and too little toward production, innovation and exports. It now has a mounting federal debt that creates present indulgence and future hardship…. As the financial crises ease, it would be nice if Americans would once again start looking to the horizon

Remember folks, this is his job, he gets paid to write stuff like this.

So David Brooks looks around and sees sad people with few jobs and almost no prospects of improving their lives, and instead of looking at why they are so sad, and suggesting something that might improve their lot — real, substantive suggestions like getting rid of tax credits that encourage companies to move off shore to chase lower wages — instead he hopes that someday, US citizens will be forward looking. “Buck, up Private!”

And that’s all you need to know.

The Nation of Futurity — By David Brooks

UPDATE 1: Drifty writes about the same column (so much better than me).