I always knew David Brooks was an asshole ....

There he was on PBS last night talking about the State of the Union and all I could think about at the time was his error-filled hateful post on Haiti.

Taibbi needs to challenge him to a public debate.

MT really on fire there

It's hard to believe that the same columnist today wrote a piece that channels some sort of "saner Ross Perot" populist that Obama should either become or lose to in 2012

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/29/opinion/29brooks.html?ref=opinion

in private he wanks to military coups tho

it is a source of amazement in my daily life that this guy is allowed to write anywhere, much less for the nyt

And appear on PBS and NPR.

So he wants a 'Perot' to turn Obama into a Clinton to get rid of the deficit and not do any of those liberal things he thinks are predictable. zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

On a minor note, it's A HUGE pet peeve when a writer, usually a columnist, tries to avoid using a cliché by modifying it. Like:

There is a specter haunting America: the specter of a saner, updated version of Ross Perot.

"there is a parrot haunting america: an avian, updated version of phil spector"

he reads like a columnist you'd find in an airplane magazine

it's not even a matter of disagreeing with him--i just don't think he's very bright.

lol or what bnw said!

He's swayed by power and the kind of self-mocking assurance that he wishes he had.

aren't we all

i kind of agree with that column?

i think Obama could use a little crazy Perot/crazy chart stuff right about now

A spectre is haunting Mr. Que.

but i mean Brooks usually drives me crazy with his bullshit

I am so pro-crazy charts

He is slick. He sets up strawmen on the left and right and puts himself in the middle. The problem is his descriptions of the left, right, and middle are never accurate even if he claims to be quoting an informed neutral source.

If you get a deficit-reduction deal, you break through the polarized rigidities that encrust everything else.

Yea like the lobbyists just disappeared and both parties got what their constituents wanted after Clinton reduced the deficit.

He may be an asshole, but he is now the NYT OpEd Page's most fervent Obama supporter! (The company you keep...) And he hit truth here:

To the consternation of many on the left, Obama has continued about 80 percent of the policies of the second Bush term.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/12/opinion/12brooks.html

Context, bro:

"Take foreign policy. To the consternation of many on the left, Obama has continued about 80 percent of the policies of the second Bush term."

Also, Brooks is an idiot, so "company you keep" applies to people agreeing with his thought process i.e. you.

oic

Democratfascists

eh i actually agreed with that last brooks column

really its Brooks discovering something a year after the rest of the planet again.

Usually a few days after writing a column like that (which he does periodically) he follows up with some knee-jerk neo-con stuff. Its the columns like this one that keep getting him invited back on NPR and PBS, not his ones blaming poor Haitians for their troubles, etc.

He is slick. He sets up strawmen on the left and right and puts himself in the middle.

otm. He's the last bobo in paradise.

David Brooks is back to forecasting election results based on his analysis of suburban voters and his skewed analysis of values--

Moderate suburban voters do not see the world as liberals do, even in the most propitious circumstances, and never will.

Bitterly and too late, Dr. Faustus recognized that economic policies are about values. If your policies undermine personal responsibility by separating the link between effort and reward, voters will punish you for it.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/22/opinion/22brooks.html?src=me&ref=general

why does this guy still have a job

clearly you don't understand moderate suburban voters

those damn bobos in paradise

His literary perspective has made him a more fully rounded person than most of the people one finds in this business. Unlike many Americans, he seems to completely trust his desire for pleasure, and has been open about his delight in sex, drink, friendship and wordplay.

Brooks on Christopher Hitchens. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/02/opinion/02brooks.html?_r=1&src=me&ref=homepage

Many Americans do not delight in friendship?

http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/the-arrogant-david-brooks-tells-readers-that-stimulus-will-risk-national-insolvency

Dean Baker versus David Brooks(who attacks those "high-IQ" types who want more government stimulus now)

Full profile in New York, by the way.

Politically, it’s clear why the White House likes Brooks—he’s the persuadable opposition. “David represents to them the sensible Republican,” says Collins. “If David is convinced, they regard that as a real bi-partisan triumph.” But the special relationship is as much about style as politics. Temperamentally, Brooks and Obama could be twins. They address crises with an almost inhuman calm—an asset at times, but also a liability when the only proper response is emotional. On this, Brooks defends Obama. “You know, people fault President Obama for being passionless sometimes, for being a little too cold,” Brooks said on PBS NewsHour in May. “But when you have a week like this, where you’ve got the Greek situation, the oil spill, you’ve got Times Square, you’ve got floods in Nashville, I think they responded with reasonable speed, but basically with a level of calmness, which is in his nature … This is a good time to have a president like Obama, who’s just steady.”

Working on the new book has strained his easygoing exterior. “It’s like the worst period of my life,” he says. He’s been getting by on four hours of sleep a night. He’s been writing in the basement a lot. Only there can he find solitude. He listens to movie soundtracks to help him concentrate. (Sense and Sensibility is good; he’s sick of Braveheart.)

After nearly three decades of writing, he’d expected the turmoil of churning out prose to fade away. It’s been the opposite. “I think gradually as I go through life I feel it more and more,” he says. “The failures hurt more. The anxiety ratchets up.” It’s not the material anxiety he writes about in magazines and books—kitchens, cars, grills. It’s a writerly anxiety. “The thirst for admiration is like the thirst for money—it’s never-ending,” he says. “You never get to the point where you say, I’ve had enough.”

Who admires him?

Dean Brooks does not quench Brooks' "thirst for admiration":

Demand siders did not believe that $150 billion in annual stimulus from the government could offset the contractionary impact of a reduction in annual spending by the private scctor of $1.2 trillion ($1.2 trillion > $150 billion). That is how demand siders explained the failure of the stimulus to have much impact in reducing the unemployment rate. Perhaps this explanation is too complicated for Mr. Brooks (he repeatedly complains about the high IQs of the demand siders), but it actually seems fairly straightforward. If he wants to be honest, he could at least say that he doesn't understand the demand siders' explanation, rather than asserting that demand siders do not have an explanation.

Dean Baker that is

This guy.

So I sit there in my green jacket, happily chewing on a Twizzler

He arrogantly thinks his watered-down conservative vision for the future is a 3rd path Democratic vision.

god he sucks

Rewriting history-- no mentions of Native Americans, slavery and robber barron excess

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/07/opinion/07brooks.html?th&emc=th

Next, Platt takes aim at the American dream. When Europeans first settled this continent, they saw the natural abundance and came to two conclusions: that God’s plan for humanity could be realized here, and that they could get really rich while helping Him do it. This perception evolved into the notion that we have two interdependent callings: to build in this world and prepare for the next.

...

The United States once had a Gospel of Wealth: a code of restraint shaped by everybody from Jonathan Edwards to Benjamin Franklin to Andrew Carnegie. The code was designed to help the nation cope with its own affluence. It eroded, and over the next few years, it will be redefined.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/12/opinion/12brooks.html?src=me&ref=general

Shocking. He attacks public sector unions and their alleged growth since the '50s without any facts supporting his charges. He also offers no facts re his fantasy '50s government.

OK, on second reading he offers a few facts, but they seem to be carefully chosen so as to ignore other ones.

Many of us would be happy to live with a bigger version of 1950s government: one that ran surpluses and was dexterous enough to tackle long-term problems as they arose. But we don’t have that government. We have an immobile government that is desperately overcommitted in all the wrong ways.

This situation, if you’ll forgive me for saying so, has been the Democratic Party’s epic failure.

This is stupid because Little Bush chose tax cuts rather than surpluses, so even Brooks' own party does the same thing.

You can see a paragon of the Composure Class having an al-fresco lunch at some bistro in Aspen or Jackson Hole. He’s just back from China and stopping by for a corporate board meeting on his way to a five-hundred-mile bike-a-thon to support the fight against lactose intolerance. He is asexually handsome, with a little less body fat than Michelangelo’s David. As he crosses his legs, you observe that they are immeasurably long and slender. He doesn’t really have thighs. Each leg is just one elegant calf on top of another. His voice is so calm and measured that he makes Barack Obama sound like Sam Kinison. He met his wife at the Clinton Global Initiative, where they happened to be wearing the same Doctors Without Borders support bracelets. They are a wonderfully matched pair; the only tension between them involves their workout routines. For some reason, today’s high-status men do a lot of running and biking and so only really work on the muscles in the lower half of their bodies. High-status women, on the other hand, pay ferocious attention to their torsos, biceps, and forearms so they can wear sleeveless dresses all summer and crush rocks with their bare hands

From his New Yorker article.

was he furiously jacking off as he wrote that?