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

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?

That shocking expose took a lot of courage! Next up: a hard-hitting look at why Texas barbecue is better than Vermont barbecue.

When I saw the table of contents, my first thought was, nah, this must be some other David Brooks, right? Then I recalled he wrote that one book that people once talked about before he became an OpEd hack, and wondered: would the New Yorker really give this joker (benign though he may be) a platform for his latest branding exercise? (Answer: alas, yes.)

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

Steely Dan lyric circa Gaucho.

That's actually the better part of the article.

David Brooks obsessively writes about this supposed "class" that I suspect encompasses maybe 1000-10,000 people in the US?

I wonder if he could name 10. I mean he's a journalist so he should be able to, right?

Like how many couples have actually met at the Clinton Global Initiative?

I like the obvious moves to make sure you know this a LIBERAL rich person, so class warfare is a-okay.

This part, otoh, is some of the worst garbage I've ever read in the New Yorker. It's like sub-sub-Gladwell bullshit:

-----

Harold and Erica got their first glimpse of each other in front of a Barnes & Noble. They smiled broadly as they approached, and a deep, primeval process kicked in. Harold liked what he saw, from the waist-to-hip ratio to the clear skin, all indicative of health and fertility. He enjoyed the smile that spread across Erica’s face, and unconsciously noted that the end of her eyebrows dipped down. The orbicularis-oculi muscle, which controls this part of the eyebrow, cannot be consciously controlled, so, when the tip of the eyebrow dips, that means the smile is genuine, not fake.

Erica was impressed by him: women everywhere tend to prefer men who have symmetrical features and are slightly older, taller, and stronger than they are. But she was more guarded and slower to trust than Harold was. That’s in part because, while Pleistocene men could pick their mates on the basis of fertility cues discernible at a glance, Pleistocene women faced a more vexing problem. Human babies require years to become self-sufficient, and a single woman in that environment could not gather enough calories to provide for a family. She was compelled to choose a man not only for insemination but for continued support. That’s why men leap into bed more quickly than women. Various research teams have conducted a simple study. They hire a woman to go up to college men and ask them to sleep with her. More than half the men say yes. Then they have a man approach college women with the same offer. Virtually zero per cent say yes.

So Erica was subconsciously looking for signs of trustworthiness. Marion Eals and Irwin Silverman, of York University, have conducted research suggesting that women are sixty to seventy per cent more proficient than men at remembering details from a scene. In the previous few years, Erica had used her powers of observation to discard entire categories of men as potential partners, and some of her choices were idiosyncratic. She rejected men who wore Burberry, because she couldn’t see herself looking at the same pattern on scarves and raincoats for the rest of her life. She viewed fragranced men the way Churchill viewed the Germans—they were either at your feet or at your throat. She would have nothing to do with men who wore sports-related jewelry, because her boyfriend should not love Derek Jeter more than her.

She looked furtively at Harold as he approached. Janine Willis and Alexander Todorov, of Princeton, have found that we make judgments about a person’s trustworthiness, competence, aggressiveness, and likability within the first tenth of a second. These sorts of first glimpses are astonishingly reliable in predicting how people will feel about each other months later. Erica noticed that Harold was good-looking but not one of those men who are so good-looking that they don’t need to be interesting. He was tall, which tends to inspire confidence; one study estimated that each inch of height corresponds to six thousand dollars of annual salary in contemporary America. Then he walked up and said hello.

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/01/17/110117fa_fact_brooks#ixzz1B2d0bDkr

this guy, he is the definition of vacuous ambition

David Brooks obsessively writes about this supposed "class" that I suspect encompasses maybe 1000-10,000 people in the US

Responding to the above quote I butchered:

Brooks probably knows all 10,000 of these people because of the douchey pundit circles he runs in whilst the rest of america wonders what the fuck he is talking about.

I'm going to write a takedown of Brooks called Bobophobia

creepy detached observation and thinly veiled resentment for being found unattractive by the opposite sex

he want to get it on a higher level than everyone else to explain away his punchablity via envy

love how he backs this piece up with SCIENCE