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

Everyone loves to quote the "abortion lowers crime" blurb but no one seems bothered to actually read what the man wrote in his book.

Fuck David Brooks, why are we talking about him? Also yeah can people start reposting NYT articles? I refuse to BUY a David Goddamn Brooks article.

Because you are president, you are briefed each day on terrorist threats to this country. These briefings are as psychologically intense as an episode of "24," with descriptions of specific bad guys and their activities.

This has had a cumulative effect on your psychology. While many of your fellow citizens have relaxed as 9/11 has faded into history, you don't have that luxury. Your briefings, and some terrifying false alarms that haven't been made public, keep you in a perpetual state of high alert.

You know that one of the few advantages we have over the terrorists is technological superiority. You are damned sure you are going to use every geek, every computer program and every surveillance technique at your disposal to prevent a future attack. You have inherited the FISA process to regulate this intelligence gathering. It's a pretty good process. FISA judges usually issue warrants quickly and, when appropriate, retroactively.

But the FISA process has shortcomings. First, it's predicated on a division between foreign and domestic activity that has been rendered obsolete by today's mobile communications methods. Second, the process still involves some cumbersome paperwork and bureaucratic foot-dragging. Finally, the case-by-case FISA method is ill suited to the new information-gathering technologies, which include things like automated systems that troll through vast amounts of data looking for patterns, voices and chains of contacts.

Over time you've become convinced that these new technologies, which are run by National Security Agency professionals and shielded from political influence, help save lives. You've seen that these new surveillance techniques helped foil an attack on the Brooklyn Bridge and bombing assaults in Britain. The question is, How do you regulate the new procedures to protect liberties?

Your aides present you with three options. First, you can ask Congress to rewrite the FISA law to keep pace with the new technologies. This has some drawbacks. How exactly do you write a law to cope with this fast-changing information war? Even if you could set up a procedure to get warrant requests to a judge, how would that judge be able to tell which of the thousands of possible information nodes is worth looking into, or which belongs to a U.S. citizen? Swamped in the data-fog, the courts would just become meaningless rubber-stamps. Finally, it's likely that some member of Congress would leak details of the program during the legislative process, thus destroying it.

Your second option is to avoid Congress and set up a self-policing mechanism using the Justice Department and the N.S.A.'s inspector general. This option, too, has drawbacks. First, it's legally dubious. Second, it's quite possible that some intelligence bureaucrat will leak information about the programs, especially if he or she hopes to swing a presidential election against you. Third, if details do come out and Congressional leaders learn you went around them, there will be blowback that will not only destroy the program, but will also lead to more restrictions on executive power.

Your third option is informal Congressional oversight. You could pull a few senior members of Congress into your office and you could say: "Look, given the fast-moving nature of this conflict, there is no way we can codify rules about what is permissible and impermissible. Instead we will create a social contract. I'll trust you by telling you everything we are doing to combat terror. You'll trust me enough to give me the flexibility I need to keep the country safe. If we have disagreements, we will work them out in private."

These are your three options, Mr. President, and these are essentially the three options George Bush faced a few years ago. (He chose Option 2.) But before you decide, let me tell you one more thing: Options 1 and 2 won't work, and Option 3 is impossible.

Options 1 and 2 won't work because they lead to legalistic rigidities and leaks that will destroy the program. Option 3 is impossible because it requires trust. It requires that the president and the Congressional leaders trust one another. It requires Democrats and Republicans to trust one another. We don't have that kind of trust in America today.

That leaves you with Option 4: Face the fact that we will not be using our best technology to monitor the communications of known terrorists. Face the fact that the odds of an attack on America just went up.

these "cellular" "telephones" represent a paradigm shift that our founders never intended

Sorry everyone else asked for it. :(

m.

this reminds me of the one bloom county strip where steve dallas cries when he finds out "knight rider" is a children's show.

“One of the things I’ve found in life is that politicians are a lot more sincere than us journalists and we are more sincere than the people that read and watch us.µ

vid here

On "Meet the Press," challenged on an assertion that 10,000 Iraqis will die every month if the U.S. pulls out, The New York Times columnist admits he just picked the number "out of the air."

http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003615101

I saw the broadcast. He also implied that it's worth losing a few hundred Americans a month if it keeps 10,00,00o,00,000,000 Iraqis from dying. For once Bob Woodward acted like a journalist and went after him.

As much as I hate to defend Brooks, I think this is an unfair "gotcha" slam - he was obviously using the number 10,000 rhetorically to begin with. He's just trying to argue that even more Iraqis will die if we pull out, which may or may not be true but is not exactly an assertion "out of the air."

Given that so many generals, Bushies, neocons, and "experts" have offered their own out-of-the-air assertions since 2002, I'm prepared to slap the shit out of Brooks, especially after that slavish Bush column he wrote last week.

xpost

But Hurting, he's inserting an exact number to make a hypothetical scenario seem like a concrete actuality. Far from the worst of his crimes, but it highlights how slippery his support for his arguments typically is.

In other words, I'd let this go in many other cases, but Brooks deserves to be called out on this.

Ok, but advocates of withdrawal say stuff like "It can't get worse than it already is" all the time, which is just as hypothetical.

Besides, how literal-minded do you have to be to think that David Brooks is claiming to know exactly how many Iraqis will die per month?

Well, he claims to know a lot of stuff that he doesn't!

But regardless, this sort of rhetoric gets those numbers out there as talking points. Soon enough, 10K and 125 become the accepted estimations that you have to argue against.

Should we just keep a running tally of his clueless Obama/"class warfare"/"lakefront liberal" columns that he dribbles out like so much Olean?

F'instance

Perhaps he'll finally reach the point of just doing a find/replace of "Kerry" with "Obama" on his shit from 4 years ago. It would certainly save him effort.

Methinks that lean times at the Times call for a cutback:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/03/opinion/03brooks.html

actually i kind of liked that column--he's right, all Ward 3'rs hate everyone in Bethesda and Potomac.

I grew up in Ward 3. Maybe the dynamics have changed since I lived there (due to 8 years of republican rule?) but at the time I didn't sense that there was a huge distinction seen between that and Bethesda. Also Ward 3 was full of incredibly intelligent, interesting people who could have made much more money in the private sector and felt some kind of calling to government.

"Nyah, they're just jealous" -- this passes for biting social commentary?

yeah i was kind of kidding--like everything else he writes about he's way over simplified everything. dude is such a goober

ah ok, I think I see the sarcasm now

as far as i can tell brooks never knows if he's kidding or not.

its funny how in their search for a palatable republican the times found the most inane guy in the wrold

http://timesonline.typepad.com/comment/images/2007/05/15/david_brooks.jpg

"OK, fine. Let's talk about inanity."

David Brooks is the name of:
David Allen Brooks (born 1947), American film and television actor who played archaeologist Max Eilerson on the science-fiction television series Crusade
David Brooks (author) (born 1953), Australian author of short stories and co-editor for Southerly
David "Bubba" Brooks, American jazz musician
David Brooks (inventor), inventor who patented an innovative insulator for telegraph lines in 1867 while working for the Central Pacific Railroad
David Brooks (journalist) (born 1961), commentator for The New York Times and other publications
David "Mavado" Brooks (musician), Jamaican dancehall artist
David Brooks (murderer) (born 1955), teenaged accomplice of serial killer Dean Corll
David Brooks (politician) (1756–1838), United States representative in the Fifth United States Congress
David Brooks (rugby league), Australian rugby league footballer
David Brooks (rugby union), British rugby union footballer

No results found for "gayvid brooks".

http://www.suepatrick.com/images_home_special/david_brooks.jpg

Maybe this is the David Brooks thread I'm looking for.

Taibbi dissects what has got to be one of the worst things Brooks has written in recent memory.

http://trueslant.com/matttaibbi/2010/01/27/populism-just-like-racism/

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.

heh

Nixon didn't speak English either.

That's a pretty nonsensical metaphor.

oh he's really outdone himself with this one

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/11/opinion/sund4r-pichai-google-memo-diversity.html

on pins and needles waiting for his Charlottesville column

Ugh, the very thought makes me want to step off a bridge.

"David Brooks really has three jobs because he has to raise his wife," my fiance said

— Sarah Jones (@onesarahjones) March 4, 2021

rather condescending toward the wife

like giving vince carter a 6 at the dunk contest, come on

That's hilarious. Is it wrong that I find that hilarious?

“If Books Could Kill” covers David Brooks’ book

https://www.iheart.com/podcast/867-if-books-could-kill-104279346/episode/david-brookss-bobos-in-paradise-104750888/

http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLwwnCKLi5BMOW6L2Gg97bgI_iKYINBPZa

No Fair Remembering stuff has a series on Brooks.

from the bobo thing it's amusing to learn that brooks has the exact same approach to class analysis as those edgy left podcasters who've robbed "PMC" of any concrete meaning

PMC?

https://acronyms.thefreedictionary.com/PMC

the professional-managerial class as conceptualised / later rejected as relevant concept by barbara ehrenreich, long since stripped of any material referents and turned into an all purpose woke/idpol/SJW equivalent by reactionary elements on the left

hearing more brooks classics it's no surprise obama was so shit with this kind of intellectual nourishment

his totally (by his own admission for once) imaginary scenario of a scat play fetish party cancelling an attendee for not recycling, presented as if he's making some kind of point, is hilarious and disturbing and probably where he accidentally peaked as a human being

he needs to stay the fuck away from joggers in parks

One of the worst paragraphs I’ve ever read pic.twitter.com/kZRfi2Ol0Y

— Hamilton Nolan (@hamiltonnolan) November 24, 2022

From the comments on above tweet about Brooks saying his ears were straight outa Compton—

In 1991 when David Brooks was a 30 year old man writing columns about how the Black people who make the music he likes deserve poverty and suffering, his current wife was six years old

— Hilary Agro 🍄 @hilarya✧✧✧@masto✧✧✧.l✧✧ (@hilaryagro) November 24, 2022

from the same column:

My body has matured; my tastes have not.

Then there are the times that are just awkward — like the time at a Nas concert when a seven-foot-tall woman in a black bodice came up to me and asked, “What on earth are you doing here?”

rejected Piano Man lyrics