Jim notes an excellent takedown of David Brooks and his puffery. It also contains a good description of much of the tea party:
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members of the Tea Party—the type of people who, let’s be clear, David Brooks wouldn’t invite into his fabulous mansion in a million years—I’d say that they are just generally angry and afraid and weak and self-injurious. No, not crazy, not mentally ill. Just angry, because they’ve been sold out by an economic philosophy that has totally undermined their ability to provide for their families or secure a better life, the economic philosophy espoused by Brooks and the rest of the thought leaders that control our society. Afraid, because three decades of economic policy designed to punish workers have left them totally insecure, not knowing from day to day if they can trust their present condition. Weak, because they fall for a ruthlessly efficient propaganda machine that teaches Republican to take their fear and direct it out at the people that don’t look like them, especially the black Kenyan Marxist socialist who occupies the White House. Self-injurious, because they could benefit from a stronger redistributive system as much as anyone else.
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Ha. Ha. A one-man band alone on a deserted island. Sure wish I could write as eloquently as Freddie deBoer and David Brooks. So, where does David Brooks get all his money? From all those scared Tea Partiers? I stopped paying attention to David Brooks years ago, along with all those other FOX misfits. David Brooks is correct in that there are millions of frightened Father Knows Best wannabes who see their fairy-tale sand castles crumbling into a dark sea of despair. The lives that God had so graciously given them, lives that they had slaved so many decades to secure for themselves and their GRAND children, are being torn away by relentless hoards of savage barbarians, to which they have given so many descriptive names that I shall not attempt to repeat. Maybe I should have read about the Old Guard, about the Old Money, about the Bobos In Paradise. (Honestly I hadn't heard of Bobos In Paradise until you brought it up.) Shouldn't we and our GRAND children be entitled to live happily forever on our sunny, fortified hilltops, interconnected by fortified, five-lane highways, protecting us from those hoards of barbarians lurking in the desolate valleys below, savages who would lift our scalps in an instant? Why is God being so cruel to us now, after all we have done for Him? What have we done to invoke His wrath? Haven't we religiously tithed our fair share to the Church? Don't we rich, white people deserve to be happy, Social Animals? Shouldn't each of our rich lives be the "Happiest story ever!?" Well, Yes!, says David Brooks! Now you know that something has to be wrong with David Brooks' story when Forbes Magazine kicks his butt. Really? "According to Chris Mooney," Jon Entine says, "...conservatives are scientifically illiterate. The heat generated by Republican grey matter working through complex scientific theories pops their hard-wired neural circuits like corn heating in a kettle. Because science is made up of 'facts,' he writes, there must be some neuro-cognitive evolutionary reason for why the right wing brain limps along as it does. He equates the far right of the Republican base, which does fervently embrace these anti-science views, with both Republicans and conservatives in general." David Brooks doesn't seem to get it.
Posted by: Roger | June 17, 2012 at 09:37