Jon Chait and Brendan Nyhan had some good pieces last week about how Peggy Noonan’s columns are essentially mystical in outlook. Obviously, you don’t need them to tell you that; nevertheless, I was happy to see two semi-VSPs touch on one of the things we rant about here regularly.
I would argue that David Brooks’ columns are also essentially mystical (believe it or not, I’m tired of talking about Bobo today, but everyone’s talking about his anti-stimulus idiocy in the comments). Yes, he wears glasses and talks about Hume, Burke, and Niebuhr, and even cites quantitative studies (from National Affairs and Steve Sailer, which aren’t so different when you get down to it). But there’s no evidence he understands any of the quantitative arguments — the citations are one and two-line throwaways, and he failed high-school math according to yesterday’s NY mag profile. The imaginary businessmen from Racine, Washington he communes with at the Applebee’s salad bar are no more real than the dolphins who saved Elian Gonzales.
I don’t find Nooners and her ilk to be all that toxic; sure, Brian Williams loves her, but she’s openly superstitious, and sometimes openly drunk. Mysticism dressed up as high-brow analysis is toxic. Using totebag-friendly pseudo-intellectual references to argue in favor of pointless wars and irrational economic policies is much more damaging than drunkenly blathering on about magical dolphins.
Dave Fud
Seems you have an itchy trigger finger, DougJ.
El Cid
Re
Video links? That would be fun to see.
TR
Of? Of what?!
Wait! I need closure on that anecdote!
DeadlyShoe
I think the mystics have cast Hold Blogger on him. Where’s a counterspell when you need it?
General Egali Tarian Stuck
Merlin with a spiky acid-tipped tongue.
DougJ
@Dave Fud:
My browser died on me while writing it. It was weird.
El Cid
Wouldn’t an emphasis on evidence-based pundits undercut the high-level market for establishment-oriented insider blatherers? Wouldn’t there be an increase risk that pundits would say things which departed from or upset the sort of establishment consensus their publications or networks supported?
How else could pundits keep assuring us over a period of years and years of continuing wars that these next 6 months are crucial, in some presumed contrast to 6 other, less important months?
JGabriel
OT, but speaking of mystics, Prince declares the Intertubez is OVAH:
Damnsies! We’re only as hip as The Real World now.
I am: disillusioned and so distraught.
.
Redshift
Yep, Krugman nailed it today — Brooks’ citations are argument from authority, nothing more. He not only thinks “smart people believe this” is sufficient argument against actual evidence, he conveniently ignores how wrong his chosen “smart people” have been in the recent past.
sukabi
I put it to you that the whole fuc*ing bunch of the Washington pundocracy is toxic… they play a game of “How Far Can The Bar Be Lowered”… unfortunately the bar would have to be exhumed to even be seen they’ve lowered it so much.
david mizner
Yes, and Brooks, unlike Nooner, influences Dems.
And 75 percent of what’s wrong with Obama is exemplified by his determination to please David Brooks.
Mark S.
I’ve come around to your thinking on Brooks. Reading his 8,000th column on how we need to slash social security and pensions so millionaires can keep enjoying their tax cuts has convinced me that Bobo is really a force for evil. He’s the happy face of Social Darwinism.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Seriously? I’ve seen hints that she was quite the party girl back in the day, and wet-brain would certainly explain a lot, but I got the impression that she had done a Catholic version of the whole Gee Dumbya dry-drunk-put-down-the-bottle-pick-up-the-bible thing
DougJ
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Sometimes when she’s on tv, she’s certainly drunk. Maybe you have to have spent every holiday of your life around Irish relatives of a certain type to see it, but it’s pretty obvious to me she’s drunk sometimes.
sukabi
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Dumbya may have claimed publicly that he was off the sauce, but his body language, speech and demeanor call him a liar…
Redshift
@El Cid: Being evidence-based is a lot more work, so the free market rewards low-effort idiocy over high-effort correctness.
Seriously, the best description I’ve ever read of why punditry works the way it does is that for a pundit, it’s better to be outrageous than accurate, because if your outrageous prediction is correct one time, you’re considered a genius and can ride the gravy train for the rest of your career, while the hundred times you’re wrong just fade into the sea of blather. (Though based on the evidence, I guess there’s an additional constraining factor that you have be outrageous only in ways that don’t bite the hand that feeds you, in order to be around enough to make that one lucky prediction.)
MattF
To be more fair here, I’d say Noonan’s method is introspective rather than mystical. She’s flat wrong about all sorts of things– but she’s openly unempirical in her method– there’s some information about how her mind works, and that can be of interest. Brooks– he does the same thing, but he’s less honest about it, and so, IMO, less interesting.
To take a sillier example of the same thing, for the past week, the coyote character (supposedly ‘liberal’) in the comic strip “Prickly City” has been avowing his love for Sarah Palin. Anyone who actually knows a male liberal will realize how separated-from-reality this is. But the fact that a winger can imagine, in all seriousness, that a liberal will fall in love with Palin is revealing– it’s a delusion, but it’s part of a world view.
beltane
Maybe I’m in a bad mood because it’s hot as hell here, but I’m going to go out on a limb here and state that Noonan, and Brooks, and almost all the rest of them are not only toxic, they are like cyanide to our civilization. They are the guardians of a failed, discredited cult, paid to snuff out the life of any reality-based ideas that threaten to enter mainstream consciousness.
There are many drunken loons in NYC. They mutter their delusions to themselves as they huddle in doorways and on park benches. Except for Peggy Noonan, they do not write newspaper columns or appear on TV.
schrodinger's cat
@DougJ: Your browser loves Bobo, is it a totebagger?
Ash Can
@JGabriel: Call Fred Hiatt; that boy has a future on the Wipe-O OpEd page.
Mark S.
Oh God yes Nooners is either drunk or on Quaaludes during most of her TV appearances. Truman Capote was better at keeping it in check.
ulee
Nooners lives in a low level inebriated state, puncuated by high levels of intoxication, and subsequent periods of deep sleep from which peers have found her difficult to awaken.
flukebucket
I always thought she was one of those who go running for the shelter of a mother’s little helper.
But maybe it is liquor.
Te
The Brooks money-quote was this…
the Demand Siders write as if everybody who disagrees with them is immoral or a moron.
in the middle of an 800-word piece confirming that he is a moron.
A moron for reminding the world he hasn’t the remotest clue about economics, a moron for referring to Keynes as a “lesser mathematician”, a moron for siding with European central bankers who Krugman has long regarded as morons, and particularly, a moron for thinking that a fight with K-thug will end well for him.
jrg
@flukebucket:
I always thought it was pills, too. She comes off as a real space cadet.
middlewest
Unfortunately, the entire economic debate in this country has fallen back into the same old mystical supply-side twaddle. And dems are going to lose (again) if they try to fight back with reality. Trying to beat magical thinking with logic and evidence almost never works, just ask the Amazing Randi.
They need their own magic spell to defeat the cult of austerity and fiscal virtue. And I think they have it: putting America back to work. Dems should talk about “working Americans” like a homeopath talks about water- it fixes fucking everything. Don’t get dragged into the specifics or any boring economics, just treat “working Americans” like it’s a freaking magic wand and wave it in republican’s faces every time they try to bitch about spending.
Reduce the deficit? -working Americans will do it.
Fix the economy? -working Americans will do it.
Cut wasteful spending? -Sure, just spend money on working Americans, which is never waste.
Of course, this will never happen, because Blue Dogs exist.
The Main Gauche of Mild Reason
@DougJ:
I’m pretty sure it’s Valium or some related sedative. She doesn’t seem to slur her words on it, but she’s definitely out there. To be fair, I’ve known people to take Valium before public speaking or interviews; it’s possible that she gets really nervous on TV.
slag
I just watched Mind Over Money: http://video.pbs.org/video/1479100777/ this weekend that got me thinking on this very topic. The clash between the behavioral economists and the free market fundamentalists seems to be really heating up now, and I’d like to think something good will come of it. But since mysticism still reigns supreme, I’d probably be better off hoping that Jupiter will align with Mars and that this will be the dawning of the Age of Aquarius. It’s a more likely outcome. Besides, love ruling our planet sounds like a lot more fun than reality ruling our economic thinking.
Tonal Crow
@Redshift:
Not to excuse low-effort idiocy, but it can’ t be emphasized enough that evidence-based argument is far more difficult — and far more time-consuming — than faith-based blathering. It also, almost by definition, attracts people who take evidence and logical argument seriously, which means, among other things, that they tend to spend too much time and effort debunking bunk, thus eventually burning out. Meanwhile, the faith-based blatherers effortlessly and endlessly recycle their fictions, complete with “citations” to show their “seriousness”.
In short, a form of natural selection causes the proportion of faith-based blather-pundits to rise over time. Darwin, ya can’t escape him.
Tonal Crow
@slag: Ah, behavioral economics: finally, some science.
Mark S.
@The Main Gauche of Mild Reason:
I think you’re probably right. I remember watching her on one of those roundtables with Sam and Cokie and I swear to God she had her eyes closed the whole time. She was on something.
russell
For “mystic”, read “living in a world of her own imagination”.
Redshift
@Tonal Crow: Critically, it’s more effort for the writer and for the reader. While we get a lot of low-quality BS these days (e.g., Sarah Palin, who constantly tells obvious whoppers that aren’t going to convince anyone who isn’t already in the cult), it’s possible to write BS that sounds like it’s evidence-based, but doesn’t take nearly as much effort as actual reality-based work. It can easily snare the unwary, while retaining the fundamental quality of BS that while it takes a lot of effort to debunk, it takes almost none to pivot to a new line of BS.
slag
@Tonal Crow: Admittedly, my view of the field of economics as a whole is very dim. I don’t see how you can keep people who are using equations to predict the market from using those same equations to influence the market. At some point, I fail to see how the whole enterprise doesn’t just descend into one big self-fulfilling prophesy. But at least the behavioralists are trying to explain stuff that the free marketers mostly throw their hands up at. At least they’re trying to add some value to the field.
Corner Stone
@DougJ:
It’s also why she acts the way she does the rest of the time. The little dramatic pause before she turns a phrase, the very slow and measured movements of her hands as she drags them back across the table to her body. She’s very reserved physically, and this isn’t due to just her age.
So that when she is drunk, the normal tells don’t outright glare.
DFS
It’s funny to me that these dudes go to such trouble to find elaborate ways of describing what Noonan does (“ad hoc explanations,” “narrative construction”), when you could simply and bluntly call it “making shit up.”
Allison W.
@david mizner:
This ‘I’m not daddy’s favorite’ nonsense is arrogant, childish and getting old. Whenever he does something you guys don’t like its solely because he hates the Left and favors the Right. Obama take his decisions and jobs seriously. You should remember that instead of boiling it down to who daddy likes best.
Death Panel Truck
I live in Washington state, and there’s no Racine here. You might find one in Wisconsin, however.
Cacti
Brooks along with George Will are proof that if you wear glasses, people will assume you’re smart.
jwb
@Mark S.: I think it’s more cynical than that: I think Bobo knows very well that he’s full of shit but also knows he gets that pay check for writing such shit.
flukebucket
There ain’t no salad bars at Applebee’s either.
Mike in NC
Where’s Pol Pot when you need him?
Holden Pattern
One is reminded of A Fish Called Wanda, wherein Otto is played by Brooks:
russell
Why do you hate French literature?
Brian J
I find Noonan to be incredibly useless because, unlike other columnists people regularly criticize, she doesn’t even make an attempt to make an argument about policy. I don’t read her columns much, but any time I do, or any time I see her on television, it’s as if she has managed to combine the worst elements of a gossip column, the horse race analysis of political reporting, speeches at a fund raiser, and a paper by an ignorant communications major in college into pointless columns week after week. Perhaps it’s my ideology clashing with hers, but she’s not even amusing. She’s been around for a while, so it’s probably hard to get a handle on why, exactly, she was hired, but if it was for sharp insights into the world of politics or policy, they stopped getting their money’s worth a long time ago.
bago
You need to change the fundamental notation used in argument. When I try to make a point at work I have snippets of code, runtime logs, sql queries and documentation to bring a point. It’s 2010. When talking data, bring your A game. Leave this pointless unsubstantiated bullshit to the dark ages.
Seriously, it’s 20 fucking 10. Get your shit together.
Sarcastro
Why the word ‘mysticism’? It’s not really an apt word here. I mean… it’s politics. You can talk to these people. They’re real. Peggy isn’t loading up on mushrooms or whipping herself bloody with reeds in order to better understand the experience of Barak Obama. No, she’s just making shit up that makes her feel better. “Romanticism” is a better word I think.
catclub
@Mike in NC:
I like the cut of your jib, young man.
Snarki, child of Loki
There’s nothing wrong with the american economy that can’t be solved by hauling Bobo out to the middle of Wall St., and eviscerating him to propitiate the Gods of Capitalism.
Worth a try, anyway, and the average IQ of the NYT editorial page would go up by 10 points or so.
Tonal Crow
@bago: I wish. The problem is that it’s more effective to argue to the public’s emotions than it is to argue to the public’s intellect. Republicans know this, hence their electoral success despite their policy fail. [1] Some progressives in the weeds know this, but no one listens to them. Democrats on the Hill don’t know this, and seemingly refuse to learn it.
[1] If Republicans got support commensurate with their policy successes, I expect they’d attract more votes than bubonic plague, and less than swine flu.
4jkb4ia
How could you get into the University of Chicago and fail high school math?
(Now if I have to give the complete story of EW and Me, and I have to admit that I was defeated by the Lebesgue integral, DougJ won’t cry. He might smirk.)
(After skimming I think this pdf was a nice explanation of the Lebesgue integral)
El Cid
@Snarki, child of Loki: Just take all Bobo’s money away, allow him no contacts with the outside world, and make him live on and scrub the boats of fisherfolk whose lives are and are about to be further devastated by that tiny little oil volcano down in the Gulf.
bago
Oh, the ones on the hill know it. (Seriously, it’s not a frickin hill. It’s a landscaping mistake that extends for 5 blocks.) The whole emotional debate vis a vis getting elected is a significant factor, but I think that if senate rules were changed to allow vigorous back and forth debate, with laptops and whiteboards we could see some progress. You could call bullshit in seconds instead of waiting for days of sycophantic press to circulate your weak ass talking point, affecting the low information electorate.
bago
This idiotic provincialism is baked into DC. What’s the difference between Chevy Chase and Friendship Heights? 5 blocks. Bethesda? Right across that park there.
aimai
I’ve got to say that I think the word “mysticism” is exactly correct for Bobo and for Nooners–though of course more so for Noonan than for Brooks. Noonan deliberately styles herself as a mystic, as a visionary, as a person who always prefers a mystical, occult, obscure and faith based vision to cold hard facts. In fact when facts or polls run against her she usually turns her back on them directly and starts blathering on about souls, angels, visions, feelings.
Brooks does too, its just that his personal version of mysticism is, as Krug and others have pointed out, a ritualized davening in the direction of apparently almost randomly chosen right wing authorities in fields like sociology, economics and philosophy. Since he doesn’t understand these people in the slightest, but only their position along a narrow left/right axis, he’s usually wrong. But he is unswervingly true to a personal faith in which it doesn’t matter what reality says, along as his moral tale always ends up where he needs it to go to receive his paycheck. I used to amuse myself by trying to determine within the shortest number of sentences just how Bobo was going to slag the dems, or liberalism. Could I get from a windy and abstract comment about garbage collection, or turtles, to a fifth paragraph denunciation of free public education? It got too easy, and too sickening,and I had to give it up. But if I were to score myself I’d say that I was batting 1000 or whatever the appropriate score would be. It got so that by the end of the first sentence, definitely by the end of the second, I’d have grasped the hook and seen the dead fish reeling in no matter how absurd, tendentious, or downright false the premises of the column.
aimai
Tonal Crow
BTW, Dougj, shouldn’t this post be titled “Mystic Mountain Hop”?
MikeJ
@Tonal Crow: No, it’s a perfectly good Van Morrison ref.
4jkb4ia
Ah, he didn’t fail. He got Ds at worst.
brantl
@El Cid: It’s not fun to see; if she’s not drunk, she’s suffering from just-back-from-the-edge terminal anoxia. She slurs, she gets a shit-eating grin about her own imagined cleverness. It’s a Nora-Desmond’s-gone-to-complete-shit moment.
flukebucket
She’s always seemed kind of Paula Abdulish to me. You know something is wrong you just are not sure what.
4jkb4ia
At least in 1998 at the University of Chicago when they shook up the core, calculus was part of it. Students can now choose between calculus, statistics, and computer programming.
At the bottom of this article we see that between 1966 and 1984 the four undergraduate divisions had more power to modify the core curriculum than they do now.
mattt
I’ve been wanting to ask for months but didn’t want to sound like a noob…..can somebody explain “totebagger?” I’ve lurked at B-J since the BSE (Before Schiavo Era) but somehow missed that coining. And it’s (inexplicably) not in the lexicon.
My theory is that it refers to dimwitted passers-around of conventional wisdom who believe they belong to some kind of intellectual elite because they watch the News Hour instead of CNN….and carry around the totebag they got by donating to PBS to prove it!
Linda Featheringill
Peggy Noonan:
I have often thought that WaPo keeps her on as a token liberal or female or something. The Power That Be over there would appreciate having someone fill that position with such disorganized writing so that no one could take her seriously.
Otherwise, why don’t they try to put Rachel in that position?
Noonan is not a threat. Rachel, bless her heart, is a bulldog or some other vicious breed of attack dog.
Anyway, tokenism makes me angry. Every time I read something that Peggy has pulled up from somewhere, I get upset. Usually, I just try to stay happy by staying away from Noonan.
Nellcote
Isn’t Noonan’s main claim to fame ripping off phrases from the Bible for Raygun speeches?
jl
Brooks’ column today is a jaw dropper because his conclusion is the exact opposite of the first 80% of his column.
After intellectually confused arguments against the ‘Demand Siders’ based on very doubtful facts, unsupported assertion, name calling, and mind reading of small businesspeople from sensible sounding places in the midwest, and a citation to a paper with very insufficient detail regarding its methods, and sweeping conclusions about economy wide macroeconomic multipliers that do not have anything to do with its very poorly explained statistical analysis, Brooks comes out for
extending unemployment,
more aid to state and local governments,
which are exactly the measures that the non ‘Demand Side’ call budget busters, which according to all of the preceding analysis in the column, would be counterproductive because it would increase current deficits and therefore (supposedly) undermine confidence.
Brooks’ column today reads like a gigantic hedge, with all the GOP friendly analysis ‘above the fold’, and the hedge tacked on the end, with no justification whatever.
In fact, a large and continuing program of federal aid to state and local governments (larger than was eventually defended by the administration or passed by Congress) was one of the indispensable parts Larry Summers’ proposed stimulus when this administration took office.
I’ve read that Obama pays attention to Brooks. If Obama pays attention to Brooks’ on economics, then Obama does not know enough economics to understand when he is listening to a person who does not know anything about it.
Nellcote
@mattt:
It come from the tendency of PBS fundraising to offer totebags as a reward for donations. Most offen it refers to NPR pundits.
Sheila
This is highly unfair to mysticism. Check out Walter Stace’s classic book The Teachings of the Mystics to get an idea of how the word is used correctly. Neither Noonan nor Brooks have any chance of recognizing that they are one with the cosmos.
slag
@mattt:
Yeah. Why isn’t it in the lexicon? DougJ fail.
mclaren
Peggy Noonan is dangerous because she remains the respectable establishment voice of anti-intellectualism in America.
I keep coming back to Noonan’s seminal 2004 Wall Street Journal column “Broken Glass Democrats” in which she praises the drunk-driving C student who did so much to wreck this country:
Praising the fumbling bungling stumbling bumbling drunk-driving C student formerly in the Oval Office because “he’s not an intellectual. Intellectuals start all the trouble int he world” says it all.
This is the main force destroying the Republican party right now — rabid anti-intellectualism, a know-nothing worship of ignorance and incompetence, an adoration of “gut” decision-making and a contempt for experience and expertise. It’s the essential myth behind the Reagan debacle — the fantasy that a very old very ignorant totally incompetent actor somehow magically ended the Cold War and deified America.
In reality, Reagan’s failed and foolish policies of deficit military spending and bringing Christian fundamentalists into politics and cranking up the futile war on drugs sowed the seeds of America’s current decline. We’re drowning in debt and mired in unwinnable overseas wars and hopelessly addicted to middle east oil and locked into a prison-industrial death spiral of a failed but unstoppable drug war because of the idiotic policies followed by Reagan 30 years ago.
If instead of following Reagan’s crazy stupid policies we had followed Jimmy Carter’s policies on energy and avoiding foreign invasions, America would today be energy-independent and we’d have no trillion-dollar deficits (which are attributable entirely to our spending more than a trillion dollars a year on a military that can’t win wars anymore).
Peggy Noonan’s anti-intellectualism explains the rise of Sarah Palin in the Republican party. It explains why senile sociopaths like Ronald Reagan and their failed and foolish policies of tax cuts and deficit military spending are still promoted and adored in Republican circles. Noonan’s anti-intellectualism is the impetus behind America’s stupid worship of cowardly incompetent 4-star generals like Stanley McChrystal (see “Rise of the four-star deities” in The New Statesman) and the Tea party’s crazy advocacy of tax cuts combined with increased military spending that will also somehow (inexplicably) also balance the budget.
Peggy Noonan’s anti-intellectualism explains the Republican love of supply side Laffer Curve tax cuts. To someone who thinks “intellectuals cause all the problems in the world,” math is an annoyance, “facts are stupid things,” and if we just wish hard enough that cutting taxes will balance the budget, then wishing will make it so. Peggy Noonan’s anti-intellectualism explains why the Republicans are polling so well right now, primed to take back the House and possibly the Senate this November — because deep down, Americans hate smart people who tell them unpalatable complex truths. Americans would rather deny the facts and live in a magical world where “gut” decisions by golden-voiced actors win the Cold War and reduce the deficit by cutting taxes.
Peggy Noonan’s anti-intellectualism is far scarier than David Brooks’ class war of the rich against the poor. If Brooks’ view wins this November at the polls, the worst that can happen is that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer — but if Peggy Noonan’s anti-intellectualism wins out in the electorate, it’s global warming denial and peak oil denial and religious fundamentalism and the suppression of science in favor of Lysenkoism, and that’s a lot more dangerous in the long run.
Honus
“…but she’s openly superstitious, and sometimes openly drunk.”
To paraphrase Kurt Vonnegut, “this was a common combination on the planet earth.”
Platonicspoof
A remarkable graphic on the deficit causes at Clusterstock and from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
Thanks to Joan McCarter at the GOS:
Bill Murray
@Allison W.: well there is this article from this weekend http://nymag.com/news/media/67010/ which stated
“Brooks first met Obama in 2005, when Obama was a freshman senator. He was impressed by Obama’s command of political philosophy, not to mention his tailoring. When Obama’s book The Audacity of Hope came out in 2006, Brooks praised it in his column and urged Obama to run for president.
Since then, Obama’s team has courted Brooks assiduously. Emanuel once arranged for Obama to swing by a meeting he and Axelrod were having with Brooks. At a dinner of conservative writers at George Will’s house, where the guests included Charles Krauthammer and William Kristol, among others, Obama jokingly asked Brooks, “What are you doing here?” At another meeting with journalists, Brooks sat next to Obama, who would periodically turn to Brooks and point out that the policy being discussed was quite Burkean. “You could tell he was really conscious of his presence,” says his Times colleague Gail Collins.
At The Week’s opinion-journalism awards dinner in 2009, where Brooks was being honored, Axelrod made the love affair explicit, praising him as a “true public thinker” amid the “insipid, instant commentary and one-hour news cycles.”
jl
@jl:
I meant to type:
‘extending unemployment BENEFITS’
instead of
‘extending unemployment’
in my comment above.
Evolved Deep Southerner
Better watch that “openly drunk” shit, DougJ. Back in April, I believe it was, Wonkette had to post the only straightfaced post in its history – a correction – after a reader had sent in a photo of Lady Peggington Noonington and Major Garrett drinking in a DC bar. Only it wasn’t Noonan or Garrett in the photo. And Lady Noonington’s lawyer said she didn’t drink. (The comments under that correction are classic, by the way.)
Evolved Deep Southerner
http://wonkette.com/tag/ahem
The third comment down from Ted Kennedy Breakdancing pretty well sums up the tone of those comments.
Honus
@mclaren: I think H L. Mencken said it best: “someday democracy will advance to the point where a complete idiot will be elected president.”
mclaren
@Honus: Alas, that’s already happened — four times now. 1980, 1984, 2000, and 2004. Waiting for Sarah Palin in 2012 ’cause the fifth time’s the charm…
Mike G
@mclaren:
If there’s a fire on the block, he’ll sit there like a deer in the headlights for seven minutes, waiting for someone to tell him what to do. Then he’ll wander out to the street and order around the firefighters like he knows more about their job than they do. He’ll bitch about their unions, salaries and retirement packages when their backs are turned, maybe cut a fire hose to get a cheap laugh out of his drunken jerk buddies. He won’t give a shit about the people whose house just burnt down, it’s all just an entertaining spectacle for a solipsistic asshole who makes everything about him. Tomorrow he’ll complain to the city about the flooding foam in the street and his shrubbery damaged by the firefighters.
And who the fuck is Sally?
khead
I thought this post was pretty funny until my wife had to wake me up a while ago.