Brooks & Dumb: Serious As A Case of Shingles

(Drew Sheneman via GoComics.com)

... which won’t kill you, but might make you wish you were dead. For purposes of relief via moxicautery, a couple counter-irritants. Jonathan Chait at TNR wonders “Will No One Rid Me of This Meddlesome Candidate?”:

... Yes, it’s really time for somebody to start persuading moderate or mainstream Republicans that Rick Perry is dangerously unsuited to the presidency. If only Brooks knew of anybody who would be good at making a case like that…

Wait. Maybe this is a job for conservatives who don’t have to put themselves before the voters. Like perhaps some kind of public intellectual. If only there was some kind of moderate conservative columnist, perhaps with a national reach at a newspaper like the New York Times.

Hey—I’ve got it. Brooks surely knows Ross Douthat. Maybe he can ask him to write that column!

And the invaluable Doghouse Riley, if only for the brillance of “With Luck, The Capitalists Will Innovate A New Knot To Hang Themselves With“:

IF there was anything to American Exceptionalism—other than the fact that we dominate a hemisphere, and came out of two European global wars physically unscathed and economically better off than when we went in—wouldn’t it show up in our politics? Wouldn’t we have the wisest counsel, the fullest debate, the most trenchant commentary?

Would we have David Brooks at the New York Times?...

I’d just like to point out, yet again, how the “moderation” in Brooks’ “moderate conservatism” works.

Brooks is going to say essentially what I said the other day about Mitt Romney: that he now finds himself unable to jab his leading rival because the same clinical insanity that infects the public persona of Rick Perry infects 80% of the Republican electorate. Brooks, of course, substitutes “small government conservative” for “certifiably batshit”. It is the Times...

[T]he thing I find curious is how “moderates” like Brooks, and “fiscal ‘conservatives’” like Mitch Daniels, act like the moderate conservative Reaganite in the White House is wearing an OSU sweatshirt in Ann Arbor. Look at what Brooks finally (in the last two paragraphs) gets around to saying about Perry: he’s slimy, he’s a panderer, if he’s a borderline crook we need to redefine our borders. He leaves out (despite his economist credentials) the massive sucking sound at the center of the Texas Miracle. What th’ hell’s so bad about Obama by comparison? Health care?

Is he gonna say that? (Is Daniels?) Not and risk the franchise; you can’t be The Moderate Republican Liberals Love if they’ve thrown you out of the Republican party. Brooks “watches” (the polls) as “moderate ‘conservatism’” “disappears” from the Republican electorate. We hear barely a peep. That is, barely a third-hand sideswipe at Rush Limbaugh, or Sarah Palin, or the Teabaggers both he and Douthat had kinda sorta identified as the problem with the Party, circa 2007. Go back and read ‘em in early 2009, as they start looking for a door to hide behind, realize it’s no good, and so proclaim that the Teabaggers are really themselves. Just less refined.

Th’ fuck’s wrong with these people?

There may be more damning indictments of Republican “intellectualism” than the fact that these guys have spent the last thirty years inventing excuses for utter crackpotism, first with the idea of eternally harvesting its votes, now in the hopes that the ‘conservative’ welfare spigot will stay on, but you have to google “William F. Buckley” and “Civil Rights Movement” to find ‘em.

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Between thought and expression

What made Bush such a bad president? I lay awake at night wondering about this sometimes. Today, Jonathan Bernstein revisits the question with a link back to an interesting piece he wrote last year. I think this is right:

We’re still early in the building of the history of the Bush years, but here’s my guess. We’ll find that what we saw was pretty much what was happening. He didn’t act aggressively when faced with potential policy disaster—whether we’re talking about the summer of 2001 and terrorism, or 2003-2005 in Iraq, or 2004-2008 and Afghanistan, or 2007-2008 and the economy, or Katrina, or anything else. We’re going to find that he strutted around a good deal, but was otherwise passive and indifferent, and easily manipulated by those around him. And my guess is we’re going to find the big things that went wrong (terror, Iraq, Afghanistan, torture, the economy) joined by dozens of smaller things that slipped through the cracks for eight years.

I think this is at least partly wrong:

A couple things…first, about Dick Cheney. I was talking to a staunch Republican former student a couple of weeks ago, and mentioned that one of the biggest surprises to me during the Bush years was that Cheney had turned out to be a lot less capable than I had expected. My student was utterly shocked that anyone could think that. This depressed me no end. He’s an open-minded guy, and certainly not prone to believing that whatever Republicans do is always correct. But it was clear that within his information bubble, the possibility that Cheney just wasn’t very good at his job had never been raised. Bush, too. He did recognize that things had gone wrong, but saw it more as policy choices and, to some extent, ideology. In my view? Even something such as torture, which I think was a (outside of the morality of it) disastrous policy, was far more a case of incompetence than it was ideology.

At a certain point, what’s the difference between incompetence and slavish adherence to an unworkable ideology? Maybe torture isn’t the best example here, let’s take the decision to go to war in Iraq. Cheney wanted to go into Iraq for ideological reasons. Most likely, there was no way to do the invasion in a way that wouldn’t lead to chaos, since sending in 500K+ troops (not saying that wouldn’t have led to chaos, but I’ve seen it written that maybe it wouldn’t have) was not politically viable, but Cheney believed (for reasons I would describe as ideological) that even a deeply flawed invasion of Iraq was preferable to not invading Iraq.

So it is with economic policy. A highly competent implementation of Hooverist/Hayekian economic policies during a recession will likely exacerbate the recession. But if you’ve drunk enough of the Austrian Kool-Aid (Gruner Veltliner?), that doesn’t matter, because you believe that in the long run the economy will be stronger for it. Similarly, a well-designed, competent move toward government default would ravage the economy, but if you’re Michele Bachmann, you believe that would be good, in the long term.

If you’re a pundit and your foundational beliefs are that (a) both sides are wrong and (b) the American middle-class has it too good, then no matter how well you write and reason from these principles, you will likely also endorse Hooverism and revel in the “shared pain” that it causes everyone.

In the end, it’s all mostly unfalsifiable anyway, now neocons can say that Saddam would have nuked us if we hadn’t gone into Iraq, in 2020 the Reasonoids will say that eight years of near-recession made our economy stronger in the long term, at some point Jacob Weisberg and Andrew Sullivan will write that Ryan’s vouchercare proposal really did “advance the debate”. Moreover, all of these people believe what they’re saying and writing is true.

Will that be incompetence or a skillful expression of their ideology?

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Slippery Angry Black Man Ruins Chances of Agreement

Sorry to do this to you, but Bobo is a masterpiece this morning:

Alas, the dream of a Grand Bargain died Friday evening for three reasons.

First, it was always going to be difficult to round up the necessary Congressional votes. Republicans didn’t want the tax increases. Democrats didn’t want the entitlement cuts.

Second, the White House negotiating process was inadequate. Neither the president nor the House speaker ever wrote down and released their negotiating positions. Everything was mysterious, shifting and slippery. One day the president was agreeing to an $800 billion revenue increase; the next day he was asking for $400 billion more. Spending cuts that seemed to be part of the package suddenly seemed hollow. Negotiating partners disappeared.

It was phenomenally hard to figure out exactly who was offering what. Democrats in Congress were kept in the dark and were understandably suspicious. It was all a recipe for misunderstandings, hurt feelings and collapse.

Third, the president lost his cool. Obama never should have gone in front of the cameras just minutes after the talks faltered Friday evening. His appearance was suffused with that “I’m the only mature person in Washington” condescension that drives everybody else crazy. Obama lectured the leaders of the House and Senate in the sort of patronizing tone that a junior high principal might use with immature delinquents. He talked about unreturned phone calls and being left at the altar, personalizing the issue like a spurned prom date.

The Brooks rundown faults three things:

First, “BOTH SIDES.” Second, OBAMA IS SLIPPERY. Third, OBAMA LOST HIS COOL.

I’m just going to stop this post now before I say what I want to and it becomes representative of the “angry left.”

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The Sad Long Life of David Brooks

Yesterday I posted a link to David Brooks’ most recent magnum vomitus in which he referenced an article by Dudley Clendinen called “The Good Short Life”. Clendinen’s article is a beautiful, brutal, prickly and funny thing, which you should read immediately, if you have not yet had the pleasure. It will be the best thing you read all day.

Then, if you will, come back and I’ll dare to append some of my own poor scribblings. And a bit of ranting about David Brooks. There will be swearing and David Brooks’s writing may even be compared in a very insulting fashion to baked goods.

Off you go.

See what I mean? That’s the sort of extraordinary writing that David Brooks will never succeed in producing – because the Clendinen article is written by a fine, honorable and self-aware human being and David Brooks’ articles are written by … well, by David Brooks.

I have never met Mister Clendinen, and it saddens me that I almost certainly won’t have the chance to know him. I wish him much joy of the time he has left, much dancing and much walking of dogs, and a quiet and happy death.

On the other hand, David Brooks is a person I would move continents to avoid. While I wish him a long life and little pain – because that is the decent thing to wish for anyone, no matter how morally bankrupt and intellectually turnip-like they may be – I don’t say I wouldn’t be happy if he was to suffer a little accident which removed his ability to write, such as it is. To be frank, I’d probably open a bottle of champagne to celebrate, but it’s generally not something I actively wish for. Actually, if I’m brutally honest, I will admit that rereading both articles made me angry, and that there were moments where I allowed myself to imagine graphic acts of violence against Mr Brooks, but that’s as far as it went, I promise. It was something lingering involving two kilos of anchovies in his pants and an hungry petrel, I seem to recall.

Most satisfying. Very Tippi Hedren. More »

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How long is it until we can leave David Brooks out on a hillside to die?

As I have mentioned before, I try very hard not to read anything that David Brooks writes, just in case my brain becomes so revolted it tries to crawl out my ears.

His most recent excresence, however, is so appalling, such a pile of unthinking horror topped off with scads of twaddle masquerading as sympathy, that I can’t leave it alone.

The fiscal crisis is driven largely by health care costs. We have the illusion that in spending so much on health care we are radically improving the quality of our lives. We have the illusion that through advances in medical research we are in the process of eradicating deadly diseases. We have the barely suppressed hope that someday all this spending and innovation will produce something close to immortality.

...

Obviously, we are never going to cut off Alzheimer’s patients and leave them out on a hillside. We are never coercively going to give up on the old and ailing. But it is hard to see us reducing health care inflation seriously unless people and their families are willing to do what Clendinen is doing — confront death and their obligations to the living.

...

My only point today is that we think the budget mess is a squabble between partisans in Washington. But in large measure it’s about our inability to face death and our willingness as a nation to spend whatever it takes to push it just slightly over the horizon.

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Ah Well. Never Bet Against Applebee’s Salad Bars

I should know better.  Yesterday I made the obvious error of suggesting that maybe, just maybe, David Brooks iz lerning.

To be fair, I hedged a bit—but still, I suggested that we had at least the weekend before the essential BoBo-ness of the man reasserted itself.

Wrong.  As commenter MattH pointed out, it was mere hours before the facile, flaccid stylings of the David Brooks we know and love reasserted themselves.

In Friday’s regular roundtable of horrors on NPR’s ATC, Brooks managed to produce a truly vintage performance, starting with this:

Mr. BROOKS: Well, the first thing that could be said is they’ve gotten it wrong and a lot of people have gotten it wrong. They didn’t expect this. Remember when the stimulus passed, they thought unemployment rate would be down around 7, when it’s up at 9.2 now. Then we have the summer of recovery, so we clearly don’t understand the way the economy’s going.

FSM help us all when Brooks gets to talking econ.  People do understand a great deal about the way the economy is going.  Brooks works with one of them, who happens to be a Nobel laureate.  Just today he published data sourced from the Congressional Budget Office that describes what the stimulus did, and why it now has so little impact on employment.

This isn’t rocket science.  This is common knowledge, and it takes trivial effort to discover such numbers.  Brooks doesn’t make that effort, because he understands economics in precisely the same way he was able to interpret the semiotics of nonexistent salad bars at Applebees.

It gets worse:

Now, part of the problem is not their fault. When you have a financial crisis, you have a long, long, slow, very frustrating recovery. And we’re sort of in the middle of a normal financial crisis recovery which is very slow and miserable. But the thing that can be done is, I think, over decades we’ve added weight after weight to the economy and made it less flexible, a little more rigid, made it hard for people to hire and fire with various regulations and taxes and things like that. And it’s time for a generation-long effort to really reduce that stuff.

This is pure Brooks.  Say that out loud.  It doesn’t sound overtly stupid. There are sentences and punctuation and things that sound like words organized into claims of meaning.

But now read it again.  Ignore the assumption not in evidence—the claim that a priori financial crises resolve themselves slowly and painfully as a “normal”—i.e. natural; i.e. not subject to policy choices—quality.  Pay no attention the simply false claim that this is a “normal financial crisis” at all.  What happened during the Bush II presidency was not simply a recurrence of prior follies. It was the specific and predicted consequence of a whole series of decisions about the way to regulate (or not) a banking system.  But don’t mind that either.

Instead, look again at these sentences: More »

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Sticking the landing

I know, blah, blah, Halperincakes.

However, while acknowledging that the relevant points being made are much the same all over our side of the internets – Halperin is a douchenozzle, but perhaps we might want to concentrate more on him being a useless hack than his (not very) naughty words, and by the way has anyone in the media noticed that Republicans are holding the entire world economy to ransom? – I think some people deserve a front page mention for the sheer number of style points earned.

Steve Benen wins for plain speaking …

Let me say this as plainly as I know how: Republicans are threatening to deliberately cause a global recession. The president is willing to strike a deal that leans heavily in the GOP’s direction, and Republicans are refusing. Who, in this scenario, is being dickish?

Halperin’s choice of words pales in comparison to the fact that he’s offended by the president’s mild rebuke of political recklessness the likes of which American hasn’t seen in generations.

... while Alex Pareene at Salon just wins my undying devotion forever:

I don’t care what Halperin calls Barack Obama. But for the record, President Obama did not really act like a dick yesterday, which is unsurprising, because Mark Halperin is a horrible political analyst who is wrong about everything. (Also for the record, it takes one to know one.)

...

Being a professional observer of the “horse race” is bad enough, but Halperin doesn’t even understand the horse-race element of politics. He fails at being a hack. He’s too dumb to correctly parrot conventional wisdom. He is pretty sure Sarah Palin and Donald Trump are 2012 front-runners. He thought “suspending his campaign” to fix the economy and not knowing how many houses he has were both huge messaging victories for John McCain. He wrote a book about how to win in 2008 that predicted everything Hillary did, but in his world it all worked. He thought Bush’s political comeback would come any day now throughout the entirety of the years 2006-2008. He can’t interpret polls or see through the spin of GOP consultants who are much smarter than he. If I were revising the Hack list I’d put him above No. 1.

H/ts: Valvida and MattR

ETA: Just sticking a gratuitous “David Brooks is a dickhead” tag in there because DougJ left it off his post for some unconscionable reason.

EATA: Commenter ThatLeftTurnInABQ quoted for truthfulness:

From 2000-2004 we tried sticking forks, knives and spoons in whatever 110 volt outlets we could find around the house. That didn’t work so well, so from 2006-2008 we tried washing our hair. Then in 2010 the teabaggers decided that the problem with 2000-2004 was that it wasn’t enough, so now we are unplugging all the major appliances in the house so we can really get our freak on, starting with having sex with the 220 volt outlet behind the fridge.

Meanwhile, the backyard is on fire and robbers are hotwiring the SUV in the driveway, into which they’ve already loaded all of our clothes and money.

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A Long-Term Rental in the Village of the Damned

First of all, I guess I’d better make a dry-cleaner run really soon—I’m at an age when I haven’t been invited to a lot of weddings lately, but since a hell of a lot of residents of my state might be heading to the Chapel of Love all of a sudden, I’d better make sure my good clothes are looking tidy and fresh. Mazel tov, folks. And thank you, Governor Cuomo—you may be a Christie Lite with regard to taxes and public-sector unions, but on this issue you’re conducting a master class in arm-twisting for progressive ends, a class I wish a certain rather more prominent Democrat would show up for and take notes.

****
Having said that. I want to shift gears extrememely awkwardly, and talk about, um, David Brooks.

Yesterday’s Brooks column concerned a Rolling Stone story about a teenage girl who gained some fame posting provocative content online, with ultimately unpleasant consequences for herself and her family. Brooks lives for the moments when he’s given an opening to express moral outrage, in a squeaky, soft-spoken, but ultimately noodgy neo-Victorian way; this is a rather tawdry story, so I guess you can’t blame the guy for piuncing on the opportunity to finger-wag and scold.

But the conclusion to which his column builds is preposterous:

She is an extreme case of an enormous uncontrolled experiment that is playing out across the world. Young people’s brains are developing while they are immersed in fast, multitasking technology. No one quite knows what effect this is having….

Most important, some young people seem to be growing up without learning the distinction between respectability and attention.

What is he saying? That failing to learn “the distinction between respectability and attention” is some sort of Net-driven, multitasking-derived disease that’s utterly new, and that’s turned our kids into strange beings we respectability-craving elders can’t recognize—or control? Is he arguing that we have failed to communicate our highly developed focus on respectability to our young?

Has he been living in the same country I have for the past few decades?

Has he watched reality television? Has he missed the entire dysfunctional-youth memoir boom?

For that matter, has he missed the rise of shock-jockery and the infusion of its values into political discourse (Glenn Beck, Michael Savage), or the infusion into news of penny-dreadful tabloidism (from Hearst through Murdoch and Nancy Grace)? Has he missed thelast three years of Sarah Palin’s life?

This is America. We don’t do anything “respectable”—or at least we have nothing but contempt for those who do what’s respectable (e.g., schoolteachers, or people who punch in at a factory and do honest work). “Respectable” work isn’t honored, and, if it pays a decent wage, we want to put an end to that, stat. So, since most people can’t be Steve Jobs or Lloyd Blankfein, there’s simply no reasonable path to feeling “respectable” than doing something sensationalist.

That’s not the fault of synapse-fried teens. That’s our fault, as American adults.

(X-posted.)

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Both sides do it

How many ways can these fuckers find to say “both sides do it”? The always awful David Von Drehle:

Change is urgently needed. ObamaCare envisions change within the existing structure of the health care industry, while Republican Paul Ryan’s proposal would impose change by having elderly patients buy their own coverage, using government vouchers. Both of these represent huge departures from the status quo. If this election educates voters to make an informed choice between these options, we’ll be a stronger country for it.

But we certainly didn’t see that sort of informative campaign in the special Congressional election in New York’s 26th District last week. Instead, we saw candidates accuse each other of trying to destroy Medicare.

The Ryan plan ends Medicare. It is that simple. A voucher program is not Medicare. Telling voters that the Ryan plans ends Medicare is a statement of fact. We have reached a point in our discourse where Villagers think that it is sad and unfortunate when voters are told the truth.

Ruth Marcus:

Barack: You make some reasonable points.

Paul: So do you. We should do this again.

I get tired of saying this over and over but Medicare is a reasonably functional component of an otherwise dysfunctional health care system. That is all there is to this debate, when one looks at numbers. It’s cheaper than private insurance and its cost is growing more slowly than the cost of private insurance.

With each passing day, I became more sympathetic to Robespierre.

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We are all Ryanists now

Maybe I’m wrong to be a little freaked out by this, but I am:

Clinton praised the Democratic victory in NY-26 yesterday but added, “I hope Democrats don’t use this as an excuse to do nothing.”

Ryan responds: “My guess is it’s going to sink into paralysis is what’s going to happen. And you know the math. It’s just, I mean, we knew we were putting ourselves out there. You gotta start this. You gotta get out there. You gotta get this thing moving.”

They parted with Clinton telling Ryan that if he ever wanted to talk about it, he should “give me a call.”

I loves me some Big Dog. Maybe all these fuckers start to drink the Village Kool-Aid once they’ve got enough scratch, I don’t know.

Update. Here’s where that great meeting of the minds took place:

Participants in Peter G. Peterson Foundation’s 2nd Annual Fiscal Summit to Include President Bill Clinton, Members of Congress, National Economic Council Director Gene Sperling, Governor Mitch Daniels, National Fiscal Commission Co-Chair Alan Simpson and Member David Cote, New York Times Columnist David Brooks and The Atlantic Business and Economics Editor Megan McArdle.

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Watching the monkeys flinging poo

Good morning, dears. I was a little stuck for things to write this morning, so I thought I would have a look around and see what the pundits have managed to vomit up on our internets this morning.

I started off reading Maureen Dowd’s latest excrescence in the NYT about Obama in Ireland thinking it might be worth mocking, but quickly realised there are only so many different ways you can say “Jesus, Maureen, put down the bottle.”

Over at his blog, Bobo continues to fling links to random bits of other people’s sociological research in the vain hope that people will assume “The Social Animal” also contains actual science-like stuff, rather than being 350 pages of David whimpering about how Gail Collins won’t sleep with him.

Then I read Jonah Fucking Goldberg, whose view on Paul Ryan is, as far as I can work it out, that Paul Ryan should run because Jonah wants to sex him, but that if Paul Ryan ran and the Republican voters decided that they didn’t all want to sex him as well, the other candidates could then point out that they didn’t have cooties like Paul Ryan does and win the election that way.

I’m not kidding:

If you think that’s a huge problem, Ryan getting in the race might be the best possible option. Because by getting in, Ryan would allow the rest of the field to differentiate themselves from Ryan and the House budget. Most of the contenders would have to differentiate themselves from Ryan while also coming up with more serious entitlement-reform plans of their own than they might otherwise.

Let’s assume Ryan gets in and loses and, say, Tim Pawlenty wins the nomination. After “pushing off” from Ryan in the primaries, Pawlenty would be far better situated to tell Obama in the general, “Look, you’re running against Paul Ryan. He’s not on this stage. I am. I beat Paul Ryan. Deal with me and my ideas.”

In many ways, if Ryan doesn’t run we’ll have a similar problem to the one we had in 2008. There was no stand-in for Bush in the primaries, so there was nobody the candidates could differentiate themselves from in order to be the “not-Bush” or “anti-Bush” candidate. By the time McCain won the nomination, Obama could claim that electing McCain would amount to a third Bush administration. Without Ryan, the man of the moment, in the race, and without an obvious stand-in for him, the Republicans will be saddled with the Ryan plan whether they endorse it or not. And that means Obama will be able to run against a demonically caricatured Ryan instead of the actual nominee.

[Edited for clarity: I should make it clear, for those of you who don’t want to get out of the boat, that Jonah spends the rest of that column and another which he linked to fellating Ryan so hard one of his eyeballs popped out …

I think he could go all the way. I think he’s as close as we’ll ever get to an “Obama” candidate this year — a charismatic guy who taps into something in the zeitgeist and can articulate it in a compelling way. He’s certainly the only guy out there who can sell the Path to Prosperity. I’d like to think that if he got in the race, he’d win the primary and then take the fight to Obama. But that’s all hypothetical at this point. We’ll never know for sure if he doesn’t throw his hat in.

... which makes his Ryan-as-sacrificial-lamb idea even dumber than it looks on its own.]

I can’t take any more stupid this morning, so I’m going to go and watch Marge Albrechtson piss herself while she chases squirrels. At least that doesn’t make me want to murder anyone.

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