Ten things I hate about you
I Hate the New York Times has another solid anti-Bobo screed up, one that gives the perfect answer to the question “Why do totebaggers love David Brooks so much?”
10. He makes Andy Rooney look like Harmony Korine.
The first reason is my biggest gripe with Bobo though:
1. He’s wrong about everything.
Whether touting the great promise of W or predicting that the Republican Congress would govern as moderates, Bobo is indeed nearly always wrong. I could forgive that if he were more entertaining. Jon Chait is also almost always wrong (shame on me for going along with his impeachment predictions), but at least he’s punchy and funny. I could also forgive Bobo if he bored me but got everything right (like Nate Silver does). It’s Bobo’s combination of sober-minded tedium and off-the-mark prognostication that annoys me most.
And I can never shake the feeling that Bobo views his plodding, thorough-going Burkean gibberish as having intrinsic intellectual value, irrespective of its real-world accuracy. With modern conservatism, almost anything is potentialy an end in and of itself. I’m wrong but look how carefully and politely I argued. Who cares how much it costs and if it has anything to do with terrorism, spreading freedom is doing God’s work. Budget shmudget, Jeebus and John Galt would want us to have tax cuts.
“Las Vegas Resort Sues Tennessee Tea Party Group Over Hotel Bill
by Alex Alvarez | 2:38 pm, July 20th, 2011
» 7 comments
Some (certainly not I) might say that one Tennessee Tea Party group was brewing up trouble when it booked — then postponed, then ultimately canceled — a conference at the Palazzo resort in Las Vegas. The Las Vegas Review-Journal ventures to say they’re in hot water over the cancellation. The group, you see, had initially booked a conclave for July 14 -18, 2010 before postponing it for October of that year and then ultimately canceling the gathering altogether.”
http://www.mediaite.com/online.....otel-bill/
Of course he does; it’s part of what makes Bobo such a nattering douchebag.
Don’t let the tweed jacket fool you. On the Evil/Stupid axis, Bobo is deep in Evil’s backfield.
@eric: Ohhhh funny, I think that’s the one that most odious Judson Phillips runs. Maybe Southern Beale would know, since they are both Nashvilliains? He’s the villain, she’s the Nash, I guess. Why LO’D and Ed Schultz have that super putz on their shows, I’ll never know.
A quick point this
needs some kind of restatement like “thorough-going misunderstanding of Burke’s larger point and consequently gibberish.” Most or nearly all present-day invokers of Burke take his long, rambling, and badly constructed, by his own admission, text on the French Revolution as the sum total of Burke’s output and it isn’t.
To paraphrase Hannah Arendt, Bobo is the kind of people who lead you to the slaughter of masses of people.
It’s the banality of the evil.
I get the feeling from Dr. Shrill’s brief references, as though through clenched teeth, to his ‘colleague’ that if they weren’t in the same paper he’d be shredding him on a regular basis.
I laughed.
Great we get a Bobo and McArdle post today. Now we just need a Sullivan post. He has been pretty dumb since he got back. Maybe his replacements aren’t so bad after all.
Calpers is getting grumpy about the News Corp structure and management: News Corp investor urges reform to weaken Rupert Murdoch’s influence. NOT just Rupe, they don’t like the share structure and have voiced concerns about James in the past. There’s pressure at Dow Jones too vis-á-vis Hinton too. Gotta keep an eye on those quiet days: they sneak up on you. OK, off to go melt again.
ETA: Belated apologies for being so OT.
Brooks conjures a few imaginary characters, gives them names of historical figures to give them import and the false sense of honesty, and then has conversations with them in his own mind. Then he writes about those conversations as if they actually happened and are of actual relevance to whatever issue he’s focused on for that week.
In most circumstances, such activities would have one consigned to a psych ward. But because Brooks substitutes the names “Edmund Burke” and “Alexander Hamilton” where “Frank the Talking Rabbit” and “Barney the Ghost Pirate” would otherwise be, he gets a recurring gig on the editorial page of the third most circulated newspaper in the United States. Sic transit gravitas.
JSF @8:
So did I. A real, not virtual, LOL. The dog is looking at me strangely.
Nice reference to Murdoch, DougJ.
With all the hacking in the news, Snoop DougJ would have been good too.
Also too, no one is more industrious than Bobo when it comes to making absolutely sure he never has to leave his wrongity-wrong-wrong little tapioca-skin Reasonable Conservative bubble. I know of only one case in living memory where Bobo left himself open to being pinned down by an unauthorized and dangerous question in public.
He lied — flat out, baldly and without hesitation — and just moved right along to the next question.
I’ll believe that when Andy Rooney says the bunny smells like A PILE OF BULLSHIT!!!1!
@DougJ:
You were doing great until “Jon Chait is also almost always wrong.”
That’s guilt by association, and guilt by association is bullshit.
Try again.
What pisses me off about him is the conflation of his lack of self-awareness AND his real role in society (providing justification for social inequality) AND his monetary overcompensation for it. He gets huge amounts of money to stroke rich people, telling them that they provide valuable contributions to society and deserve all they get. But he is a muddled thinker and perfectly useless in any objective way, and gets more cash than many people who do honest, useful labor. When he writes about the just deserts of the wealthy, does he REALLY not see that there is no tie-in betwen HIS intellectual value and his financial net worth? Or is that part of the joke?
@ burnspbesq
you are just the weirdest fucking person.
@aisce:
lolz
Money:
If you haven’t use this one before, it’s about fucking time.
[…] to all my new readers from Balloon Juice and elsewhere! Now that my long absence from the ‘net is over, and I have fully purged all […]
I love the guy, his predictions are always wrong. I wish they weren’t because I love how he writes.
Ol’ Dirty Bastard used to call himself Big Baby Jesus. You should call yourself Big Baby DougJesus.
Second that. Also has kind of a Talladega Nights ring to it.
@Kiril: Don’t forget Dirk McGurk.
DirkJ McGurk
My style different from yours.
David Brooks is a bigger liar than I will ever be and I am a pathological liar.
You ask me if it’s snowing, don’t be surprised if I lie.
You ask David Brooks if it is snowing, just assume that the opposite of what he says is true. Every damned time.
@aisce:
Considering the source, I will almost certainly take that as a compliment.
@Kiril:
Big Baby DougJ.
Rock’n’roll criticism is more factually grounded than many of Brooks’s columns.
(Sadly I’m a bit of a fan of the former, but not the later– and this seems relevant because of your captions/headlines.)
“Why do totebaggers love David Brooks so much?”
Actually, we don’t love him at all, but the people at the Newshour and All Things Considered seem to think that we should. You can’t get away from him.
I think his greatest sin is not even his. Somehow, he has managed to acquire a position of perceived influence, and there is the nagging impression that his opinions SHOULD matter, due to said position. So it rankles even more when he spouts stupidity and banality, because we are under the mistaken impression that he SHOULD be saying something important.
I think it’s akin to the “Is anyone else seeing this? Is it just me?” feeling you get when you are expecting something worthwhile, and are served useless pablum. As it happens over and over again, there is a disconnect because your brain has already discounted the pablum, and if reality was in any way linked to justice, the pablum would nevermore be issued from a supposed point of prominence. It really is enraging.