(Matt Davies via GoComics.com)
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Gonna trespass on DougJ’s turf to share Matt Taibbi regarding David Brooks’ latest, “one of the weirdest, most mean-spirited things I’ve ever seen in The New York Times”:
… The condescension is bad, but the argument is even worse. Brooks is trying to make a “point” here – he takes something like 800 words to make it, but it boils down to a single snarky observation: “Isn’t it ironic that these same people who’ve been fighting for the right to personal indulgence for all these decades since the Sixties are now fighting for the right to be legally restrained?”…
This whole same-sex marriage issue is much less about freedom than it is about justice. This is about a group of people wanting to be fully recognized as citizens, with absolutely equal rights, who among other things no longer want to subsidize the tax-advantaged marriages of straight people like Brooks. To even try to view this issue through the perils-of-permissive-society lens that Brooks has been obsessed with for years is incredibly insulting, but that’s exactly where he goes:
Americans may no longer have a vocabulary to explain why freedom should sometimes be constricted, but they like it when they see people trying to do it. Once Americans acknowledged gay people exist, then, of course, they wanted them enmeshed in webs of obligation.
Translated into human English, this passage would read something like this: “The reason same-sex marriage enjoys such inexplicably broad support now is because middle America wants to throw a net over gay culture, now that it’s been let out of its cage.”
And yet Brooks is still more logical, barely, than Louie Gohmert, defending his title as the Dumbest Republican Currently Holding Elective Office, who opposes any form of gun control because gay marriage leads to beastiality.
Maybe we should put these two men in a room together, somewhere they can share their unique insights with each other. And I vote we lock the door from the outside, just as a demonstration.
Michael G
I say what the fuck, I’ll accept Brooks’ argument.
In fact, let’s annul David Brooks’ marriage to increase his freedom.
Michael G
Actually reading Brooks’ column makes me think it’s a poorly executed April Fools joke.
Mustang Bobby
To quote myself (who better?): “Except that Mr. Brooks misses the larger point, which is that being denied the right to limit your own freedom is in itself a limitation on freedom. Straight couples have the right to choose to get married or not. They know going in that they may lose some of the freedoms that they had when they were single, but that’s a choice they get to make. Same-sex couples don’t have that choice.”
Amir Khalid
There, that’s much better.
PeakVT
@Michael G: The NYT should free him of his obligation to produce in 800 words of bullshit two times per week.
Linda Featheringill
The fear that somewhere somebody is having a good time.
sm*t cl*de
It’s like rain on your same-sex wedding day.
Americans […] like it when they see people trying to [constrict freedom]
Really? Americans are fascists and authoritarians by nature? Citation needed.
Keith G
Brooks is a decoy (though he might not realize it himself).
The issues for discussion should/must be:
What do do about the Dems getting played on the sequester issue.
How to handle the fact that implementation of universal healthcare is way behind schedule.
Why meaningful nation wide gun regulation seems deader than a Sandy Hook first grader.
Really now, Brooks is superfluous to these, and many more, issues. It seems that the forces of darkness have hit upon a working plan to make a second term Obama an irrelevant inconvenience. And they are not paying a price for their efforts.
WereBear
It’s a real struggle to formulate arguments against a human rights issue when the usual winking assumptions and prejudiced idiocies are no longer accepted.
I believe Brooks’ head is so far up his ass he’s trying for a double header.
fuckwit
For some reason, the word “gaping” made me think of goatse.cx
amk
@Keith G: amen
JPL
David Brooks must have an interesting marriage since he had to give up all his freedoms. I didn’t realize that if DOMA is overturned, gays will be forced to get married.
Linda Greenhouse’s column deals with equal protection and the Trojan Horse which is state’s rights. link
NotMax
It is spelled bestiality, not beastiality.
c u n d gulag
Is Brooks really, “straight?”
I always suspected that Bobo is asexual.
Any my proof that he is, is Ross Douthat.
If that ain’t asexual reproduction, I don’t know what is!
Dan
It’s an 800 word version of that joke: I think people should be able to get married. Why should we be the only ones to suffer?
See? The joke doesn’t require 800 words.
kdaug
You know, Anne Laurie, there are a lot of empty closets nowadays. With the right deadbolt…
NotMax
It truly does seem that the term “babbling brooks” was invented to describe David.
El Cid
How David Brooks can bear to get through life with all his extra-terrestrial superpowers of maximum willpower, deliberate restraint, and squinty-eyed thrift in a world full of us impulsive, profligate libertines is beyond me.
Baud
@Michael G:
You could say that about every Brooks column.
PsiFighter37
@El Cid: I think if you spiked his drink at the holiday party, there’d be a lot of crazy shit going down, as he lets his inner freak flag fly.
Karmus
Just read the Taibbi piece. Excellent. Thanks for posting.
Brooks sorely needs some of his freedoms restricted, methinks, say by the fence that encloses the pasture where he ought to be put out. Or maybe a nice padded cell would be more appropriate.
Kay
It’s probably a good sign. All he’s doing is making same sex marriage a conservative issue.
David Brooks discovered, like he always does, that The Heartland is exactly like David Brooks.
I think it’s hilarious that his entire professional career is a weird denial of…his entire professional career. He really and truly believes he is not an elite pundit who speaks exclusively to the same 250 people. He really and truly believes he is instead the voice of Main Street.
My favorite column of his was when he went on a baseball travel trip with his son and found out that all of the people who stay at motels agree with him.
Donut
Doesn’t that sort of describe the wrenching stupidity and ignorance parade that has been unraveling in the GOP since Obama got elected in ’08?
sherparick
Brooks must have had an interesting adolescence during the 1970s (born in 1961, he was to young to remember much of the actual sixties) growing up in Stuy Town next the East Village. New York was a rather chaotic place, and was especially so in the 1970s, and I guess it scared the heck of poor David. This fear of chaos is one of the deep demi-urges of Conservatives, and if Brooks could have his druthers, I expect he would like to see the whole world go back to the feudal system, where everyone was born in their place and was kept in it.
kdaug
@Kay:
At the Applebee’s salad bar.
Donut
@PsiFighter37:
What would you spike him with?
LSD or ecstasy?
Each would produce radically different results.
Suffern ACE
Marriage? Marriage? What do those sodomites know about marriage? How could they know about it? No one ever has spoken about it out loud before, but it really sounds dreadful.
Donut
@Donut:
The GOP’s dramas play out on cable news and on Teh Inter-tubes, the locked room of American political discourse, in other words.
SiubhanDuinne
@NotMax: Thanks for saving me the trouble of posting the identical comment.
Kay
@Keith G:
There’s a hand-off that has to happen but often doesn’t with Democrats.
Obama’s ideal for guns, because they’re trying to turn around an issue that’s been speeding in the other direction for years. Classic broad strokes advocacy.
The sequester should have gone “Obama, then hand off to House Democrats”. They’re much better positioned than he is to talk about cuts in their districts.
I see it again and again. It drives me crazy. If he tees up “sequester damage” for them in broad strokes for 3 months they then have to HIT IT.
Paul in KY
@Donut: Why not both? He could be an experiment.
Helen Bedd
“Isn’t it ironic that these same people who’ve been fighting for the right to personal indulgence for all these decades since the Sixties are now fighting for the right to be legally restrained?”
And here I thought the argument was they “are now fighting for the right to be [legally] recognized….”
Keith G
@Kay: Indeed. I know that it’s very hard for the Democratic Party to actually act like a political party. The fact that the Republicans are uncharacteristically dissolving into disunity is of no comfort sense gridlock and disruption benefit their goals.
These are serious times and this country desperately needs one of its political parties to step up to the plate and act like a governing party. This is a test of leadership and fair or not I don’t think history will be handing out any passing grades.
orogeny
I wonder how Mrs. Brooks feels about Dave’s description of their marriage as being “enmeshed in webs of obligation”?
Omnes Omnibus
How does a marriage restrain someone? If the person is going cheat, for example, the person would would cheat, married or not. And vice versa.
Gian
I have this theory… the more anti-gay marriage a right winger is, the more I think he opposes gay marriage because there will be fewer chances for hot wide stance airport events if gays are faithful to marriages.
kindness
Yeay! David Brooks keeps up saying things that would even embarass my Republican parents.
I don’t think Brooks is going to create the hoped for groundswell he was looking for when he wrote this piece o’ crap. I suspect it’ll be the opposite.
Guillotine yet?
bemused
@sherparick:
What a prissy scold even though he is only 51 years old. I doubt he was ever tempted to sow any wild oats in his whole life or too scared to.
Mnemosyne
@Kay:
For some reason, that reminded me of one of my all-time favorite Wodehouse quotes:
RaflW
@El Cid:
Except for the $3mil mansionette, of course. But that’s just 1) a reflection of the crazy house prices in (the right parts of) D.C. and 2) an investment. Houses are investments that just happen to also have cozy inglenooks or double walk in closets or whatever it is that makes a house cost three mil.
RaflW
@Helen Bedd:
Rereading that Brooks tidbit, I get even more pissed. Yeah, that pesky loving a person through and through, faults and all, good times and bad … it’s such a personal indulgence.
Shut the fuck up, David Brooks. You are a first class asshole, even if you do occasionally have leather patches on your jacket elbows.
The dripping condescension and sense that he knows the morality of other people’s lives better than they know their own, it’s vile and brings disrepute to the entire NYT venture.
Kay
@Keith G:
I just think they’re way off track, congressional Democrats. Obama’s a second term President. He wants immigration, I think, as a top priority, but it doesn’t really matter for the midterms and Congress what Obama wants or even gets.
What are the priorities of the congressional Democrats? What are they planning on running on? They do best in midterms when they stick to practical issues, “pocketbook” issues, so…what are those? Do they want to advocate for a minimum wage increase? I know it’s unlikely to pass, but that’s not the point. He set it up for them and they followed up for a week or two and now I don’t even know where they are.
If I am at a loss for words they are really in trouble :)
Captain C
@Donut: I’d pay to see either.
Groucho48
Isn’t this column pretty much a recapitulation of the Megan McMegan article that was mocked here a few days ago?
sm*t cl*de
I am appalled that neither the original Brooks column, nor Taibbi’s flensing thereof, nor this post links to Devo. I thought that was obligatory.
gbear
@orogeny: I was wondering the same thing. Must have been kind of a frosty evening (frostier than usual) after his wife read his argument about how much marriage stinks.
I hope she made him sleep in the car.