We need a word for the category of blogging which is devoted to mocking David Brooks. This week, we saw absolutely epic efforts by driftglass and Charles P. Pearce. This type of blogging is inspired. It’s as if Brooks’ prose provides the bass line, and then the improvisation begins. There is something exquisitely ridiculous about both Brooks and the position the Republicans have put him in by moving to the right of the Partito Nazionale Fascista on both social and economic issues. If Brooks went away, what would happen to Moral Hazard, the Irish Setter? What would become of driftglass’s Pretty Hate Machine? Do they need David Brooks for inspiration even more than the Hate Machine needs him for coolant?
And outside of the Heart of Confederate Darkness, moderate GOP voters who are kept carefully shielded from the truth and lulled into a cozy, supply-side coma by the Bobo Koolant are genuinely horrified when the Core of their Party is suddenly exposed and they are forced to face with eyes wide open the naked, roaring, venomous, unreconstructed filth that actually fuels and pilots the Conservative’s Pretty Hate Machine.
There’s always Peggy Noonan, but her output is too little. And it just isn’t the same.
So, what do we want to call this genre?
Wow. Is this Wankers Memorial Saturday?
My entry in the name the genre contest is:
Applebeebobology
Applebeebobology is a strong candidate.
I grew up in Chicago where the motto is vote early and vote often. In keeping with that, I have rated your comment as excellent AND I am voting for Applebeebobology here in the comments.
Truly inspired.
I’m feeling more than a bit hostile and old-fashiony about Bobo’s sophistry tonight. Applebeebobology strikes a good insider’s derisive note, but I’m not feeling too satirical, so I’ll go with
“Takedowns of a cur”
instead. I acknowledge it’s unlikely to catch on.
Here’s the center of my anger with all this today: we’re in the process of seeing a slow-motion train wreck that reproduces the worst aspects of the Iraq War II runup, along with some extraordinarily corrupt additional features, particularly the fact that tearing the New Deal/Great Society programs into shreds is opposed by supermajorities of Americans (hell, it’s even opposed by a majority of Republican Party voters!).
Yet, Bobo is a chief artisan of inflating the “Fix The Debt” bubble around Washington D.C. It’s apparent that no matter how many billions Pete Peterson and his sociopathic brothers in shame spend, they will never get public opinion on their side on this.
However, with the primary help of people like Bobo and their “reasonable”, “concerned” “facts”, the pundits and press, cocktail parties, lobbyists, and other constituent-destroying people who ghoulishly distort Congressmembers’ views, the voters can very effectively be defeated.
We’ve just got to win anyway. Somehow.
Oh shit! Thanks a lot. Making me read Brooks and Woodward, both on the same day.
I’m headed to the liquor cabinet. My day is done.
I look of look at what Brooks does for the movement as Conservative Composting. Brooks is the nitrogen, the green matter that is required periodically in order for the microbes in the compost pile to perform their magic and generate the heat within the pile that is indicative that decomposition is under way and that everything appears properly balanced. Without the nitrogen, the pile is just a bunch of useless sticks and waste that just lie there. Without a regular supply of nitrogen, things just won’t work. Get everything just right, and the microbe machine continues to churn along.
Methane Digester ~ The inside story.
driftglass and Pierce are pretty much doing all the necessary work – there just aren’t enough people paying attention to them. I’d also love to see the incredibly awesome cast of firemeganmccardle.com come back and pitch in with the effort, but same deal.
Ezra’s polite but thorough and public pantsing of Brooks was a start – and Krugman has done a bit of that as well, though not as effectively. Problem is Brooks is probably clever enough to not walk into that kind of trap again. And in future columns where he has to completely mischaracterize Obama’s position to make a mendacious GOP-supporting point, he’ll be sure not to say anything concrete enough to get pinned down like that. Instead of “Obama has no plan,” which was just a baldfaced lie, he’ll say “Obama hasn’t been serious about finding a solution” or some other such mush that conveys the same lie in squishier language.
I really can’t express how disgusting I find the guy. Malkin, Rush, that crowd are awful and all and it’s depressing how many people listen to that BS, but they’re sideshow carnival barkers. Brooks’ poison is intended to achieve pretty much the same ends, but isn’t as easily detected.
Boborythmics? Full disclosure: I’ve been practicing it for months myself, it takes up close to half of my own blogging.
driftglass and Pierce are primi inter pares, but there is always a need for more because Brooks is so Protean in the number of subjects he is proudly ignorant of and the different ways he can be wrong, from the simplest numerical falsification to the loftiest philosophical bullshit. For example his column of February 12 attracted almost no attention from drifty and Charlie but inspired one of my best efforts, I thought, a direct parody of the column; but a few days later the great Tom Levenson of Balloon Juice came up with a fantastic long-form essay/diatribe on the same column. The amazing thing was that there was virtually no overlap between his piece and mine in what was mocked–plenty of material to share.
This is why Brooks gets his estate in Arlington or Georgetown. He represents a broad class of scribblers and jabberers, but he is at the top of the game.
I like coleslaw – in recognition of Barbara O’Brien at Mahablog, who has often referred to Brooks as “cabbage head.”
I have to admit, reading Pierce through the recent campaign, I started rooting for Moral Hazard – and feared he would end up on the station wagon roof.
In honor of the old boy, I’ll suggest:
“Contemplative Ball Licking with David Brooks”.
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Also, too: I’d like to see “BipartisanThink” become this year’s “epistemic closure”, as a means to explain what is going on in the national debate.