Charles Pierce reads David Brooks so you and I don’t have to.
Okay, I read David Brooks so you don’t have to, too.
But, not today. Today, Charles gave me a respite.
Which brings us to David Brooks, who would like all those hysterical gay people to start using their inside voices and to understand that their desire for equal protection under the law would be better served if they understood the feelings of the people who think they are sodomite insects who are all going to hell. No link because fk him, that’s why.
Having not read the piece, I can still safely assume that this is a full and accurate summary.
If you copy a David Brooks column onto your clipboard and paste it into Google Translator, this is the result:
White privilege
I feel that incompetent columnists are all going to hell.
Oh please no!
I’m an atheist and there is no way I want all those right wing columnists in Hell with me.
Driftglass has deconstructed Brooks in totality. I’m fairly certain Driftglass could write a better Brooks post than Brooks.
Thanks for driftglass. Good stuff.
http://driftglass.blogspot.com/
“People like Bloody Bill Kristol and David Brooks do not have permanent sinecures at the top of the the American media food chain because of some irrevocable law of nature. They stomp across the land unmolested because a handful of wealthy individuals — their employers and several hundred of their colleagues — have struck an unholy bargain to sell out their professional and betray the American people in exchange for a fuck-ton of money.
It really isn’t any more complicated than that.”
I might even have understood it if they hadn’t done it before the bottom dropped out of the news market.
Here’s an article from 1982 that argues corporations have been poisoning the well since then, in seemingly innocuous ways:
The “MacNeil/Lehrer Report” started in October 1975, in the aftermath of Watergate. It was a show dedicated to the proposition that there are two sides to every question, a valuable corrective in a period when the American people had finally decided that there were absolutely and definitely not two sides to every question. Nixon was a crook who had rightly been driven from office; corporations were often headed by crooks who carried hot money around in suitcases; federal officials were crooks who broke the law on the say-so of the president.
It was a dangerous moment, for a citizenry suddenly imbued with the notion that there is not only a thesis and antithesis, but also a synthesis, is a citizenry capable of all manner of harm to the harmonious motions of the status quo.
Thus came the “MacNeil/Lehrer Report,” sponsored by public-television funds and by the most powerful corporate forces in America, in the form of Exxon, “AT&T and the Bell System,” and other upstanding bodies. Back to Sunday school went the excited viewers, to be instructed that reality, as conveyed to them by television, is not an exciting affair of crooked businessmen and lying politicians but a serious continuum in which parties may disagree but in which all involved are struggling manfully and disinterestedly for the public weal.
http://harpers.org/archive/1982/08/the-tedium-twins/
In not for Charlie, I’d never know whatever bubbles out of Brooks’ little mind on an all too regular basis.
Who knew that NASCAR wasn’t a bastion of white, straight, “Christian” conservatives?
And look at who heard that NASCAR roar:
So, how soon before we see the GOP POTUS wannabes that endorsed IN’s RFRA begin their back peddling? Should we do the countdown in minutes or hours?
Looks as if somebody forgot what happened to him the last time he jumped on the religious right bandwagon.
Governor Hutchinson pick up the red telephone, Walmart’s calling.
Called this one:
Walmart Asks Arkansas Governor To Veto Religion Freedom Bill
Arkansas Governor Says He Won’t Sign ‘Religious Freedom’ Bill Until Changes Are Made.
That quote is a thing of beauty. The second best quote from Pierce’s article:
I particularly liked Brooks described as “a sewage-treatment plant for the worst instincts in our politics.” Amen.
“Morality is a politeness of the soul.”
The most harrowing sentence I’ve read since, “For the love of God, Montressor!”
Charlie also calls Brooks “a moral monster.”
Argh. “Charles” not “Charlie.”
In honor of Governor Pence, I am refusing David Brooks access to my brain because he offends my rational sensitivities.
I’m a stones throw from Indiana, so I get special dispensation in this case. Thank you, Governor!
Sigh. For most of my adult life, I never payed any attention the Brooks and his ilk. I was too busy making stuff, I suppose.
Now that I’m retired with “time on my hands” (not really) I do have the time to spend a couple of hours a day reading the pundits.
I realize that I’ve got to quit doing that. Brooks and his cohorts are a complete waste of time. I call their spew ‘soft evil’.
For a while (iirc 1998-2001), I got in the habit of watching the “talkies:” McLaughlin, MTP, and the ones on CBS and ABC. One day it hit me that they were at least 90% wrong on everything. Turned them off and have been better informed ever since.
I often called Sullivan hysterical when he was going on and on about Scandal Baby Trig or the evils of the Clinton’s part 56,000 etc.