David Brooks vs. George Will

brooks by a country mile

Will and his wife have actually contributed to damaging the country in a more direct way than Brooks ever did/will, although Will is unquestionably the better writer. this is tough.

GW gets extra pts for bad baseball writing

Will is cunning, bloated with self-importance, deceitful, and has no qualms about using any bad faith debating technique to confuse and obfuscate his chosen issues. Brooks is cherub-cheeked and irrepressibly boyish, sincerely believes his own silliness, and seems to absorb effortlessly what passes for wisdom among the wealthy and influential people he meets at cocktail parties, for whom he acts as town crier.

At this point in their respective careers Will's influence is waning and Brooks is the darling of the public airwaves. Just in terms of effectively spreading idiocy, Brooks is worse.

David Brooks is dangerous because he's convinced hundreds fo thousands of NPR listeners that a reasonable expostulator of conservatism exists.

Will may obfuscate his issues but at least you can tell which side he's arguing from, whereas Brooks seems equally conservative but obfuscates his politics. Also Will is a better prose stylist.

But Will is not a good writer either! Beyond his bad faith, his schtick is to stick a Burke quote here or excerpt from a novel there and it's obvious he hasn't read them and is just showing off.

the late Hitchens called them "tags of learning."

ha

I agree Will is not a good writer, but he's cleverer and more obfuscatory than Brooks, who is just clumsy.

was Walter Lippmann a better writer-sycophant? idk

hmm, maybe he's not as good a writer as I remembered, haven't really read him in a while:

Pope Francis embodies sanctity but comes trailing clouds of sanctimony. With a convert’s indiscriminate zeal, he embraces ideas impeccably fashionable, demonstrably false and deeply reactionary. They would devastate the poor on whose behalf he purports to speak — if his policy prescriptions were not as implausible as his social diagnoses are shrill.

Brooks makes my brain hurt more.

almost reads like Gilbert & Sullivan lyrics xp

With a convert’s indiscriminate zeal, he embraces ideas impeccably fashionable, demonstrably false and deeply reactionary. They would devastate the poor on whose behalf he purports to speak — if his policy prescriptions were not as implausible as his social diagnoses are shrill.

is Will quoting from his own Wiki?

George Will is way, way worse than Brooks. He has been a condescending apologist for far more war crimes and travesties throughout history, plus he claims baseball for right wingers.

Will's a worse person, but is he a worse public figure?

I think so. His heyday was back when people got their news from papers and his unavoidable presence on the opinion pages meant that regular people might actually take him seriously. I think most of David Brooks' audience consists of his own peers plus a host of hate-followers. I really don't know anybody who thinks of him as other than an imbecile. I do remember knowing people who thought George Will was smart.

George Will created the Bush-is-wimp proto-meme, thanks to his weekly lunches with Nancy Reagan, who hated the Bushes. He prepped Ronald Reagan for the '80 debate with the aid of Jimmy Carter's stolen briefing book nd went on ABC later to praise his performance w/out disclosing the information. The guy was a fucking menace. I say "was" b/c like Tombot says his influence has waned.

Will definitely falls into the category of "a stupid person's idea of a smart person." (I think this was originally said/written about Newt Gingrich.) He's the Fox News equivalent of the Professor, from Gilligan's Island. I see Brooks as essentially harmless, on the other hand, because 1) he doesn't go as deep in the tank for actual candidates that often, and b) he's too deep in the enemy camp - the Fox News demographic doesn't pay any attention to him 'cause he's on NPR and PBS all the time.

Brooks writes like he's always making this expression:

http://bullmurph.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/40-david_brooks.jpg

those on the east coast can catch Brooksy on NPR in 10 minutes!

"a stupid person's idea of a smart person."

haha oh man that is good

Will is worse, because Brooks, 15 years ago in his "Bobos" days, was actually a pretty good reporter and observer; the annoying big-think chin-scratching that was 10% of his reporting eventually just gobbled up the interesting part of him and it's a shame.

Also, Tomboto otm about Will's appalling take on baseball.

http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1437881262l/677515.jpg

really tempted to just make an entire fake George Will discography

Where There's a Will...

Triumph of the Will (metal album)
Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow? (torch song/breakup album)
Will He or Won't He? (coy genderbending new wave album)

Voy (Latin fusion)

Brooks's identification of the Bobo phenomenon definitely feels like his best moment

in retrospect it was self-recognition

Phrase that has never been spoken by anyone ever: "David Brooks put it best when he said..."

will is my favorite interviewee / storyteller in the ken burns Roosevelt series

geez, I hate Reagan and I'd love to be asked to be an interviewee/storyteller in a Ken Burns series about Reagan

years ago i was watching some early-90s pbs doc or other and a relatively youthful george will came on with hair of startling red; i immediately informed alfred, who said "he'd just started dying it, in honor of our fallen foe". not sure brooks has ever made me laugh that hard even w an assist.

will sulkily calling bill o'reilly a loser on whatever fox show it is that interviews george will about who the losers are was probably better television than the actual splitscreen fight where will sulkily denies reagan ever forgot anything

lol forgot

Will: I'm a conservative and these are my [ignorantly biased] views
Brooks: I'm an unbiased outsider and these are my [ignorantly biased] views

Therefore Brooks is worse.

Cosmo Kramer nailed it when he said George Will is clean-looking, but not particularly bright

Will is far worse. Brooks occasionally shows tiny hints that he may gain self-awareness; if he did the resulting column would be incredible.

Brooks occasionally shows tiny hints that he may gain self-awareness; if he did the resulting column would be incredible

I think this is what you're looking for

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/17/opinion/brooks-the-thought-leader.html?_r=0

Which by the way, is another reason Will is worse, Brooks offers this fascinating and desperately suppressed vein of self-loathing that surfaces once a year or so

GW gets extra pts for bad baseball writing

Left field: myth or monopeia.

https://screen.yahoo.com/george-f-wills-sports-machine-000000461.html

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C9TQ4Q2WAAEx51T.jpg:small

this paragraph wears a bow tie

what's mellifluous about "Mark Meadows"

alliteration?

David Brooks' Facebook page (which is public) describes him as "Former Columnist at The New York Times." And the Times just hired some other right-wing maniac away from the Wall Street Journal. I wonder when the official announcement will come?

I was wondering if Bret Stephens arriving would kick someone to the curb. (Stephens notably has been trashing Trump for months while the current WSJ editors have been all 'we shouldn't judge him harshly' and the like.)

The really baffling part is, this means they decided Ross Douthat was a keeper.

seems like firing news should go here: RIP David Brooks

Oh man I was rooting for a Stephens-Douthat trade but I'll settle.

While I'll never agree w/Bret about the Middle East or basically anything since he's been demolishing Trump I've gained respect for the guy, it took hella nerve given what his colleagues' appeasing stance. had to be some uncomfortable editorial meetings for awhile there

brooks> douthat > bret stephens, a serious hawk capable of making compelling arguments for intervention that could get us all killed. he should have been kept behind the wall street journal paywall.

brooks has been harmless ever since he decided that the modern GOP wasn't for him anymore.

Bret Stephens is dogshit.

yeah he's probably retiring, then taking time to write a truly awful book

Bonobos in a Trumpian Hellscape

Edroso had the best response: http://alicublog.blogspot.com/2017/04/today-in-career-advancement.html

you guys are right, his interventionist posturing is dangerous and crazy. guess i was so glad to see Trump criticized in the WSJ i suspended my judgement. mea culpa

never heard of Bret Stevens before

he's a very bad man

he writes columns

about bombing people

you guys are right, his interventionist posturing is dangerous and crazy. guess i was so glad to see Trump criticized in the WSJ i suspended my judgement. mea culpa

― Dogshit Critic (m coleman), Thursday, April 13, 2017

s'all good. When I hear Brooks on NPR even I still feel on occasoin like Opus hearing a lecture from the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh.

Unsurprisingly Mr. Nolan has a few things to say about Mr. Stephens, with quotes:

http://fusion.net/the-best-of-bret-stephens-your-newest-new-york-times-o-1794297718

(Hadn't realized he was married to someone who already writes there. THAT couldn't hurt.)

Quoting Mr. Stephens:

How did we become a society in which a son tells his father that he supports ISIS and it fails to register with this ostensibly integrated Muslim family, living the American dream, that perhaps a call to the FBI would be appropriate?

Here’s how we became that society: By pretending that the extreme branch of Islam to which Farook plainly belonged is a protected religion rather than a dangerous ideology. By supposing that it is somehow immoral to harbor graver reservations about 10,000 refugees from Syria or Iraq than, say, New Zealand.

This is a stunning twofer. In one breath supporting the plain duty of parents to inform on their children and following it up immediately with invoking refugees from New Zealand to argue in favor of anti-Islamic bigotry. You have to admire his whatever-he-uses-for-brains.

Not even David Brooks could out name-check the new George Will column that drops Keats in a lede about the NFL: pic.twitter.com/Yi3ZPZ57kY

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) September 6, 2017

Conservative columnist George Will is making the argument to vote against Republicans in the upcoming midterm elections.

In a piece published Friday in the Washington Post, Will says that President Trump's "zero tolerance" policy at the border was "the most telegenic example of misrule" and it provided “fresh if redundant evidence for the principle by which” independents and moderate Republicans should vote.

That principle he says is that the number of Republicans in office must be “substantially reduced.”

"The principle: The congressional Republican caucuses must be substantially reduced. So substantially that their remnants, reduced to minorities, will be stripped of the Constitution’s Article I powers that they have been too invertebrate to use against the current wielder of Article II powers," Will wrote. "They will then have leisure time to wonder why they worked so hard to achieve membership in a legislature whose unexercised muscles have atrophied because of people like them."

http://thehill.com/homenews/393728-george-will-argues-for-voting-against-the-gop-in-midterms

does anyone in the entire world care what george will thinks?

no but it's still cute for him to write his little column in his lil bowtie

That is maybe the nicest possible way to describe George Will, I commend you!

George Will should die in an adverb fire.

slowly

^Yellow Kid lays the first kindling on the pile, lovingly, gently, almost imperceptibly

pointess revive, but here are the first sentences of george will's op-ed today (Republicans, Are You Sick of Winning Yet?):

A presidential election is like a barometer, which has been defined as an ingenious device that reveals the kind of weather we are experiencing. In case your dismay about the dilapidation of the nation is not yet commensurate with the valid reasons for dismay, consider four things abo-

uUUUUUUUUUUGH just STFU, holy shit

i emerge from the smoked out hills to let you know that george will has written an objectively average column, which is well-above will's average column. it presents the conservative case against the death penalty.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/why-capital-punishment-is-finally-coming-to-an-end/2021/04/23/9242e462-a3a3-11eb-85fc-06664ff4489d_story.html

congratulations, george will. you may gained a slight edge on the persistently wily David Brooks

one of those articles that makes its entire shitty argument in the closing paragraph, title, and the context of the authorship.

BAINBRIDGE ISLAND, Wash. — On the side of a lightly used road, from which drivers can look across Puget Sound to Seattle’s skyline, a small sign identifies the turnoff to the “Japanese American Exclusion Memorial.” On a recent sun-dappled midweek summer morning, 79 years after the exclusion began, a smattering of visitors were facing a dark episode in American history. They, and the memorial, are quiet refutations of current loud accusations that the United States does not face unpleasant facts about its past.

Seventy-four days after Pearl Harbor — Feb. 19, 1942; today, among Japanese Americans, Feb. 19 is a “Day of Remembrance” — President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066 authorizing the evacuation to concentration camps of, eventually, about 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry. Two-thirds were U.S. citizens, half of them children. The first 227 left this island from a dock a few yards from the memorial’s sinuous wall listing all of their names.

They were destined for Idaho, via California. While they were away, many of their homes, farms and businesses sold for much less than their value.

Gen. John DeWitt, head of the Western Defense Command, had a theory: “A Jap is a Jap.” A 1943 report on the “evacuation,” prepared under his direction, made clear that the supposed “military necessity” was based on racism. The report said that an invasion by Japan of the West Coast was probable, and that it was “impossible” to distinguish loyal (if there were such) from disloyal Japanese American citizens: “The Japanese race is an enemy race and while many second- and third-generation Japanese born on United States soil, possessed of United States citizenship, have become ‘Americanized,’ the racial strains are undiluted.”

This report was kept from the Supreme Court when it upheld the internments in 1944. As was a report, prepared for Chief of Naval Operations Ernest King, estimating that perhaps 3 percent of Japanese Americans were potentially disloyal, and that these were “already fairly well known to naval intelligence.”

DeWitt said that “the interception of unauthorized radio communications” emanating from along the West Coast “conclusively” explained Japanese attacks on U.S. ships. The FBI, however, found “no information” of “any espionage activity ashore or ... illicit shore-to-ship signaling.” Nevertheless, to some people, whose racial animus was heated by war fever, the complete absence of Japanese American sabotage was seen as sinister evidence of how stealthily the homegrown enemies were biding their time.

Meanwhile, Japanese American soldiers, some of whose families were interned, were distinguishing themselves in the war’s European theater — even though for a period after Pearl Harbor the Army took away their rifles. The 442nd Regimental Combat Team, composed of Japanese Americans, fought its way up Italy and into France, where it suffered 1,000 casualties rescuing 175 Texans of the 36th Texas Division’s “lost battalion” that had been cut off by Germans. By the war’s end, the 442nd was the most decorated unit for its size in U.S. history.

In time, the fever of war abated. Then, the civil rights movement sensitized the nation, and occasioned much soul-searching, some of it retrospective. In 1988, Congress formally apologized for the internments, and provided reparations checks of $20,000 to 82,000 victims. In 2018, the Supreme Court repudiated its 1944 decision as “gravely wrong the day it was decided” and “overruled in the court of history.” In 2011, here by the dock where the exclusions began, this island’s memorial was opened.

In 1994, David Guterson, a high school English teacher on the island, published a novel, “Snow Falling on Cedars,” set on a fictional island in Puget Sound, where Japanese residents had been blown about by the winds of World War II. The novel won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. One of Guterson’s characters remembers signs posted by the War Relocation Authority on March 21, 1942, notifying all “Japanese islanders” that they must leave in eight days. The novel sold 4 million copies during a year and a half on bestseller lists. It was kept there by readers who were willing to be immersed by him in the unpleasantness of a fictional internment camp. It is not unlike the one the Bainbridge Islanders were sent to: Idaho’s Minidoka War Relocation Center, which is a National Historic Site administered by the National Park Service.

This island’s small memorial, a modest contribution to the national memory, is a pebble from a mountain of evidence against those who accuse Americans of being too calloused or squeamish to redeem their nation’s honor by confronting departures from it.

America has no problem confronting unpleasant facts about its past, by George Will

In 1988, Congress formally apologized for the internments, and provided reparations checks of $20,000 to 82,000 victims. (46 years after it happened)
America has no problem confronting unpleasant facts about its past
In 2011, here by the dock where the exclusions began, this island’s memorial was opened. (69 years after it happened)
America has no problem confronting unpleasant facts about its past
In 2018, the Supreme Court repudiated its 1944 decision as “gravely wrong the day it was decided” and “overruled in the court of history.” (76 years after it happened)
America has no problem confronting unpleasant facts about its past

Americans are great at confronting unpleasant facts - just give them 50 to 75 years so that most of the people involved with unpleasant facts have died

At the beginning of this year I read a book about the largest mass murder in Oregon history, perpetrated against a group of Chinese gold miners in 1887 in the remote northeast reaches of the state. An investigation was made. A trial was held. No one was ever convicted.

The author began researching this book in 2003, 116 years later. There are still many descendants of the people who were involved in the case living in the area. When he tried to interview them they dummied up, evaded him, hid old county records from him, told him to 'let sleeping dogs lie', and generally tried to discourage him.

Nope, America has no problem confronting unpleasant facts about its past.

give it a couple more generations. give it til 200 years. i know americans - they will confront this

Incredible stuff from David Brooks: If America had to choose between a proto-authoritarian and someone indistinguishable from a centrist European politician, we would have to break the glass and support an obvious grift to separate rich people from their money pic.twitter.com/UkTQSa8awb

— Don Moynihan (@donmoyn) September 2, 2022

This is just Brooks giving an ill-disguised boost to what's left of the Bush-family wing of the GOP in their quixotic quest to take back control of the party, rather than submit to the reality that you can't do that when at best only 20% of GOP voters will vote for your 'principled' corporate stooges if Trump or a Trumpist loon is on the primary ballot whom they can vote for.

all of that is standard brooks. the more notable thing was where he directly compared, on one hand, the possibility of bernie sanders winning the democratic primary and then having to win the general election before facing a 50-50 senate, and on the other, the open pit corruption of donald trump (which, in brooks' telling gets reduced to "morally unacceptable to millions"), and then sympathizes with those who would find both sides intolerable

the old guard GOP who view themselves as the most respectable, moderate and sensible people in the USA, and the best and most able to lead the entire world, have been willfully blind to the fact that since 1968 they have deliberately bound themselves to the worst-educated, most racist, and religiously fanatical segments of the population in order to gain and keep power. this blindness is now incurable. they are lost souls howling in a wilderness of their own making.

"We didn't think the tiger would eat OUR faces," lamented the old guard of the Face Eating Tiger Party.

I'm interested in how he conceives of the right's problem as morality and the left's problem as ideology does he have a whole theory about this or is just brainfarting it out. actually I'm not that interested

https://i.imgur.com/TcA5qXO.png

also, does anyone know what year this photo is from

https://i.imgur.com/3P0AHU7.png

Shortly after Harding's election.

right after rogaine was invented

After the infield fly rule was introduced

i'd guess it's probably from around the time j crew became a company