RIP David Brooks

not really

to be fair, his soul is dead

maybe, someday

http://img2-cdn.newser.com/square-image/64121-20110331221226/david-brooks-gop-senator-groped-me.jpeg

http://i.imgur.com/tSGDs.png

He and E.J. Dionne on NPR are like a shrimp and goldfish floating in a thin gruel.

lol i am ded

I always knew David Brooks was an asshole ....

Bump this thread whenever he dies.

RIP, hell needed a bunch of cretinous demographic catchphrases.

David Brooks epitomizes the kind of career pundit who always seems at least a tiny bit guilty that he gets paid at all. I used to think Frum was like that, too, though I heard an interesting sign-off from him on NPR yesterday, where he announced he was abdicating his point/counterpart position because he didn't feel his views currently aligned with that of "the right."

Frum has more brains than Brooks.

frum is worth a million brookses, which says more about brooks than frum

lol xp

Bobos in mourning.

I only brought up Frum because he's another guy who practically sounds like hand wringing.

Frum's a smart feller but I've never quite forgiven him for:

http://gopbelgium.com/images/booklist/The%20Right%20Man%20by%20David%20Frum.gif

i hate david frum and the things he has historically stood for but at least he's not a total waste of space

Not the right thread, but since we're posting remarks by GOP buffoons here's Douthat's latest dispatch from fantasyland.

So Frum with some hand-wringing seemingly admitted yesterday that stimulus might have been necessary and now Douthat says stimulus would have been ok if it had been done by a President McCain (in a better way of course than the Dems did). Oy veh.

oh douchehatpaws

more like Ross don'tdouthat amirite

my fav douthat moment was when i saw him interviewed on tv and the interviewer read a wonkete quote that called him a something like a misogynist neck beard homunculus and his response was all 'well sometimes you make arguments that work and sometimes they kinda fall flat but you know' and it was like dawg they just called u a homunculus

lol

In November 2009 I saw Douthat on a Friday at noon in the gay portion of Dupont Circle with a man-friend.

haha wow: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/03/opinion/workers-of-the-world-unite.html

this turdball should write slashfic:

Occasionally you get a candidate, like Tim Pawlenty, who grew up working class. But he gets sucked up by the consultants, the donors and the professional party members and he ends up sounding like every other Republican. Other times a candidate will emerge who taps into a working-class vibe — Pat Buchanan, Mike Huckabee or Sarah Palin. But, so far, these have been flawed candidates who get buried under an avalanche of negative ads and brutal coverage.

This year, Romney is trying to establish some emotional bond with the working class by waging a hyperpatriotic campaign: I may be the son of a millionaire with a religion that makes you uncomfortable, but I love this country just like you. The strategy appears to be only a partial success.

Enter Rick Santorum.

The country doesn’t want an election that is Harvard Law versus Harvard Law.

wait, hasn't david brooks spent years arguing that this is a perfectly good thing??

If you took a working-class candidate from the right, like Santorum, and a working-class candidate from the left, like Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio, and you found a few islands of common ground, you could win this election by a landslide.

Brown was born in Mansfield, Ohio, the son of Emily (née Campbell) and Charles Gailey Brown, M.D.[1] He was named after his maternal grandfather. He became an Eagle Scout in 1967. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree in Russian studies from Yale University in 1974. At Yale, he was in Davenport College, the same residential college as U.S. Presidents George H. W. and George W. Bush

and you found a few islands of common ground

Sometimes he sounds just like Tom Friedman

Has anyone read the Life Reports David Brooks has been running in the nytimes? It's a really good way to make yourself hopeless and depressed.

Otoh, you can probably say that about anything relating to David Brooks.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/14/opinion/brooks-the-materialist-fallacy.html

had to physically restrain myself from ripping the skin off my face as I was reading this.

He really is such a dunce.

what the hell's he talking about

yogurt, I think

He is doing a little kid level response to the standard criticism of Murray's latest book

http://ussc.edu.au/blogs/David-Brooks-apparently-thinks-society-means-white-people

http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2012/02/america-might-be-better-shape-david-brooks-thinks

more like Roast in Piss

Please take a number, if you would like to be the next columnist/blogger/economist etc. to critique David Brooks' latest pronouncement:

Here's Dean Baker

http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/david-brooks-denounces-economics-is-biology-next

Brooks also has an interesting theory on the loss of skills. He tells readers:

"The American social fabric is now so depleted that even if manufacturing jobs miraculously came back we still would not be producing enough stable, skilled workers to fill them."

Five years ago we had two million more people employed in manufacturing than we do today. Has the social fabric become so depleted in this period that these people or others could now not fill these jobs if they came back? If Brooks really thinks that the ill effects of unemployment are that extreme he should be screaming for more stimulus in every column.

brooks recasts real world problems as a morality play in his role as conservative apologist: every david brooks column

tho often i guess they are not so much real world problems as fake made up problems

Today's helping, courtesy of a certain ilx alumnus: http://www.salon.com/2012/02/17/david_brooks_i_have_heard_of_jeremy_lin/singleton/

But even while grappling with the tension between religious values and contemporary cultural values, which is basically well within Brooks’ wheelhouse, he demonstrates a hilarious misunderstanding of sports, and what sports are “about,” because Mr. Brooks has been spending far too much time in his cloistered elite liberal media ivory tower munching on brie and arugula and not enough time among Real Americans in their “Sporting Taverns” watching “The Big Game” over a pint of mass-market domestic lager.

suspect beating up brooks when u need an easy column will outlast "analyzing" linsanity/linreality tbh

A few generations ago, teenagers went steady. But over the past decades, the dating relationship has been replaced by a more amorphous hook-up culture.

a few generations ago, it was legal to marry a 15 year old

a few generations ago, interracial marriage was against the law

a few generations ago, bestiality was legal in Florida

The half-century between 1912 and 1962 was a period of great wars and economic tumult but also of impressive social cohesion. Marriage rates were high. Community groups connected people across class

In the half-century between 1962 and the present, America has become more prosperous, peaceful and fair, but the social fabric has deteriorated. Social trust has plummeted. Society has segmented. The share of Americans born out of wedlock is now at 40 percent and rising.

Ah, the good ol' days..... If only married people had kids, we could have impressive social cohesion and a strong social fabric like we did before 1961, when only men could get decent jobs and we kept those darned negroes out of our good schools, restaurants, and bus seats....

beyond self-parody at this point

Ok can this just be a thread about Davis Brooks ffs

thanks map :heart:

I'm still waiting for the announcement of his demise.

Grim Reaper doesn't want to go near him

thanks map :heart:

― Kate (rushomancy), Thursday, January 25, 2024 3:38 AM (seventeen hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

you're welcome babe

Doth he not have feels.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/08/opinion/trump-republicans-immigration.html

Down at the bottom: "READ 1230 COMMENTS"

No, I don't think I will.

He thought he was beyond shockable

"are we the baddies????"

My progressive readers are now thinking: Have you not been paying attention? Donald Trump has owned this party for years. If he told them to kill the immigration compromise because he needed a campaign issue, they were going to kill that proposal.

To which I respond: I don’t think you quite understand what just happened.

Do go on.

"Let me recount my dinner conversation with my wife, who I think, as I told her at the time, doesn't quite understand what just happened"

this man is a walking definition of fatuity

They have to mouth the Trumpian prejudices to survive in this era, but somewhere deep inside, the party of Reagan still lives in their souls.

Uff da

it doesn't matter a damn what's deep inside their souls because they sold their souls to Trump and are no longer in possession of them

"souls"

lol the party of Reagan is where the problems really started, asshole

when will this fucker really die, c'mon 2024

seriously, thread lets me down time and again

LOL I know. Every damn time.

Seriously, "the party of Reagan." I spent the Reagan years protesting his illegal wars, go fuck yourself.

Spouse suggested that I love to hate on DB the way I watched 60 Minutes to hate on Andy Rooney back in the day, but it is truly a different thing with me and Brooks

Ugh, he's definitely more smug than Rooney was. I haven't read him in awhile and then I saw this annoying bit--

Last fall I argued that Joe Biden was the Democratic Party’s strongest 2024 presidential nominee. I believed that for two reasons: He has been an effective president, and he is the Democrat most likely to appeal to working-class voters.

I still believe Biden is the party’s strongest candidate, but I’m getting more pessimistic about his chances of winning.

The first reason is not political rocket science: Voters prefer the Republicans on key issues like inflation and immigration. Most Donald Trump supporters I know aren’t swept up in his cult of personality; they vote for him because they are conservative types who like G.O.P. policies and think Trump is a more effective executive than Biden.

"Most Donald Trump supporters that I know" ...

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/04/24/opinion/thepoint?searchResultPosition=1#biden-poll-young-voters

and think Trump is a more effective executive than Biden.

Brooks is huffing something if he takes this at face value.

every single trump supporter david brooks knows supports trump because he'll lower their taxes and/or abandon all regulation of them or their businesses

that is what being 'effective' means

yes, but that was amply covered by "prefer the Republicans on key issues". I perfectly understand that the the follow-on reference to "inflation and immigration" was just camouflage for lower business, personal, and capital gains taxes combined with reckless deregulation, both of which Trump leaves entirely to his minions in Congress to make happen. He has no interest in such petty details as writing and passing legislation. He just likes to sit in the big chair and give orders.

*reads* this guy is the most dangerous bastard in the public discourse because people don't realize or won't admit how motherfucking dishonest and/or deluded and stupid he is.

In which Our David quietly has a nervous breakdown:

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/05/trumpism-maga-populism-power-pursuit/682116/

gtfo with this "to be sure" graf

Of course, the left made it easy for them. The left really did purge conservatives from universities and other cultural power centers. The left really did valorize a “meritocratic” caste system that privileged the children of the affluent and screwed the working class. The left really did pontificate to their unenlightened moral inferiors on everything from gender to the environment. The left really did create a stifling orthodoxy that stamped out dissent. If you tell half the country that their voices don’t matter, then the voiceless are going to flip over the table.

Those grafs at this point are AI-generated.

I love the image of young classy nice David in 1986 discussing Burke and Oakeshott over beers with bros while Reagan vetoes anti-apartheid legislation and AIDS victims die.

pontificating to your moral inferiors about apartheid and epidemic deaths

Watching his little segments on the PBS NewsHour has been hilarious the last few weeks. He seems on the verge of tears.

As always with these Times weirdos, it all goes back to who the cool kids were in (their elite Ivy) college.

The MAGA elite rode to power on working-class votes, but—trust me, I know some of them—they don’t care about the working class.

this made me lol

also "real conservatives read burke"

he gave a speech to some group in San Francisco last week that I had on in the background, and it was pretty good actually.. I think he's a better speaker than a writer

I loathe this guy already but if I ever see him write “pontificate” unless it is self referential. . .

I cannot make anything approaching objective assessment so can someone please tell mw if this guy has ever displayed anything resembling a sense of humor?

it's so obvious how all of his hand-wringing about elite liberal snobbery is just projection and weird sublimated class guilt. i think that he really thinks he has this ability to access how working class people think and feel, and that his horrid columns are some kind of megaphone for their interests, but he doesn't realize it's just the idle delusions of a racist wet fart who has never contributed anything of value of society

I don’t know why I do this to myself but if I have to know about it so does the rest of ilx: https://weavers.org/about/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZKuzwPOefs

Dude probably thinks of himself as some sort of Robin Hood, taking money from Bezos and Walmart to fund his little Aspen Institute vanity project.

It's like what if you did politics, without getting your hands dirty

Or: what if you did politics, but with a much younger spouse and a glassful of overpriced airport scotch

Milo, my first thought was the Pete Seeger group

If the same affluent families come out on top generation after generation, then no one should be surprised if the losers flip over the table.

In other words, a civic uprising has to have a short-term vision and a long-term vision. Short term: Stop Trump. Foil his efforts. Pile on the lawsuits. Turn some of his followers against him. The second is a long-term vision of a fairer society that is not just hard on Trump, but hard on the causes of Trumpism — one that offers a positive vision. Whether it’s the universities, the immigration system or the global economy, we can’t go back to the status quo that prevailed when Trump first rode down the escalator.

I’m really not a movement guy. I don’t naturally march in demonstrations or attend rallies that I’m not covering as a journalist. But this is what America needs right now. Trump is shackling the greatest institutions in American life. We have nothing to lose but our chains.

I'm s till not over Bill Kristol posting "Abolish ICE" this week

Kristol defended trans rights a couple months ago!

werent all the og neocons (incld bill's dad) disillusioned former leftists anyway? probably just running home after their ideological chickens have come to roost

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/wRXEk7su62w/sddefault.jpg

I don't think Brooks was ever a neocon: too young and too Reaganite.

Brooks rose into prominence as a moderate Republican and has enjoyed immense success and prestige as a result. Psychologically, he could hurl himself from a moving car more easily than he could reject Republicanism, no matter how batshit crazy the party becomes.

― Aimless, Saturday, January 19, 2013 9:56 AM (twelve years ago)

It's been interesting to watch this man screaming as he flies through the air, anticipating the pavement.

I don't think Brooks was ever a neocon: too young and too Reaganite.

― the talented mr pimply (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Saturday, April 19, 2025 1:28 PM (fifty-five minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

yeah that "og" adjective is doing a lot of heavy lifting, i mean the guys who went right in the 50s and 60s who woulda predated brooks