You know you can PM people here, right?
IMHO many conservatives are like anti-vaxxers on that regard, anti-vaxxers just forget that the current conditions they see now is what allows them to be very reckless with their families today, they have not seen how disease was rampant when vaccines were not there. The problem they ignore is that the rosy conditions that allow them to skip vaccines did not exist until a lot of progress was made with the vaccination rates.
And so it is with the ones wanting to dismantle welfare, what they want to skip is not going to be as easy as they expect. In other discussions I have seen it is becoming clear that robotics and other advances are going to destroy many traditional jobs in the future and the idea of a more robust safety net needs to be taken into account.
A lot of conservatives will wonder later what did hit them once they get rid of the safety nets.
I don’t get the hate for Brooks from liberals here. The same thing happened when David Frum called out the Republican Party a few years ago. I didn’t see that as anything but good news.
David Brooks should be congratulated. It must not have been easy to come down on his party like that, but he did the right thing. It’s great to see the insanity of the Republican Party called out by one of its own who can’t be accused of just mouthing partisan rhetoric. Whatever Brooks has done in the past, he just kicked the tea party fascists in the ass. Good for him.
I’ve never badmouthed the curmudgeonly Charles Krauthammer. I rather enjoyed reading William Safire, and admired William Buckley.
But David Brooks is a pretentious twit. So he’s taken a stand against lunacy. Big deal. Would you applaud him if he also announces he doesn’t like rattlesnakes? Brooks opposes the lunatic right-wingers only because he thinks the lunatic fringe decreases the electoral chances of the slightly less fringy right-wingers.
False.
In 1960, the Republican Party had a lock on the professional class. Since then professionals have trended Democratic. Professionals are well heeled, affluent, and have an economic interest in low taxes. But they also understand the importance of not sinking the ship or blowing up bridges. They embrace science, vaccination and accept the scientific consensus on global warming, gravity, evolution and the germ theory of disease. They also have the analytic skills and temperament to distinguish between middle class and budget busting tax cuts aimed at the upper echelons. Often they are affluent of course: I’m making a claim about their cognition, not their social status.
Details, caveats, qualifications in this thread:
Here’s your answer:
We’ve seen this movie before. Brooks is delivering a schtick: his analysis has always been a joke.
So, what we do, comrade, is to encourage and incite class warfare between the upper bourgeoisie and the ruling class? Excellent. Inform the revolutionary cadres.
This is not something Brooks just came out with today. He’s been talking about this for quite some time now, so your “next week” is long past.
Yeah, yeah. Once more. We’ve seen this movie before. He waggles his finger on the 2nd Tuesday of alternate months beginning with vowels, then goes back to his usual vacuous shtick without missing a beat. The gulls cheer.
He came out (ha!) in favor of SSM in 2003, long before most Democratic politicians did. He’s also been in favor of legalized abortion, much to the chagrin of most of his conservative colleagues.
Can you tell us what his “vacuous shtick” is? Of the conservative commentators out there, he seems to me to be one of the few who doesn’t hesitate to criticize Republicans, and he does so frequently. If you want him to change into a liberal, maybe you’re asking too much.
I’d applaud him for announcing he doesn’t like rattlesnakes if he was a rattlesnake, which I think is a more apt analogy.
Even if David Brooks is a pretentious twit, I think my point still stands: he blew the whistle on his own party. Whether that gets any traction or not remains to be seen, but at least he did it. If only other conservatives would follow his example, pretentious twits or not.
I’m not getting your respect (or whatever you want to call it) for CK over DB. CK seems much closer to a hack than Brooks (whom I don’t consider to be a hack). Tell me what I’m missing.
I have to admit that I haven’t read Brooks much, and what I have hasn’t impressed me, including this column despite its subject matter, so I didn’t realize he’s done this before. But if he has, isn’t regularly calling out the TP lunatics in his own party a good thing?
Sheesh, where to begin? Like a lot of pundits Brooks seems to think that Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders were somehow separated at birth: you see they are both outsiders! Nate Silver provides the fact based debunking of that counterintuitive but not really inanity. Hint: Bernie Sanders has served in one house or another of Congress since 1991. Sanders policy positions are way more substantive and Trump gets more media play.
As a pop-sociologist Brooks phones a lot of his data-free columns into the Times. Albert Burneko: [indent]In the years since, he has been a reliable producer of out-of-touch, tissue-thin pronouncements on the perils of our secularized, technologized 21st century lives, virtually all of which rightly can be interpreted as passive-aggressive nostalgia… You could just about set your calendar by it: In a month of Brooks, you’d get the call to begin or continue a war with Iraq or Iran, the grasping attempt to paint some cretinous Senator or presidential hopeful as the intellectual heir to Edmund Burke, and then, at last, the decline-and-fall column. You’d see a headline like “The Slow Virtues” or “The Hollow Century” or “Why the Teens Are Despicable,” and you’d know ol’ Dave’s coffee shop was out of plain croissants a week ago and the barista had a nose-ring and he’d decided he’d witnessed the death of the Western moral tradition. [/indent] The comparisons to Edmund Burke are particularly hilarious: he once compared crock-pottery breaker GW Bush to the uber-cautious Burke in a column that deftly combined wishful thinking with supercilious hagiography.
Michael Peppard pretty much nails Brooks’ vacuous modus operandi: “* In this column I will embed my own nostalgia for the time and place in which I grew up within a framework of someone else’s compelling (if simplistic) narrative, and then offer sweeping, general prescriptions for our societial ills.*”, before IDing a howler whereby Brooks attributes a quote by Paul in Corinthineans to Jesus himself. Not a lot of Jesus quotes in Cornintheans.
I think almost anyone who has to put out a column every week can be said to have a “schtick”. It’s difficult to reinvent oneself every week.
It’s really astounding that folks can’t just say: Hey, good on him for calling out the crazies". The very first sentence of the very first response was to call him a partisan hack. A partisan hack who criticizes his own party??? Now that’s the kind of partisan hack I can get behind!
He’s a desperate hack. In this column he bemoans the incompetence of the freedom faction of the Republicans and their unyielding obstructionist stance. He takes great pains to point out that this is not a new problem, but an insidious problem with roots that go back to Rush Limbaugh’s beginning.
Yet, less than a year ago, in the wake of the mid term election, he wrote about the "bizarre " behavior of Obama, who he blamed for “pre-emptive obstruction” in not looking to compromise with the new, heavily freedom faction influenced Congress.
So, on the one hand he professes a long awareness of the spiteful, ungovernable nature of the current Republican party. Yet, upon their current assumption of power, he was pre-emptively blaming Obama for not working with them.
Brooks is a fucking hack. Next he’ll be informing us that the little people he met at the salad bar at Applebee’s told him they are tired of all the partisan squabbling in DC, which both parties share equal responsibility for.
The man sure knows how to wear a suit! Next to Mark Shields, the Avatar of Frumpy, he fairly glows with precise tailoring.
LOL: this is pretty much it. Tendentious passive-aggressive nostalgia.
But good on you for saying that water is wet David!
ETA: Also, I heard that John Boehner is a real nonpartisan analyst. He criticizes Ted Cruz!
True fact: duck farts don’t echo, and no one knows why.
I have more respect for bombastic oafs than I have for pretentious twits. I prefer an honest man, even when wallowing in his own ignorance, over a smug hypocrite who thinks he’s oh-so-preciously erudite.
This models not just how I feel about David Brooks, but why the targets of my SDMB Pit invective are often different from others’ usual targets. … But I won’t mention any names. 