Qualifications

Can someone kindly explain why, in a job market where thousands of people holding master's degrees are either looking for work or holding jobs way beneath their skill levels, David Brooks is still employed? Seriously, if one were to sit down and scrutinize each individual player in the professional pundit industry, they'd come away completely perplexed.

Or, you know, with a deeper understanding of why utter morons are entrusted with the important job of manufacturing acceptable opinion and consent. It is neither accident nor mere circumstance that you'll see someone like Bobo on your teevee a hundred times for every occasion that, say, Noam Chomsky is allowed anywhere near a corporate media newsotainment program.

By now, Bobo should have massive arms, from carrying water for his dark overlords lo these many decades. Strangely, he still looks like he's made of pipe cleaners and broken dreams.

Just Say Mo' to Drugs

Whatever Bobo's smokin' these days, maybe we could all use a hit. Vote for the Republican, because he'll actually have to compromise. Hilarious. Any more prescriptions, Doctor?

The bottom line is this: If Obama wins, we’ll probably get small-bore stasis; if Romney wins, we’re more likely to get bipartisan reform. Romney is more of a flexible flip-flopper than Obama. He has more influence over the most intransigent element in the Washington equation House Republicans. He’s more likely to get big stuff done.

If there were ever any merit or upside for vindication, I might actually bother to dig through the archive and see if this was also Bobo's guiding "logic" for Jorge Arbusto back in the glory days of 2000 and/or 2004. But there are rarely any surprises to be found in reading Bobo's gnomic droppings, and so I punt. We are where we are, Tonstant Weader, knowing what we know about the players in this here game.

Really, if there's any greater argument against the welfare state than the continued sinecures of overpaid token media contrarians, I'll be goddamned if I have any clue as to what it might be. One of these days, someone should have Bobo and his ilk blind-taste-test competing policy initiatives from each candidate, see if they can actually differentiate. Ten bucks ('cause that's all I gots after The Man has taken his 93% cut) says they cannot.

Bobocracy

It's been a while, but this one is moronic even by Bobo standards:

The economic approach embraced by the most prominent liberals over the past few years is mostly mechanical. The economy is treated like a big machine; the people in it like rational, utility maximizing cogs. The performance of the economic machine can be predicted with quantitative macroeconomic models.

These models can be used to make highly specific projections. If the government borrows $1 and then spends it, it will produce $1.50 worth of economic activity. If the government spends $800 billion on a stimulus package, that will produce 3.5 million in new jobs.

Everything is rigorous. Everything is science.

Conservatives, who are usually stereotyped as narrow-eyed business-school types, have gone all Oprah-esque in trying to argue against these liberals. If the government borrows trillions of dollars, this will increase public anxiety and uncertainty, the conservatives worry. The liberal technicians brush aside this soft-headed mush. These psychological concerns are mythological, they say. That’s gaseous blathering from those who lack quantitative rigor.

Hanh? Lemme get this straight -- one of the most steadfast, indeed tediously consistent, preachers of the technocratic gospel is now protesting the supposedly topsy-turvy nature of What's Going On? Surely a heaping helping of doubleplusbullshit can't be far behind.

It’s been harder to dismiss morality as a phantom concern, too. Maybe in a nation of robots the government can run a policy that offends the morality of the citizenry, but not in a nation of human beings, as the recent elections showed.

Fair enough. Whence the morality, the righteous indignation, against the thieves and scammers who shitcanned the economy, forced the taxpayers to bankroll their "mistakes", are now sitting on hoards of cash that they won't lend out to rejuvenate the economy, and have dragooned a like-minded bunch of abettors to fuck people out of their homes with fraudulent paperwork? No, of course not; Bobo merely hangs his balding pate, shaking his head sadly at the Spock-like bloodlessness with which machine-messiah liberals insist on running our proud, tradition-rich society. This is truly a feat of some estimable proportions, to completely look past and implicitly absolve the destructive, sociopathic greed of a niche of derivatives pirates, and lob dickless wads of disapproval at the management style of -- wait for it -- a bunch of dickless drones who don't have the balls to take on their benefactors.

Lloyd Blankfein could demand a sacrifice of a thousand barbecued live infants for next Walpurgisnacht, and the Democrats would cringe timorously and murmur tepid disapproval, and people like Bobo would berate said Dems for their lack of support for our fine capitalist insect overlords. This is a rotten fucking little system all the way around -- the people who run and rape the finance system, the people who are supposed to legislate and regulate it, and the people who are supposed to analyze and report factually with at least a trace of intellectual honesty -- and it won't change until we set up a guillotine on Wall Street and make an example of some of these humps.

I do not understand why this has not been done yet. Perhaps at some point enough of the folks who are getting ass-raped out of their houses will band together and do or demand something. Or they may choose to wonder instead if Snooki takes it up the poop-chute. (Answer: mos def, but only if the hot tub's hot and the Four Loko is room temperature. A lady has to have her standards, even if said lady is really a transvestite Oompa-Loompa.)

Yes, if only we could just run things with a bit o' common sense, as if wage stagnation, income disparity, and banana-republic-level wealth stratification have not been ramping up and destroying the middle class for three decades now. I have absolutely no clues where Serious Thinker Bobo proposes that the "low debt" and "high savings" are supposed to come from, perhaps that bottomless pit of moxie and/or gumption that well-heeled bootstrappers like himself assume exists somewhere out in the vaunted flyover country that media dipshits constantly champion, but never seem to actually reside in.

With any luck, he'll someday find out firsthand. Really, if the market for corporate butt-boy suddenly fell out and Bobo had to make something resembling an honest living, it's difficult to tell what actual skill he has. Anybody can peddle tendentious "opinion" guff on unsuspecting passersby -- it's called blogging, and there's an infinite variety of better content produced for free across these here intartubez. At some point his toadying may no longer be cost-effective, and his periwinkle-collar commiserating may be put to the test.

Epic Flail

The only thing funnier than Bobo Brooks is two Bobos, and this week finds Our Pastel Hero in rare form, as he once again attempts to limn the American Character by spelunking its stanky nether regions. Let's ponder the nuggets o' wisdom he finds therein.

Anguished Missive the First forges the well-trod iron path of the ivory-tower historian, squaring the usual tropes of classical historical theories and the misgivings of the founding fathers against the current cultural dynamic.

“Human nature, in no form of it, could ever bear prosperity,” John Adams wrote in a letter to Thomas Jefferson, warning against the coming corruption of his country.

Yet despite its amazing wealth, the United States has generally remained immune to this cycle. American living standards surpassed European living standards as early as 1740. But in the U.S., affluence did not lead to indulgence and decline.

That’s because despite the country’s notorious materialism, there has always been a countervailing stream of sound economic values. The early settlers believed in Calvinist restraint. The pioneers volunteered for brutal hardship during their treks out west. Waves of immigrant parents worked hard and practiced self-denial so their children could succeed. Government was limited and did not protect people from the consequences of their actions, thus enforcing discipline and restraint.

Fair enough, except that the fact was that every hardlined pioneer began their trek with the hope of getting rich (aside from your garden variety Great Awakening god-bothering loons), and the government's reach was limited by the size of the country and the constraints of the day. The moment any territory showed a sign of being a profitable venture, it was duly annexed; the idea that there was some underlying libertarian motif is silly. This is a fairly prosaic reduction of human nature, a rhetorical momentum-gathering device.

When economic values did erode, the ruling establishment tried to restore balance. After the Gilded Age, Theodore Roosevelt (who ventured west to counteract the softness of his upbringing) led a crackdown on financial self-indulgence. The Protestant establishment had many failings, but it was not decadent. The old WASPs were notoriously cheap, sent their children to Spartan boarding schools, and insisted on financial sobriety.

Well, the WASPs thought they could take it with them or something, and conflated ritual abuse with familial bonding. "Decadent" does not necessarily require the usual connotation of "hedonistic sybarite" when "unconscionable hoarding" will do just as well. What the leisure class lacked in public displays of sexual excitement was more than made up for in indefensible greed.

I've made the point many times that people in general and Americans in particular have perverse relationships with food, money, and sex. They binge and purge on those things, and feel guilty about it later, engaging in other destructive behaviors as a result, instead of just enjoying all those things in moderation. I don't mean it as a moral injunction, merely to point out how wasteful and dumb it can be at times for a great many individuals. But genetically uptight worshippers of Establishment mores such as Bobo almost always view these issues through the prism of the Sixties.

It is considered practically a given amongst such moral guardians that the sex-and-drug libertines of the Woodstock era eroded some great moral bulwark that had been erected up to that point. They seem to think that people weren't getting high and/or having indiscriminate sex until 1967, rather than that they were simply a bit more circumspect about those things until then. It drove them crazy that those damned kids didn't have the decency to feel guilty and ashamed about what they were doing, invoking Mencken's classic observation of a puritan being someone who was inconsolable that somewhere out there, someone might be having a good time.

Over the past few years, however, there clearly has been an erosion in the country’s financial values. This erosion has happened at a time when the country’s cultural monitors were busy with other things. They were off fighting a culture war about prayer in schools, “Piss Christ” and the theory of evolution. They were arguing about sex and the separation of church and state, oblivious to the large erosion of economic values happening under their feet.

Yes, and? It's not as if they weren't actively encouraged to indulge in those distractions by the very same self-styled moral guardians -- that is, Bobo's own Republicans and movement conservatives -- who were fleecing them, and not trying very hard to disguise it. They chose to focus on the perils of sexual licentiousness, because to call attention to financial licentiousness or consumerist depravity would have been bad for business.

The dangers of societal permissiveness are more grave and more profound than whether someone gets or gives a blowjob outside the sacred circle of marriage. Time and again, Bobo fails utterly to even perceive this, much less understand the role his own party has played in their own downfall.

Over the years, I have asked many politicians what happens when Limbaugh and his colleagues attack. The story is always the same. Hundreds of calls come in. The receptionists are miserable. But the numbers back home do not move. There is no effect on the favorability rating or the re-election prospects. In the media world, he is a giant. In the real world, he’s not.

But this is not merely a story of weakness. It is a story of resilience. For no matter how often their hollowness is exposed, the jocks still reweave the myth of their own power. They still ride the airwaves claiming to speak for millions. They still confuse listeners with voters. And they are aided in this endeavor by their enablers. They are enabled by cynical Democrats, who love to claim that Rush Limbaugh controls the G.O.P. They are enabled by lazy pundits who find it easier to argue with showmen than with people whose opinions are based on knowledge. They are enabled by the slightly educated snobs who believe that Glenn Beck really is the voice of Middle America.

This is the insularity of the sinecured pundit -- they genuinely do not get that the studied cynicism that they have purveyed for well over a generation has stuck with people who not only don't know any better, but are proud of that fact, make a point of staying in that zone and taking up permanent residence. I recall once linking/excerpting something by Gertude Himmelfarb wherein she tacitly admitted that the whole "America is Jebus' Favrit Nation" schtick was just something to keep the rabble in line, that neither she nor her claque in the opinion-mongering movementarian smart set really believed in the Judeo-Christian deity, so much as they recognized the political utility of encouraging mindless fervor from that crowd.

But that's where cynicism can really bite you in the ass, ideologically. When you have deliberately cultivated this deep-but-narrow swath of morons to do your bidding, not only do you ultimately push out anyone with an IQ over 90, but you force yourself to cater more and more to this political golem of boobism you've constructed. The Republicans heartily encouraged a climate of proudly anti-intellectual licentiousness, made it an issue of freedom and liberty to consume as much as possible, to be gluttonous and dull-witted, to self-actualize by spending every fucking night watching random idiots sort their sock drawers on reality shows, to be heedless of the consequences, and to characterize anyone who raised an eyebrow as practically a traitor.

A true moralizer would have taken issue with the notion that excess, waste, sloth, greed, and ignorance were anything short of reprehensible; the conservatard attitude was that to even suggest that such things were shameful was un-American. So activities such as smoking, eating to obesity, and watching hillbillies drive in circles all day were not just silly pastimes with obvious externalities, they were expressions of freedom. Turn on, tune in, drop out indeed.

They could at any point have made an effort to engage sensible, reasonable people and encourage a climate of intellectual rigor and honesty, and deliberately chose to go in the exact opposite direction. They may not have really meant it as such, but they have no right to be surprised that the people who were dumb enough to fall for that nonsense chose to take it literally and make it a way of life.

It's unclear by Bobo's weak tilt at "slightly educated snobs" whether he means the usual bien pensant limo-lib suspects, or effete snipe-hunting twaddlers like himself. It doesn't matter -- utlimately it's all a bunch of half-assed attempts to chicken-egg the current toxic stupidity back to some First Principle. Again, though, you can't just pump people full of dumbass juice for 20-30 years, and then suddenly climb some high horse of moral rigor because of the lack of prudence that you helped drum into their paper-thin crania.

So the myth returns. Just months after the election and the humiliation, everyone is again convinced that Limbaugh, Beck, Hannity and the rest possess real power. And the saddest thing is that even Republican politicians come to believe it. They mistake media for reality. They pre-emptively surrender to armies that don’t exist.

They pay more attention to Rush’s imaginary millions than to the real voters down the street. The Republican Party is unpopular because it’s more interested in pleasing Rush’s ghosts than actual people. The party is leaderless right now because nobody has the guts to step outside the rigid parameters enforced by the radio jocks and create a new party identity. The party is losing because it has adopted a radio entertainer’s niche-building strategy, while abandoning the politician’s coalition-building strategy.

The rise of Beck, Hannity, Bill O’Reilly and the rest has correlated almost perfectly with the decline of the G.O.P. But it’s not because the talk jocks have real power. It’s because they have illusory power, because Republicans hear the media mythology and fall for it every time.

Yes, poor Republicans, always getting rooked by the "media mythology". Why, it's sad when you think about it, because despite being obstructionist at every turn, despite heckling and taunting Obama even when he comes up with a halfway decent idea, despite having spent the last year doing absolutely nothing other than being a reverse rubber stamp because that's all they have left, they really just want what's best for the country. They've been trying their durndest, only to be thwarted at every turn and taken advantage for their well-meaning naïveté.

Bobo really has lost touch with his party. He seems to think they're trying to return to some sort of Dick Lugaresque vision of moderate, principled, somewhat informed conservatism. He doesn't get that the sideshow has taken it over, that it's just a giant clown car powered by Palin and Bachmann and the screams of small children. The Republican party stands for nothing other than fucking Barack Obama over at all costs, and empowering every dipshit and yahoo with whatever scare tactic their astroturf elves can conjure up.

Whatever Bill Buckley may have meant for the movement in his heart of hearts, his ideological descendants continue to regress, devolved to knuckle-dragging oafs whose sole mission is to stand athwart common sense and decency and scream "Death panels!"

Copping a Feel

You know, I've (half-)joked in the past about Bobo Brooks being effete, dickless, possibly latent, definitely a ginormous pussy who wouldn't know which end of a socket wrench to use, but damn:

BROOKS: You know, all three of us spend a lot of time covering politicians and I don’t know about you guys, but in my view, they’re all emotional freaks of one sort or another. They’re guaranteed to invade your personal space, touch you. I sat next to a Republican senator once at dinner and he had his hand on my inner thigh the whole time. I was like, ehh, get me out of here.

HARWOOD: What?

BROOKS: I can only imagine what happens to you guys.

O’DONNELL: Sorry, who was that?

BROOKS: I’m not telling you, I’m not telling you.

If this is Bobo's idea of being "provocative" then it explains more about him, both as a man and as a journalist, than his entire career as a columnist. First of all, be a man and don't put up with being groped by perverts, unless you're secretly into that sort of thing, in which case don't act all shocked with your "revelation" with this mystery senator (which of course was a Republican, like there was any doubt). I'll go for the easy money and say it was Larry Craig (R-Tearoom), but there's so many to choose from. Hillbilly moralist Mitch McConnell, for one, is rumored to enjoy his share of tube steak, and there's always confirmed bachelor Huckleberry Graham.

Can't wait for the inevitable Lifetime movie where Corey Feldman, as Bobo, uses a doll to show the special prosecutor where the bad man touched him. In the meantime -- sheesh, what a punk-ass bitch, really. "Ehh, get me out of here," like it never even occurred to young Bobo to just look the mystery groper in eye and say, "Dude, what the fuck? You can stop now and retain your dignity, or draw back a stump while I loudly ask the entire table why your hand is massaging my cock. Take your pick. You got two seconds before I stop using my indoor voice."

The man really has no fucking balls -- and that is an unfortunate character trait which will permeate every facet of a person, personally and professionally. People like Bobo actually care who these creeps who are feeling him up are, because he defines himself (certainly professionally, and probably to some extent on a personal level) through them, and through his access to them. It's a damned shame, and no doubt Bobo's experiences -- and more importantly, his reactions to them -- are not unique.

But seriously, I wonder how this guy explains this sort of shit to his wife. It's not a gay/straight thing, really, it's a matter of a grown man allowing himself to be treated at a public function like a cancer-ridden tween in Michael Jackson's hidden bedchamber. Just sad and weird, but it explains a lot about the people who bring us our news and carefully considered analysis.

So Like Us

I suppose I hadn't really thought about it, but it makes sense that Bobo might regard himself as the Jane Goodall of the political primate set. Since he is neither Type A nor an alpha male, his observations are by necessity too generalized to be useful, too broad-brushed to be insightful.

I can buy that a certain level of emotional stuntedness comes with that higher ground, when it comes to business and politics. For a well-groomed corporate running dog, everything is a commodity, including -- hell, especially -- other people. They are there to be conquered, after a fashion. They're either in competition with you, or they work for you.

And pols by definition have to gladhand every sentient body who approaches them. That's the gig; it's probably not habit so much as second nature with most of them. They only deal with people they want something from, and everyone who talks to them wants something from them.

And this is not a revelation either, but elite call girls make elite money to go home and to be discreet, something mistresses cannot typically be relied upon to do.

Still, what I don't buy is that, given the necessary differences in personality between "them" and "us" (and again Bobo, though he goes to the same parties and drinks from the same poisoned well, proffers this bemused detachment as if he had been dropped in on all this from another planet; klaatu barada appletini, indeed), that there is a necessarily higher preponderance of unseemly behavior in that crowd.

If anything, a good chunk of the reg'lar folks most of us encounter in our daily lives are as emotionally stunted as Larry Craig or Eliot Spitzer. Maybe their "wide stance" simply takes a more socially acceptable, economically opportunistic form; instead of hustling random cock in a public bathroom, they have jacked up their F-350 a couple feet, and race about as if they actually had somewhere to be. There's more than one way to overcompensate for shortcomings. It's all about what people can afford, and what they think will impress the neighbors.

That's what the "more in sorrow than in moralistic anger" tone elides, that people are on the run from themselves, and if they could afford to, they might very well become the party pig that thinks every woman is there to fuck him. I mean, nobody in their right mind actually wants to line up outside of Wal-Mart the day after Thanksgiving to save thirty bucks on a DVD player. They've just conditioned themselves to understand that that's the best they can hope for.

Bobo Rising

Sweet Jesus, it's like Christmas in September.

The New York Times will stop charging for access to parts of its Web site, effective at midnight Tuesday night, reflecting a growing view in the industry that subscription fees cannot outweigh the potential ad revenue from increased traffic on a free site.

Translation: who in their right mind would pay to read Bobo and MoDo and such? But I'll be more than happy to slap a hoop skirt on the former and take him out dancin' again for free. BoboWatch is back, baby!

The Usama bin Bobo Tape

I'll keep this one short and sweet: Blow me, fuckface.

Bedtime for Bobo

Labor Day is typically when lip service is paid to workers and organizers of the past, before we all get ready to head back to the grind. I'd like to take a slightly different tack and spare a thought for those people who, in a rational world, would be practically unemployable, yet are well-compensated for producing practically nothing at all. Many come to mind; we'll look at just one, one we haven't picked on in some time.

Let's get something straight -- Bobo is not a sophist. A hack, a shill, a toady to the worst strains of American political boobism, and a situational ethicist, sure, but sophistry implies a coherent tack, a plan, a vision beyond "once bought, stays bought".

The real question, as I have beating on more than usual lately, is how and why people such as Bobo manage to keep getting face time.

We've been seeing, hearing and reading a lot of pseudo-funny churlishness from Brooks – a lot of Brooks, period. Maybe NPR, PBS, and Times audiences have been calling in, demanding, "More David Brooks!" More likely, editors and producers think him a conservative congenial to liberals like themselves. It doesn't hurt that many conservatives think him a traitor.

I think he's right; I can't imagine what kind of asshole would be calling/writing in begging for more Bobo. It's editorial -- and not in the "congenial to liberals like themselves" sense, either, which is highly speculative at best. It's just that Bobo's comparatively diffident bromides put a more user-friendly face on the intellectual offal normally produced by the Coulter/Limbaugh/Hannity cretin wing. But that's not intellectual probity, it's a corporate hack's idea of "balance".

The distinction seems utterly lost on the decision-makers, so enamored as they appear to be of Bobo's woolly aphorisms and sloppy thinking. "See folks," they seem to say, "they're not all assholes." No, they're not. But they are all wrong, and have been for some time, and don't seem to be in any rush to get their shit straight. They are not entitled to their own facts, no matter how much they would like to selectively squint at things.

The article is full of evidence at Bobo's intellectual dishonesty, which abounds like Devil Dogs at Rosie O'Donnell's breakfast table. It's such an easy mark, it misses the point by belaboring the obvious -- again, why is a proven hack clogging up so much air time? Because the defense contractors that own the networks, and the pharma/insurance companies that buy advertising, would rather push the breezy familiarity of an amiable dork than someone who might actually give up the game. It's important to keep the Pepsi vs. Coke dynamic going, above all else.

So it's all noteworthy, but this one passage may explain the situation more than anything else:

On the News Hour in 2004, [Brooks] announced that John Kerry had flunked "the Joshua test" by meeting Brooks' young son Joshua and turning him off. "Anyone who can't relate to a 10-year-old boy can't relate to the American electorate," Brooks opined, but if he was right, why does he disparage Westen for saying pretty much the same, with regret, not a smirk?

Because, as the author notes, it's not in Bobo's portfolio to actually inform anyone of much of anything. He's a vested member of the machine that prefers to treat adults like mushrooms (keep 'em in the dark, feed 'em lots of bullshit), which has deliberately infantilized the dialogue and its participants. It makes perfect sense that Brooks would claim to disqualify Kerry simply for being awkward in talking to Brooks' son.

It's also complete bullshit -- even Kerry had been smooth and adept, even genuinely so, in engaging young Joshua, Brooks would have presumed it to be a limo-lib contrivance. Worst-case scenario, he'd have decided after much solemn consideration that even if Kerry had passed Bobo's reg'lar-guy quals (as if Bobo himself would not come across as a preening hard-on at virtually any blue-collar gathering), Bobo just could not have changed horses from Preznit "He fergot Poland!!1!! in mid fuck-up.

One presumes that, come enlistment age in a few years, Bobo will not exactly be exhorting his son to risk life and limb for Junior's folly. That's for the hallowed Wal-Mart-economy heartlanders Bobo worships in print. In the meantime, putatively liberal media outlets are happy to give Bobo face-time, and Bobo is more than happy to return the favor, milking his rhetorical straying from the conservatard reservation for all its artificial worth.