Tool or Fool?

[acmavm]

http://www.bestoftheblogs.com/

<snip>

David Brooks, on the News Hour last night:

<snip>

You know, there's political differences, obviously but what's at stake here is so much different. I think that the murder of Pim Fortuyn, the Dutch politician, the gay Dutch politician, who made this point, we can have multiculturalism or we can have pluralism, but we can't have both, with a subset of people that doesn't believe in pluralism that wants to enforce laws on homosexuals, on women. So you have got to make this choice and that's the choice Europe is making. I think they're feeling it much more seriously than we are but that's the choice they found they have to make.

I heard this on the radio - the TV broadcast is simulcast on the local public radio station - so I couldn't see if his face betrayed whether he knew he was being a hypocrite or whether he made these statements sincerely and obliviously bereft of the irony that he was describing in complete and accurate detail the beliefs and worldviews of the very rightwing fundamentalist Christians whose values he champions in various tones of scolding depending on the venue.

He plays, smugly, damply, a reasonable conservative on The News Hour, so his sensible and correct outrage against the narrow-religious who believe in sinfulizing gays and sinfulizing women's rights, who believe in a prescripted end narrative that regards progress as both irrelevant and blasphemous, makes Brooks either a hypocrite or a hypocrite squared. He's either saying that fundamentalist Muslims are bad when they would legislate homophobic laws and burka their women while fundamentalist Christians are devout and righteous when they would do the same, or both are equally bad in an honest moral calculus but he must not say so because the narrow-religious' support is essential in preserving the oligarchic Right's power in America. He is either a hypocrite-fool or a hypocrite-tool.

-MORE (another paragraph)-

************************************************************
Scroll down the page to find this smackdown of this smarmy jerk.

[Faygo Kid]

1. Tool.

[Arkansas Granny]

2. How about a foolish tool?