What is with David Brooks?

[Slickriddles]

In an op-ed piece in yesterday's NYTimes David Brooks proposes something like RED (state) Gaurds to free us from our "political ghettoes." He also seems to want to abandon the Enlightenment.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/29/opinion/29BROO.html

Is there a subtext of racial segregation in this piece?

[Tosca]

1. Dave

Who the hell knows what the hack is talking about? His writing is like a college freshman's on airplane glue.

[Stephanie]

2. "Still, it's worth thinking radically."

Dear God we have had enough of Brooks' and his pals' radical thought! Someone make him go away! He is the most irritating weenie of them all, IMO.

[jdsmith]

4. But he's the liberals' favorite conservative

Haven't you heard? He's funny! He makes up words (Bobo!!)! He makes up "facts" (get him to take you to dinner at Red Lobster someday.)We love li'l Davey!

[Stephanie]

5. Yes, we have to endure him on PBS, NPR, and the NY Times

It's outrageous. And he's not a conservative, he's a neo-con shill from the Weekly Standard who's only there to promote the PNAC agenda. He's sick and dangerous and deluded and he has teeny, tiny little girly hands.

[0007]

28. Brooks was on Washington Journal this morning

sprewing his shit about Michael Moore and F 9/11 - It was so bad I have to mute the tilly.

[Mayberry Machiavelli]

7. Yeh, what the hell did that BOBO acronym stand for again? That one really

caught on. Not.
:shrug:

[Scairp]

11. Did you find out what BOBO means? n/t

[Mayberry Machiavelli]

14. He wrote some stupidass article like "bobos in paradise", it's some

acronym like yuppie or something, I think he devised it himself, it's stupid as all hell and sounds too dumb to ever catch on.

[Arugula Latte]

17. I think it stands for:

bohemian bourgeois

[jdsmith]

31. But there was already a word (yuppie) that was well-established

if you are trying to coin a word--especially if you're supposed to be some kinda smart guy--you don't try to displace another that has already proven itself. Also, you propably should give a moment's thought to whether the phonetics of "Bobo" work out right with "Bohemian bourgeois." "Boboo" is more like the sound of the root terms.

[skypilot]

32. Bobos

Besides, "bobos" is already a slang term. For as long as I can remember bobos has been a term used to describe cheap and unfashionable sneakers. That's the only thing I ever think of when I hear that term. David Brooks is such an unoriginal hack. I've said before on this board that he seems desperate to coin a term or phrase that will be forever associated with his weeny ass.

[jdsmith]

34. He wants to be in the OED

Heck, so do I. That'd be frablitabulous.

[Stephanie]

20. It's something like yuppie bohemians

He came to NY and wrote deeply stupid columns for the NYT about places in NYC as if they were brand new, like Chelsea Market, when in fact they were well established and only new to HIM, the idiot newbie. This is a dweeb who will never ever in his life be cool trying desperately from every angle to be accepted somewhere. NY doesn't want him, the radical right only wants to use him, he looks stupid on TV and his columns are assinine. Go home!

[mitchum]

41. Brooks has a "talent" for discovering the obvious (along with a tin ear)

[Scairp]

23. Oh right

Wasn't he exposed for having made up some stuff about an article he wrote for Atlantic Monthly or some other such magazine? Seems like I read that somewhere recently.

[Flubadubya]

3. Well, by all means...

let's do away with education then. What is it with Nazi types anyhow? Give 'em a little power and the first thing they want to do is destroy education. These people would be laughable if they weren't so damned scary! :scared:

6. Brooks and Hitchens

should get a room.

[indigobusiness]

9. They should...

but it's such an unpleasant thought.


I'm feeling ill.

[Scairp]

8. We've been talking about him already today

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x1896173

I also couldn't make out what he was getting at. Educated people think too much? :shrug:

[gold_bug]

10. he's weird.

I watched him on C-SPAN this morning. He has a certain type of intelligence and erudition but it's strangely mixed with myopia and mushy thinking.

Regarding his national service program, I'd say personally if I had to spend time with bigoted homophobic Republicans I'd probably still end up a polarized lefty. I don't think that would work out too well for most people. The thing Brooks ignores is that some of the polarization he bemoans is caused by a reaction/backlash against rightward shift of the Republicans and the radicalism they tolerate within their party. Yet he says Rush Limbaugh is just fine and Michael Moore is an crazy partisan distorter corrupting our view of reality. Okay, whatever.

[sangh0]

12. Brooks' ploy is to complain about political polarization

and then go on to explain how everyone belongs to one of two groups, one of which is good, and the other evil.

[KoKo]

27. And, he doesn't mention that Repug Gerrymandering has caused what

might look like segregated clusters of Repugs or Dems when in fact the voting districts are designed so that the maximum of one party is placed in a district which may wind line a snake through a County just to make sure that all Repugs are included or all Dems are included.

He doesn't even mention that, but goes off on his questional postulating about how divided we are.

He's so loved by the Repugs. Amazing.

[dumpster_baby]

13. he is advocating party-less candidates, which favors monied candidates

Look at this quote from that article:
>>>>>>>>>>
"The current primaries reward orthodox, polarization-reinforcing candidates. Open, nonpartisan primaries might reward the unorthodox and weaken the party bases. To do nothing is to surrender to a lifetime of ugliness. "
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>


This is why some many local municipal elections have nonpartisan party-less election--because then the voters usually cannot get a clue about what the candidate thinks except from the candidate's ads (which gives the corporate lapdogs the big advantage). This also inhibits the growth of third parties from the ground up, at the local level, where it would be easier to do. It is just another example of how those with power manipulate the system to keep it and get more power.

But if we had a REAL multiparty, proportional representational political system, we would not even need to know anything about the candidate; we could just vote the party line. In such a system, you have REAL competition between parties, and that means that they have to have candidates who actually REPRESENT THE VOTERS by toeing the party line.

Brooks is just hauling more water for the neoliberal establishment by trying to take away power and knowledge from the voters. That bastard need to be indicted for crimes against the people.

[scarface2004]

15. according to someone with dick cheney's vocabulary...

he s just a dumb cocksucking motherfucker!!!

[Waverley_Hills_Hiker]

16. well,,he does set the gaydar off a bit.

maybe more truth to the cocksucker part than we know?

[kdowney]

18. He's

He's an elitist fop. Better to just let him go play with the debris of American cultural malaise.

[newyawker99]

21. Hi kdowney!!

Welcome to DU!! :toast:

[Cocoa]

19. go here for translation

Shorter David Brooks


A sudden influx of quarrelsome educated people during the 90's overwhelmed the best efforts of Newt Gingrich, Ken Starr, Fox News and George W. Bush to bring comity to a divided nation.

[Mayberry Machiavelli]

22. I was going to ask if you had a machine to do this for other writers.

This site is now in my favorites, LOL.

[Hamlette]

37. great site!!!

Busy, Busy, Busy!!! Smart analysis, I love the one on Hitchens on Moore:

"Michael Moore is factually challenged, by me, which is to say me and the facts disagree, so lets me and the facts go outside and settle this thing right now, right now, and if you dare quote from Orwell I’ll double-plus kick your totalitarian pacifist butt and - hey, where you going, hey!"

[Tosca]

24. Hack

He slung some mud pies at Mike Moore the other day. I emailed him and told him to keep up the good work, it can only improve sales at the box office.

[bossfish]

25. That's actually one of the more reasonable columns...

...I've read from him. That is sort of sad.

Compared to his screed about Michael Moore (hates America), this one actually had a premise that he attempts to wade through.

And he didn't mention Bush's "national service" program. He'll unify. In fact, you'll all wear the same clothes. We call 'em fatigues.

[madfloridian]

26. Didn't he go to the NYT from The Weekly Standard?

If you read the Standard and see who its writers are, you will understand Brooks.

[Stephanie]

30. Oh yes. In fact if you read his bio he is still with them

He is Kristol's bitch. Don't think he has his own ideas. He is there to shill for PNAC.

[Redleg]

29. Brooks is a pseudo-intellectual piece of distended dog's rectum.

Jeebus, how can anyone actually believe Brooks is smart?

[myrna minx]

33. The Daily Holwer is priceless...

http://www.dailyhowler.com/dh040504.shtml

SHATTERED BROOKS! David Brooks invented his facts. At TNR, that’s fine and dandy:

MONDAY, APRIL 5, 2004

SHATTERED BROOKS: As you may recall, David Brooks wrote a foolish-but-famous piece for the December 2001 Atlantic (see THE DAILY HOWLER, 12/21/01). “ARE WE REALLY ONE COUNTRY?” the cover asked. “A report from ‘Red’ and ‘Blue’ America.” Brooks, like a modern-day Thoreau, had gone out to limn the big questions:

HENRY THOREAU (1854): I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.
DAVID BROOKS (2001): I went to Franklin County because I wanted to get a sense of how deep the divide really is, to see how people there live, and to gauge how different their lives are from those in my part of America.

How absurd was Brooks’ piece? Because some states were “red” (had voted for Bush), and some states were “blue” (had voted for Gore), Brooks was afraid we might have become two different nations. So he went to see how differently life was being lived in these two different worlds. But as if to offer a cry for help, Brooks never got to the “red states” at all. Instead, he compared life in his home base (Montgomery County, Maryland) with life in the aforementioned Franklin County. Unfortunately, Franklin County is in Pennsylvania—and Pennsylvania is a “blue” state, just like Maryland! In short, Brooks compared life-styles in two blue states to see if we’d become separate red-and-blue countries. Little in his puzzling piece made much more sense than that.

more...

[redqueen]

36. Before Media Matters and Air America

The Daily Howler was a lone bastion of sanity in an increasingly bizarre world of inexplicably stupid 'journalism'.

I *LOVE* that site. :)

[redqueen]

35. People read what he writes?

Why?!

[IrateCitizen]

38. What is with him? He's a jackass, that's what.

Seriously, I've never seen anyone so smug and smarmy who writes utterly unintelligible crap in my life. It's like Seinfeld on "elitism" -- a bunch of "observations" without having any idea what he's observing or what any of it really means. He's completely detached from any idea of reality.

I wouldn't even use one of his columns to wipe my ass, out of fear that some of his stupidity might just enter my body via osmosis with my rectum.

[skypilot]

39. LOL

Well, you could always crap it back out on a sheet of paper and send it to the Weekly Standard.

[IrateCitizen]

40. Nah, they'd never print it...

... because it would make the drivel they usually publish look substandard by comparison. ;-)