Beltway Pundit Idiocy, Act iv

One of the terrific features of the Internets (sic) is the ready access it (they) provides to a wild variety of viewpoints and perspectives. I am specifically here focused on the recent meltdown of the NYT firewall that has for a year or so constrained those of us unwilling to pony up despite pain of losing access to non-pareil writers like Krugman, Rich, Herbert, and Dowd.

While I was feeling unmitigated joy at the wall collapse, I'm hereby reminded that it has also released some totally idiotic, reality-allergic, and potentially contagious writers (ironically, I am hearing Kingston Trio's "Tijuana Jail"). Specific subject here is David Brooks, notoriously factless and routinely unquestioning and unthinking mouthpiece for the powers-that-be. I.e., the poster for non-journalist. But it alerts me that we now also will be seeing the whacko Friedman in public again (he fully enshrined now with a sobriquet of his own, the "Friedman Unit (FU)," after his shamelessly repeated claims for years that we need "just another six months" in Iraq before complete triumph is inevitable).

I'm going to lean, roll of the dice, on TRex at FDL here, although I was first alerted to this latest Brooks absurdity by Glenn G at Salon (linked below, I believe). You should read both Glenn and TRex in toto. If only Brooks would settle for shooting a deputy down or some comparable crime:

David Brooks writes like mildew grows. His column today, “The Center Holds” is less an essay than an accretion of poorly chosen words and conjectures that makes yours truly yearn for the good old days (was it only last week?) when the Times Select wall kept this stuff contained and protected the unwary against random exposures.

Once again, Brooks is in full-throated warble about the glories of some non-existent “center”, and how it’s good that the Democrats in Congress have shafted the “bloggers, billionaires and activists on the left who make up the ‘netroots’.” Because, as Glenn Greenwald notes, “Brooks, of course, cares deeply about the health of the Democratic Party and wants only what is best for it”.

Completely unencumbered by facts, research, poll numbers, and in fact, virtually free of the craft of writing altogether, Brooks projects his own feelings about the state of the American political mind on to a mythical construct he calls “the American people”, conjecturing that since he is The Cosmos, all Americans must be as frightened and alarmed by the netroots as he is.

Never mind that poll after poll demonstrates that the American people are disgusted with Congress’s current “appease the Republicans at all costs” tack. The Americans who voted in a Democratic majority are feeling some pretty severe pangs of buyer’s remorse. But Brooks, messiah-like, knows what America wants more than America itself and believes that the netroots must die, so that we all may live, allelu, allelu, now and forever, world without end, amen.

Citing “high school educated women in the Midwest, and the old Clinton establishment in Washington” as the Rosetta Stone of 2007’s grim realpolitik (but providing of course no poll numbers, research, or facts to back this framing up), Brooks declares that passion is dead, milquetoast is the new black, and that the Democrats in Congress are damn right to “privately detest the netroots’ self-righteousness and bullying”. Does Brooks even know any “high school educated women in the midwest” or are they just another figment of his overheated imagination?

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