Why does everything Bobo writes sound pornographic to me?
In times of crisis, Americans rally around their government, but most of the time they have treated it as a supporting actor in national life. Americans are an unusual people, with less deference to central authority and an unparalleled faith in themselves. They seem to want a government that is helpful but not imperious, strong but subordinate.
And why do I read this stuff? I wish I knew how to quit you, Bobo.
If there is a God, He will not allow this column to develop into an extended discussion of Hobbes involving Sully, Chunky David Brooks, and Daniel Larison.
General Winfield Stuck
Nothing wrong with a little on top goberment now and then.
cleek
whatever, dude.
kindly stop trying to speak for me. you’re not the fucking chronicler of our times.
Laertes
Purple prose aside, Bobo has yielded to wishful thinking here. We’d all like to think that our countrymen
but there’s little evidence that any significant fraction of Americans want their government to be “subordinate” in any way at all.
Ask the man on the street to explain what relevance Benjamin Franklin’s famous line about security and liberty might have today and he’ll look at you like a dog that’s been shown a card trick.
Jim
Sounds like a good description of the public option
Who will be the first to post and contrast this with BoBo’s declarations that warrantless wiretapping, email snooping, indefinite detention and the Unitary Executive were not only legal but vital not just to national security but to without them ZOMG!!!! we’re all gonna die!!!!!
Glidwrith
Completely and utterly OT, but check out Scott Horton over at Harper’s Magazine:
OK, I don’t know how to link: harpers.org/archive/2010/01/hbc-90006368
Earlier John was complaining about lefties complaining how Obama was just like Bush. After reading that article, Obama didn’t start this abuse with respect to detainees, but he sure as hell seems intent on allowing it to continue. I found it especially interesting that while the CIA black sites were ordered closed, the JSOC ones apparently remain.
DougJ
Yeah, I can’t face that Horton stuff. Maybe I’ll just put up a link and say “read it”. I know it’s important. It just depresses me.
DonBelacquaDelPurgatorio
@cleek:
A.Men.
If there is anything I cannot up with put, it is somebody saying that I am independent and have faith in myself.
Them’s fighting words. Hoodafuk does that guy think he is, anyway?
( loud exhalations )
( swallows poenis reduction pills)
Glidwrith
@DougJ: It’s fairly nasty reading – it makes me bitter and depressed too. Time to go cuddle up with warm kitties and honeyed tea….
DonBelacquaDelPurgatorio
@cleek:
A.Men.
If there is anything I cannot up with put, it is somebody saying that I am independent and have faith in myself.
Them’s fighting words. Hoodafuk does that guy think he is, anyway?
( loud exhalations )
( swallows poe_nis reduction pills)
( reposted because that mod filter has pissed me off for the last time, I used a word that appeared in an ad on the front page of the blog for chrissakes )
bayville
You say pornographic, I say psychotic.
Brooks’ scribblings on the Haiti earthquake was some of the most ill-informed, ignorant, insensitive, bigoted gibberish ever published in a daily newspaper.
General Winfield Stuck
@Glidwrith: The article only states one, I believe at Bagram, and other “suspected” cites that Horton doesn’t describe, or very well. The vast network of CIA black sites around the world are apparently no longer open. I would agree that none is the correct number for these, and that Obama should update his EO to include military controlled ones as well. But hardly a “Bush like” situation.
General Winfield Stuck
@DougJ: The article is almost completely about Bush era suicides, though highly disturbing.
cleek
@DonBelacquaDelPurgatorio:
again: whatever, dude.
Brooks’ M.O. is to gaze out across the vast America of his imagination and then describe it to real America as if he’s discovered something important.
Glidwrith
@General Winfield Stuck: Yes, almost completely – I’m sure that’s quite comforting to Muhammed Abdallah Salih, found dead in his cell this past June 2009, under similar circumstances. As to how many JSOC sites remain, Horton doesn’t exactly have Top Secret Ultra-violet whatever clearance, but there is apparently the one at Gitmo as well. One could also mention how DOJ, which is under Obama’s jurisdiction, has continued to keep a lid on these so-called suicides until key eyewitnesses are going to the press to see some justice served; but then one might be labeled as self-defeating and willing to jump off a cliff, so we just won’t go there, will we?
drag0n
uh huh….
Glocksman
I imagine Bobo uses similar language during his sessions with Mistress Michelle. :)
Seriously though, that meme has existed for decades.
I remember seeing a film clip from either the 40’s or 50’s where the narrator intones about Americans being a generous people that would give you the shirt off of our backs if you ask us for help, but would fight you to the death if you try to take it from us.
b-psycho
Americans for the most part are unrealistic, short sighted fools whose view of gov’t is quite simple: they want one that helps certain people (read: whatever cultural/interest group they personally identify with) at the cost of others. Our short attention spans & unwillingness to consider that we can’t always get what we want makes it very easy for people to gain power via rampant lying. As a result, we’re ruled by the inherently corrupt, and our votes function as blind plebiscites co-signing damn near anything.
As for deference to central authority: we still have too much of it. Waaaaay too much. It just so happens because of the dominant culture here that we prefer our marching orders to sound like a mashup of unquestioning self-affirmation psychobabble & bible-thumpery rather than open subordination.
General Winfield Stuck
@Glidwrith: I didn’t say you don’t have a point. I was just adding some perspective on comparing the current situation with the Bush era. Obama is moving to whittle down the number of prisoners at Gitmo, but congressional purse strings won’t allow for closing it right now, and move everyone still there to the states.
And if Horton doesn’t have good information on “suspected” sites still open, then he shouldn’t have mentioned it. Anyways, sorry to interrupt your Obama just like Bush ruminations. But when you bring something up like this, expect to get some pushback on what is true and what is not true, or without sufficient evidence to compare Bush to Obama./
freelancer (itouch)
Re:Sully and his current state of mind vis a vis where th country is at, one of his readers has something of note:
http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2010/01/from-depression-to-rage.html
This, a thousand times, this.
Warren Terra
I’m confused – is this meant to be Douthat, AKA “Chunky Reese Witherspoon” or What? Because I thought “Chunky” referred to a different NYT “reasonable conservative” columnist than Brooks. Besides, whatever Brooks’s manifold sins may be, I wasn’t aware that detailing other peoples’ personal failings of physical beauty was one of them, so it would hardly be fair to do the same to him — even if he looked chunky, which he doesn’t, at least in the photo that heads his columns.
Warren Terra
@freelancer (itouch):
Now that‘s a letter that absolutely speaks what I’ve been thinking. The closing paragraph is terrifyingly plausible:
Mike G
Republicans strike me as people with the conceit that they are rugged individualist cowboys who don’t need no govmint, but in reality are proudly ignorant, government-suckling titty babies, conformist, strikingly gullible and cringingly deferential to what they preceive as strong-daddy legitimate authority, i.e. Republican administrations, corporations and right-wing churches, no matter how staggeringly stupid or transparently phony.
They seemed quite happy with a Cheneyist government that tortures, wiretaps, launches aggressive wars based on bald-faced lies, is corrupt, crony-corporatist, deliberately incompetent, lawbreaking and used as a weapon against its political enemies, so long as it only affects people they don’t like. They make easily-suckered media consumers and complacent, wide-eyed little corporate drones.
geoff
i read the entire column and thought, “When the fuck did David Brooks turn into David Broder?”
yeah Dave, sure…governing from the middle has worked wonders for every president along the way. oh wait…
DonBelacquaDelPurgatorio
@cleek:
I think you misspelled “dood.”
Jim
From freelancer’s Sully link
I actually blame the so-called principled and/or moderate Republicans–Snowe, Collins, Lugar, which ever ancient buzzard from Ohio it is, retired pols like Dole and Baker and Kassenbaum who say nothing–and of course their useful idiots in the media. McConnell, DeMint, Limbaugh et al– scoundrels and clowns who couldn’t do a damn thing if they were propped up, aided and abetted by Snowe, Lugar, Broder and the rest.
SGEW
“Leisure is the mother of philosophy.”
– Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan
DonkeyKong
“Does Haiti have a Applebee’s?”
– David Brooks, New York Times
Ripley
Brooks, noodling about the Greatness That is America, as he searches for a working man’s meal within the lobster tank at Denny’s. Hey, we’ve all been there, right?
Uriel
What do you have against Hobbs?
@Glidwrith: I admit, it’s troubling and then some. If the connection to the Obama admin bears out, I’ll admit it’s something that needs to be addressed immediately and with prejudice as a serious betrayal.
But I do have to mention, I completely amazed by this line explaining the “suicides”:
I had no idea that brass ones this large could even exist within the laws of physics. This guys boxers must approach the point of singularity.
Brick Oven Bill
Makes me wonder what would have happened if Bush had decided to give the Iraqis health care instead of invading them.
freelancer (itouch)
@Brick Oven Bill:
Probably, he would’ve been able to subsidize your meds. Pity.
For serious. What a waste.
Andre
There is no god.
asiangrrlMN
@bayville: ThT
JasonF
@Warren Terra: “Chunky David Brooks” is Douthat, in a takeoff on his “Chunky Reese Witherspoon” comment. Much like the “Chunky Reese Witherspoon” of Douthat’s famous anecdote, Douthat is heavyset, an ersatz version of his “Chunky” namesake, and completely anathema to any kind of sexual arousal.
asiangrrlMN
@bayville: That’s fucking disgusting. And I’m supposed to pay for opining that vile? No thank you.
Oops. Sorry about the earlier ‘comment’. My fingers weren’t working correctly.
DougJ, methinks someone needs to get laid, and it’s not Brooks. Unless you meant pornographic as a synonym for utterly clueless, pompous, and idiotic.
freelancer (itouch)
@Andre:
This is new?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2aPOMUTr1qw
Yutsano
@Andre: I’m pretty sure there’s still a dog though.
jl
How does this tie in the ‘strong daddy’ school of the executive branch?
Sounds like the MoDo leatherdaddy p r 0 n school of civics.
Anne Laurie
@bayville:
Well, if you redefine the parameters to add “… with a circulation over 10,000, during the last decade or so.” And maybe “above the Mason-Dixon line” but what I know of Southron-sovreignity papers is all heresay.
Agree that publishing such a blatant “Poor people — so shiftless! Especially the dusky ones! What can be done about this? — Nothing, so why do we bother? ! ?” apologia was pretty revolting, even by Bobo Brooks’ low standards. I was kinda proud of DougJ for resisting any commentary, actually.
Although I do wonder if David babbled to Nick Kristof in advance, because Our Basic Human Pleasures: Food, Sex and Giving reads like a pretty direct rebuke.
Ailuridae
@DougJ:
This. I think he’s a great writer and a great reporter. I even like him when he comes on the TV. But reading his stuff isn’t easy.
Sly
I’m thinking that a regularly columnist for a major American newspaper really only has one requirement: Being a incomprehensibly shitty writer. That’s the only way you can hide the fact that you have no idea what you’re talking about.
This means nothing. NOTHING!
Big, but not too big. Small, but not too small. Pretty, but not too pretty. Sweet, but not too sweet. Somewhere in the middle. Just right. Governing by Goldilocks.
geg6
Bobo can DIAF. What a goddam wanker. How a dimwit like that makes it through everyday life without inadvertantly killing himself is beyond me. Sully’s commenter has it correct, with Jim’s addition of the so-called moderates thrown in for enabling on a criminal scale. Reading Scott Horton’s article was first depressing and sad. And now that I’ve absorbed it, I’m furious. Cutting up the corpses to hide the evidence? Seriously? My government? And Obama is getting no passes from me on this one. He promised, he said it was over, and it is not. There should be no black sites. Period. And no excuses. I accept none of the bullshit excuses about how it takes time and how hard it all is. Fuck that. Stop it now. Now. I’m in a pure rage over this.
B
Hobbes is a genius everyone should have read.
stone333
Any conversation about the average American’s views on government that completely omits the words “schizophrenic”, “ADD”, or “logically incoherent” is disingenuous or incompetent. Americans want their cake, they want to eat it too, and they want a coupon for more cake on the way out the door. I believe that this is because the process of weighing interests and establishing priorities is beyond the ken of people who think in catch phrases. PowerPoint is the format of our collective political brain, not Word. Unfortunately, the type of thinking necessary to make tough choices about govt’s role in our lives is not possible in that format.
Ann B. Nonymous
The homoerotic nature of Brooks’ partisan loyalties — by which I mean his highly charged admiration of masculine stereotypes, not what gender(s) Brooks chooses to mess around with in his free time, if any — is pretty clear to me at this point, even before his odd complaint about a Republican senator who at a formal dinner “had his hand on my inner thigh the whole time.” Brooks’s superego has less control over his id than he thinks.
Do you remember when David Brooks tried to — oh hell, I can’t think of a verb that doesn’t sound like innuendo — Andrew Sullivan by proxy?
Right after Christmas 2003, Brooks decided to use Sullivan’s doctoral subject, Michael Oakeshott — and who dat? no, really, I mean it. who is Oakeshott and why should I care? — as cover for why the United States should not have planned for its occupation of Iraq:
And we all know how that turned out. Six years later, this editorial still shocks me.
The only other person blithering about Oakeshott at that time, just as now, was Sullivan. It’s hard not to see this as a personal attempt by Brooks to keep Sullivan happy by feeding his vanity. But what a strange thing to do, especially in the pages of the New York Times. It reminds me of small children writing I’m Sorry notes to each other after their feelings get hurt at a tea party. The real kind, with stuffed animals in hats, not these current staged demonstrations of resentment.
Why oh why
Taibbi translates Bobo’s previous op-ed on Haiti:
http://trueslant.com/matttaibbi/2010/01/18/translating-david-brooks-haiti/
El Cid
Bobo wants to be recognized as an achieved sociologist / anthropologist of American life, just, without all that hard work, and with the ability to put on the submissive outfit every now and then when he gets the hankering for a true Madame Ronald Reagan discipline sessions.
A Mom Anon
One thing I will never forgive this current crop of GOP nitwits for is the division they have purposely caused in communities and families. Friendships and relationships have been ruined for good over this shit and I cannot STAND it,it makes me incredibly sad. I can forgive alot of other things,but not this. This kind of nasty division is the thing that destroys a nation from within. So fuck them with a rusty Garden Weasel. All of ’em. Twice.
El Cid
Instead he did both.
Because Bush Jr. intervening to make Iraqis’ health care worse is a brilliant COIN move, but any attempt to actually make Americans’ health insurance somewhat more controlled and regulated and affordable is anti-Constitutional Stalin Communism.
A Mom Anon
Also. If there really was any justice,David Brooks would be dropped off square in the middle of Port Au Prince TODAY with nothing but his underwear and half a bottle of stagnant water to his name. Asshole.
El Cid
If he weren’t taking up space among the most powerful publications of our time, and therefore having to be monitored just to see what the punditarian establishment is trying to push, I would never, ever, ever, in a million years, find a personal reason why I’d waste my time reading David Brooks over someone who wasn’t full of shit.
There actually are people who study the U.S. and its culture, with facts and stuff, and who write better and use better arguments, but, pffft, let’s have Brooks on 9 million times on PBS’ News Hour because, you know, we always have…
kommrade reproductive vigor
Shorter Bobo: American’s want to be governed by Secret Deodorant.
Mike Furlan
Sully – Bell Curve
Danie Larison – League of the South
Chunky David Brooks – ?
Maybe – “Poor people—so shiftless! Especially the dusky ones! What can be done about this?—Nothing, so why do we bother? ! ?”
But not as obvious as the first two.
El Cid
Glenn Greenwald also notes Brooks’ typically shallow, manipulative, spurious use of the notion that our strong but ‘subordinate’ gubmit needs to lissen to tha peepul:
Here we have one of the most common and manipulative tools of the political class: pretending to care about public opinion only when it’s consistent with one’s own views (it’s “worthy of the profoundest respect”), and disregarding it as the irrelevant bile of the ignorant rabble when it’s not.
I remember another policy that was even more unpopular with the “Ameican people” than Obama’s health care plan. It was called the Iraq War. Throughout 2006 and 2007, overwhelming majorities of Americans were not only opposed to the war, but favored a quick timetable for withdrawal. So intense was the opposition that the Republicans suffered one of the century’s most thorough and humiliating midterm election defeats in 2006. Yet there was David Brooks writing column after column demanding that public opinion be ignored, mocking withdrawal as deeply Unserious, advocating continued occupation, insisting that the superior wisdom of a select elite govern our policy rather than ignorant mass sentiment. Brooks and his neoconservative friends wanted to keep sending other Americans (but never themselves) off to that war to die even though only a small minority of citizens supported it. Marie Antoinette indeed. Opposition to Bush’s surge was particularly intense — close to 70% — yet Brooks was heaping praise on John McCain for ignoring public opinion and supporting Bush’s plan (“when the Iraq war was at its worst, and other candidates were hiding in the grass waiting to see how things would turn out, McCain championed the surge . . . . He did it knowing that it would cost him his media-darling status and probably the presidency. But for years he had hated the way the war was being fought. And when the opportunity to change it came, the only honorable course was to try”).
If the Washington Establishment is adept at anything, it is ignoring and marginalizing public opinion. That bothers very few of its members, least of all David Brooks. Here was Brooks, in the midst of the deeply unpopular Wall Street bailout, celebrating the return of rule by “a cohesive financial establishment” that “does not rely on any system of checks and balances, but on the wisdom and public spiritedness of those in charge” and which “will turn to the safe heads from the investment banks”…
Fuck these awful hypocrites. The Teabaggers scream that Obama = Nazi, so we’ve GOT to listen to American opinion. The American people overwhelmingly oppose a war in Iraq / want the U.S. to leave, so FUCK YOU HIPPIES IT’S SURGE TIME BABY.
I think we need to make sure and pass health care — Coakley or not — just to make David Brooks and types cry.
I’m not confident, though — I think a lot of the Democratic establishment will choose to see a Brown victory (or even a narrow Coakley win) as proof that it’s time for Democrats to be more conservative again, work more bipartisanny, etc., just when the Obama White House might (depending on how shitty the reporting is) be deciding it’s time to be bit more ‘combative’:
President Barack Obama plans a combative response if, as White House aides fear, Democrats lose Tuesday’s special Senate election in Massachusetts, close advisers say.
“This is not a moment that causes the president or anybody who works for him to express any doubt,” a senior administration official said. “It more reinforces the conviction to fight hard.”
A defeat by Martha Coakley for the seat held by the late Edward M. Kennedy would be embarrassing for the party — and potentially debilitating, since Democrats will lose their filibuster-proof, 60-vote hold on the Senate.
A potential casualty: the health care bill that was to be the crowning achievement of the president’s first year in office.
The health care backdrop has given the White House a strong incentive to strike a defiant posture, at least rhetorically, in response to what would be an undeniable embarrassment for the president and his party.
There won’t be any grand proclamation that “the era of Big Government is over” — the words President Bill Clinton uttered after Republicans won the Congress in the 1990s and he was forced to trim a once-ambitious agenda.
“The response will not be to do incremental things and try to salvage a few seats in the fall,” a presidential adviser said. “The best political route also happens to be the boldest rhetorical route, which is to go out and fight and let the chips fall where they may. We can say, ‘At least we fought for these things, and the Republicans said no.’”
Whatever words Obama chooses, however, will have trouble masking the substantive reality: A Massachusetts embarrassment would strongly increase the pressure Obama was already facing to retreat or slow down the “big bang” agenda he laid out a year ago.
Democratic operatives on Capitol Hill have made clear that enthusiasm is cooling for tackling controversial cap-and-trade legislation to curb carbon emissions as the party heads into an election year. The same is true for the always-sensitive issue of immigration reform. On the fiscal front, massive deficits were already pushing Obama toward more austerity on spending.
David Brooks would truly complete his cycle on Obama and hate him if that were to take place.
valdivia
Wait has anyone told Brooks about the Green Ballons yet?
El Cid
@Mike Furlan: I’m pretty sure “Chunky David Brooks” is a reference to Ross Douthat, combining Douthat’s role as the newer, dumber, lazier David Brooks along with his weird resentment of a girl who came on to him once, whom he described as looking like a ‘Chunky Reese Witherspoon’.
arguingwithsignposts
@El Cid:
I’m billing you for the brain bleach and therapy sessions to get that image out of my head.
El Cid
@arguingwithsignposts: Okay, but as one of the more poorly paid of our nation’s arrogant liberal ay-leets, good luck collecting.
arguingwithsignposts
@Mike Furlan:
@el cid:
There’s an app for that.
valdivia
@El Cid:
to second arguing, why did I have to have that image in my head before coffee?
arguingwithsignposts
@valdivia:
Or even after coffee. I think there’s a Geneva Convention that explicitly addresses the issue of injecting mental images of pasty old white guys in bondage equipment into the heads of unsuspecting victims.
Demo Woman
@A Mom Anon: How is the pup. Yesterday a new volunteer came in and she is going to take some old bath mats and blankets over to the animal control shelter. She rescues dogs herself through another organization so she’s interested in seeing it.
valdivia
@arguingwithsignposts:
hey if sex is a human right then this is definitely an abuse of some Convention. I agree.
Napoleon
I swear if the Dems loose the MA seat I am going to have to barricade myself in my house with 10 gallons of whiskey and no TV or Internet access in order to make it into February.
A Mom Anon
@Demo Woman: Abby got a clean bill of health and goes back at the end of the month for her next set of shots. She’s gained a pound since I brought her home and the mushy poopies 5 times a day is gone(yay for that,lol). The vet thinks she’s a GSD/Doberman mix-that’s my guess too. I should have pics up this afternoon at some point,bless my tech challenged little heart.
Surely it’s not a secret that this shelter is a trainwreck. What needs to happen is a mega fundraiser/donation drive and trying to shame local politicians(who are mostly GOP and conservadems,so yeah that’ll happen) into making sure there’s at least enough funding and staff for daily disinfection and decent food for gawd’s sake. That shouldn’t be too fucking much to ask. Sorry,went off there and OT,back to your regularly scheduled Balloon Juice,already in progress…
Dave Fud
@Brick Oven Bill: To start with, it would have been a hell of a lot cheaper to give them health care instead of bombs and occupation. But the US didn’t need that trillion dollars we borrowed from China anyway.
El Cid
@arguingwithsignposts: Oh, and here I thought the offending mental image was that of Ronald Reagan dressed up as a female impersonating dominatrix, brandishing a whip and intimidatingly murmuring to the bound and ball-gagged Brooks in a feminine version of the Great Communicator’s schtick voice, i.e., ‘Well, here we go again…’
arguingwithsignposts
@El Cid:
AAAGGGHHHH! GREEN BALLOONS!
arguingwithsignposts
@El Cid:
I think that calls for a little kitteh chaser to wash away the imagery. Smudge on the window ledge.
valdivia
@arguingwithsignposts:
smudge is such a cutie. thanks for that.
burnspbesq
@geg6:
I share your outrage, but I undertook a second reading of Horton’s article with my lawyer hat on, and I came away with one overarching conclusion.
If (as I assume to be the case) all of the incriminating physical evidence was destroyed contemporaneously, and if all of the people who were in the room at the time keep their mouths shut, a successful prosecution for any sort of homicide is effectively impossible.
We may have to settle for a court-martial of the base commander for dereliction of duty and obstruction of the NCIS investigation. If that’s all we can get, I’ll take it. It will leave a sense of unfinished business, to be sure. But there are limits to what the criminal justice system can do in the face of a conspiracy of silence that doesn’t break down.
Ash Can
Why does Brooks get paid for this crap? Who’s he blowing?
gnomedad
@geg6:
Generally I cut Obama slack for doing what he thinks is possible right now. If anything makes me doubt him, it’s this. My only guess is that W left him with some really bad actors whose rights have been violated to the extent that they can’t legally be held, and O fears that if there is an attack that is traced to a release of one of these guys, our democracy is toast.
Someone needs to explain to the bedwetters on the right that if you won’t take any risks for your principles, you can’t be said to have any. Not that they care.
Texas Dem
You can rage against Brooks all you want, and he’s frequently wrong (see, e.g., the Iraq war), but in this case he’s simply pointing out something that should be painfully obvious to anyone who looks at the political situation honestly: In the eyes of too many swing voters, Obama has been tagged as a big government liberal who is trying to insert the federal government in every sphere of our lives. Don’t kill the messenger.
The good news, if there is any, is that a lot of people, even the ones who are going to vote against him in Mass. today, still like Obama and want him to succeed. But that requires the Dems. to face political reality and abandon the now extremely unpopular health care bill in favor of more incremental measures (like insurance reforms or perhaps a patients’ bill of rights) and deficit reduction measures that the public will support.
Obama can still be a successful president, but he must now follow the Clinton model circa 1995-96 and move to the center. Start repeating this phrase: “The era of big government is over.” It will get a little easier if you keep saying it. Trust me, as a Dem. liberal in a deeply red state, you will get used to being ignored.
El Cid
@Texas Dem: That is not at all true, and neither Brooks nor you cite any data that this is what “Americans” think. For example, a lot of Americans when asked would have preferred much MORE intervention regarding the banking system — i.e., strong regulations.
And good for Clinton for making the most of the post-1994 debacle, but I’d hardly posit the Republican-run Congress of 1995-2000 as some sort of role model for the US.
If Democrats follow this advice and let continuing disaster build in the name of ‘incremental’ reforms more palateable to a Brooksian punditariat who tell them that this is what ‘America’ wants, then they’re not going to reap political benefits as things neither improve or continue to get worse.
Texas Dem
Several quick points:
1. There is a significant amount of polling data showing that independents and swing voters have been moving right over the past year. I can’t cite the articles off the top of my head but they’re out there. Google it if you don’t believe me.
2. There’s no question that Obama should have made financial and banking reform the centerpiece of his first year. A strong move against the banks last Spring might have taken some of the sting out of the Wall Street bailout, but instead Obama chose to try to deal with health care. That’s a laudable goal and one for which he deserves credit, but it’s now clear it was very bad politics. And now that his political capital is gone, there’s nothing left for a fight with the banks, who are regaining their mojo on the Hill.
3. The Gingrich/Clinton collaborations of 1995-96 weren’t all bad, e.g., welfare reform and balanced budgets, but they came about only after the government shutdown. After that fiasco, the GOP needed to move left to save their majority, and that’s what led to the period many now fondly remember as some sort of bipartisan golden age. It was a fluke, and I doubt it will happen again–at least not before the GOP regains control of Congress. After that, they will almost certainly overreach.
4. Incremental reforms are certainly better than no reforms at all, which is what we’re looking at now.
Dennis-SGMM
Brooks would see a perfect example of why he is so wrong about what people want from government if he simply looked at Orange County, California.
Orange County, you know: the bastion of the anti-tax, get government out of our lives, yada-yada-yada, crowd. These people were downright gleeful as California’s budget deficit caused the cutback or elimination of social services, medical care for the poor and indigent, teacher layoffs, and the furloughing of state workers. They loved that shit. On the other hand, they are hatin’ on Arnie’s plan to sell off the Orange County Fairgrounds (Owned by the state) to the highest bidder to help close the budget gap. The fairgrounds comprise 150 acres of still-prime real estate in the middle of Orange County and the same people who were happy to see others suffer in the name of saving money are outraged that Arnie would want to sell off the fairgrounds to that same end. It seems that forgoing (Or paying themselves) their annual county fair and their weekend swap meets is just wrong. As for the poor, the sick and the state workers: fuck ’em, they got too much already.
Calvin Jones and the 13th Apostle
@Texas Dem: Evan Bayh … is that you?
Emma
El Cid: Jesus Christ. Dial down the images, ok? That one nearly made me barf up my breakfast.
asiangrrlMN
@El Cid: I hate you for the image, but I love you for your vivid use of the American language.
Origuy
From Ancient Greek πορνογράφος (pornographos), from πόρνη (pornē), “‘prostitute’”) + γράφω (graphō), “‘I write’”).
The writing of a whore. Sounds about right.
Tax Analyst
I think everybody who got involved in this way should have to write “I will not get involved in an extended discussion of Hobbes involving Sully, Chunky David Brooks, and Daniel Larison” 100 times on lined notebook paper or a blackboard for each such comment.
I think I owe you about 5 or 600 lines.