“The government I’m doing my best to destroy actually does useful shit, but let me also say something stupid and wingnutty. “
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Come for the politics, stay for the snark.
Let there be snark.
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Republican obstruction dressed up as bipartisanship. Again.
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Take hopelessness and turn it into resilience.
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You are here: Home / Politics / Politicans / David Brooks Giving A Seminar At The Aspen Institute / Shorter David Brooks
slag
Well, at least it was relegated to the parenthetical rather than serving as the main thrust for a change.
Just Some Fuckhead
Shorter Shorter David Brooks, government is awesome when it only does what I want.
BGinCHI
This is really just so goddamn simple.
David Brooks has no idea what he’s talking about.
There is almost no serious activity that he would either be qualified for or allowed to do.
ruemara
It’s not like we should expect anything better of Bobo.
OT anyone else having problems coming up with anything to say to birthers and WaPo that doesn’t have elevntybillion fucks in it? For once, my article writing prowess is being defeated by a veritable verbal deluge of profanity and suspicions o the nature of the editors’ et al parentage.
Radon Chong
This would be true, except “serious” now apparently means advocating tax cuts for rich people and bombs for brown people, something for which David Brooks is, obviously, supremely qualified.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
Yawn. Sorry, but I just can’t be bothered to care about what David Brooks writes anymore.
David Brooks is the King of the 1-sentence tl;dr. Within his pathetic, squalid and boorish little domain he rules supreme like Milton’s Satan in Hell, but without any of the grandeur or color or even mild literary interest.
Xecky Gilchrist
Pretty classic Libertarian false-equivalence horseshit move – the one I always run into is “individual health is good for the public; computer ownership is good for the public; therefore, since computer ownership is handled by private companies, health care should be handled by private companies. The two things being exactly the same and all.”
BGinCHI
@Radon Chong: I meant like healing the sick, or teaching, or piloting a plane, or anything that would render a pundit useless.
BGinCHI
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ: Plus he didn’t fall from Grace.
He failed upwards.
Like a sinless Satan full of helium.
Turgidson
@BGinCHI:
Including…nay, especially his current profession.
Cris (without an H)
That “shorter” applies so universally to Bobo, it doesn’t even have to have a supporting hyperlink.
Omnes Omnibus
@ruemara: Start by saying “You are an idiot,” the stop speaking. If you can’t trust yourself to say that much without profanity, just say “Idiot.”
schrodinger's cat
Bobo’s popularity remains a mystery to me, he is boring with a capital B. You know what he is going to say before he says it.
jl
Huh, who wudda thunk it, the link discusses the very aside that caught my eye:
“Democrats seem to feel comfortable using vouchers to address housing problems but not education and health care problems.”
Besides what the link says, even with government regulations that prevent all sorts of discrimination in the housing market, we have the following contrasts
Housing is a good, education and health care are personalized services.
The quality of housing is, before a transaction, much more publicly observable than the quality of the education provider, the health care provider, or the health of the patient.
The vouchers being discussed for health care are for health care insurance, not for health care services directly, so you have the problem of adverse selection and asymmetric information in insurance markets.
The pricing on housing markets, as dysfunctional as those markets are, much more transparent than for health care services or insurance.
Other than those details, Brooks is right, they are exactly the same.
The truly wingnutty thing is the end where Brooks criticizes the Housing First approach, cause the homeless people being housed may be addicted sick and mentally twisted due to our crummy health care system.
I notice that the HUD people had data, and Brooks had questions and opinions and apparently no data or even anecdotes, and he seems to think what he has is better than what HUD has.
“Donovan notes that research supports the counterintuitive Housing First approach. Some studies do, indeed, show modest benefits, but I was struck by the vast difference between the way a government sees the world — numerically and organizationally — and the gritty and unpredictable way the world sometimes looks to, say, a crime reporter or a homeless veteran himself.”
What “gritty and unpredictable way the world sometimes looks”? Brooks presents absolutely nothing except his implied conclusion. The only gritty reality Brooks give evidence of encountering in any way is going down to that awful drab nasty government bureaucrat building.
That is also wingnutty.
Disclosure: My dislike of Brooks is large motivated by the fact that he has found a way to blow smoke and get paid big bucks for it, while I have not. Some one tell me how to get a gig like that. Spouting off is fun, and I would like to get paid for doing that.
joes527
@BGinCHI:
Absolutely false.
It is the difference between stupid and evil.
David Brooks is the most most destructive villager around. He is the oh-so-reasonable one who just happens to side with the wingers every time.
Go to Wikipedia and look up “the banality of evil” I’m sure his picture will be right there.
Scott
The happiest dreams I ever have are the ones where David Brooks and the rest of his poisonous stooges dies alone, unloved, and utterly impoverished in the world he wants to bring about for the rest of us.
schrodinger's cat
@ruemara: Talking to birthers is like talking to a kitchen table, to paraphrase Barney Frank. Like my grandma used to say you can wake up someone who is sleeping but not some one who is just pretending to be asleep.
dogwood
@ruemara:
I kept it clean, but it wasn’t nice. Mostly just snark. What’s so sad about all of this is the spinelessness among the WaPo journalists. Why don’t they boycott the thing? How can hobnobbing with D list celebrities be worth the price of admission here?
Just Some Fuckhead
@BGinCHI:
Anything more difficult than handing customers a happy face sticker when they enter the store.
BGinCHI
@joes527: Huh?
Did you read what he wrote? And the response?
My point is that he waded into an area into which he has zero expertise and then attempted to make a pronouncement about it. Of the many reasons that he’s wrong and is a tedious asshole is that he has no shame about getting involved where he doesn’t belong. That would be fine if he was an elderly retiree, but he has a platform.
Ignorance is fucking dangerous.
BGinCHI
@Just Some Fuckhead: Good description of an op-ed writer, generally.
schrodinger's cat
@BGinCHI: That’s nothing knew for Bobo, he has mangled quantum mechanics, economics and neuroscience before, and I am sure there are more examples of his idiocy.
joes527
@joes527: He let slip what he really thinks during the McCain/Palin run. He called her a fatal cancer to the Republican Party
He knows that teabaggery is terminal, but insists on dressing it up in one of his oh-so-tweed jackets and calling it reasonable because that what keeps the checks rolling in.
Evil indeed.
Mark S.
If only those bar charts could depict murder scenes, then we would really know what we were dealing with.
Just Some Fuckhead
Bobo is like the fat asshole on a camping trip that knows the best way to put up a tent, start a fire, cook the steak and clean the dishes but won’t lift a finger to do anything, then complains about the efforts of others.
schrodinger's cat
@joes527: Bobo is intellectually dishonest. He always finds ways to make excuses for Republicans now matter how low they stoop. He is more insidious than the flame throwers because many independents and even liberals take him seriously since he seems so mild and inoffensive.
thefncrow
I need to take a shot at Democrats in a snide way that totally misses the point. Hmm… “Democrats seem to feel uncomfortable using hammers to crack the skulls of infants but not to remove or hammer in nails.” That’s it! Perfect!
– David Broder
Omnes Omnibus
@Mark S.: Of course, the grim realities of which Bobo speaks are but shadows of the Platonic ideal of the homeless veteran and the crime reporter.
Xecky Gilchrist
@Just Some Fuckhead: Bobo is like the fat asshole on a camping trip that
knowsclaims to know the best wayOtherwise, totally agreed.
joes527
@BGinCHI: I read Mr. Nice Blog, but the original link redirects to ask for a log in that (thankfully) I don’t have.
So, no, maybe I missed some particular egregious stupidity in this column.
I was just going off on the fact that he usually knows that what he is saying is shit.
It is what he does.
Citizen_X
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
Better to reign in the septic tank than to serve in the neighborhood.
Amir_Khalid
We should really call him David Bobo, to distinguish him from his younger brother Chunky.
Actually, aside from that bit of parenthetical snidenness, this column is not all that bad for D. Bobo. He actually goes out to look at civil servants working, effectively, to improve how they serve military veterans. And what he sees speaks well of people who work in government, he has to admit that.
Of course, “not all that bad” for David Bobo still leaves him saying dumb things like “numbers are neat but life is messy, and I know that ’cause I’m a news reporter from the streets, man” — like he has some kind of street savvy superior to the knowledge of people working in the field with real human beings and empirical data. Like those workers are somehow unable to look beyond their data, or gather new data to refine their work. That’s rich, coming from a guy who doesn’t look like he got anywhere nearer to the streets than the theater where he saw West Side Story.
PeakVT
@jl: Are you willing to develop the ability to lie day in and day out without showing the slightest bit of guilt?
Zifnab
Fucking Bobo. He’s the kind of guy that can leave a burning bag of shit on your front doorstep, and then whine to all his friends that you never replied back to him with a thank you card.
Gosh darn Democrats are so logically incoherent and funny look’n and stupid. So glad I could help point that out. A-hurk!
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@Citizen_X:
Yes.
I’ve decided that the best way to respond to D.B. is to simulate what is probably the only force in the Universe capable of penetrating his thick skull, which is to adopt a tone of haughty and put-upon weariness on the part of his social betters, a combination of the silent cut and a facial expression which says “Ohhh. There’s that smell again.” just before one turns away.
Benjamin Cisco
Was channel surfing while reading this, and what do I happen upon but Bobo discussing the afterbirthers – of course, he had to take a shot at the President. Of course, he would have released the certificate months ago. Of course, he doesn’t understand what the big deal was.
__
What a worthless waste of protoplasm.
Citizen_X
@Mark S.: Jesus wept. Shorter Bobo: Anecdote is superior to data.
Not to mention that it’s the job of the crime reporter to deal with individual cases (just like the HUD case worker), as much as the homeless veteran must deal with his own life. (Der.)
But to deal with millions of people, as the government does? That takes statistics, Bobo.
(Grumble grumble fricking inumerate twit mutter mutter.)
handy
@Citizen_X:
This is every article Bobo has written. Along with the addendum, “Bi-partisan Dem capitulation to Republican ideology is the crunchy center of political nirvana.”
Suffern ACE
@Citizen_X: Perhaps collating that data into neat charts is the problem. Better to present it on one table 500 pages long and then throw it up in the air so it scatters throughout the room. Run the government like a sandbox to take off that bureaucratic edge,
trollhattan
@Scott:
You say that now, but wait until Brooks’ perfectly shined shoes are filled by Jonah Goldberg on your weekend news shows, NPR Fridays, NYT pages…. Yea, verily, there are fates worse than Bobo.
Although I could actually envision Mark Shields leaping across the set and strangling Goldberg.
ppcli
Brooks is even harder to take this week than he usually is, especially on the subject of what government can do. This week, several states were devastated, and Alabama was the worst hit. Obama went to Tuscaloosa right away, met with the mayor, promised federal assistance (and meant it) and did what he could to lift people’s spirits. Also, you know that his administration is sending the most competent people they can find to do that they can to help out. The fact that Alabama is a state that voted against Obama in landslide numbers doesn’t enter into the calculation for a moment.
Contrast that with the actions of the Bush administration that Brooks did so much to enable. We all remember the patronage appointment of “Heckofajob” Brooksie, and Bush’s memorable “nobody anticipated the breach of the levies” that was contradicted by video of his own cabinet meeting the day before the breach. But also don’t forget how disgracefully political the Bush people’s actions were from the outset. Bush couldn’t be dragged away from the birthday cake for McCain to go to Democratic New Orleans. When it became clear that this inertia was politically a liability, he swooped in to the nearest Republican outpost – Mississippi, where the toll was incalculably less severe, to hang with Haley Barbour and Trent Lott. When he finally got to New Orleans (even loyal Villagers were becoming critical – he had no choice but to make a token appearance), money was spent on starting up bulldozers for photo-ops and then the bulldozers were shut down and moved away once the cameras were off.
The sheer incompetence was bad, but the cynical politics were even more disgraceful. Either Brooks doesn’t see the contrast between these two responses to catastrophe – in which case he is just not looking – or he does see it and he chooses not to remark on it when making a special visit to the government branch that deals with related things. In the second case he is even more craven and cynical than I realized. Bad either way.
(Oddly, I haven’t heard any reports of the governor of Alabama making the wingnuts’ favorite Reagan joke to the effect that the most dreaded words in English are “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.” during Obama’s visit. I wonder why not. It’s a real crowd pleaser – gets lotsa yuks every time.)
grandpajohn
@BGinCHI: he waded into an area into which he has zero expertise and then attempted to make a pronouncement about it.
Hell , I thought that was the basic skill set required for one to be designated as a pundit
Comrade Dread
Personally, if I ran a religious school, the last thing I would want would be government funds of any sort.
Tonal Crow
So what Brooks is saying is that Republicans favor giving convicted rapists vouchers to visit prostitutes?
Cat Lady
Isn’t he behind a paywall now? Ignore him and he might go away.
danimal
@thefncrow:
Bravo.
Work in a reference to skull-f&*king kittens and you’ll get the job.
IM
@trollhattan:
And in a way that has already happened: Douthat is worse then Brooks.
Cliff in NH
@joes527:
You might want to do a spyware scan from a bootable disk, cause that’s just not true.
Chuck Butcher
I suppose it is important to pay attention to Bobo because other people do; and that says a hell of a lot about the entire situation.