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You are here: Home / Open Threads / What about Bob?

What about Bob?

by DougJ|  June 8, 201111:09 am| 22 Comments

This post is in: Open Threads

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Never fear, Bob Herbert fans, the man has joined the Demos think tank/policy shop, where he will be blogging and working on a new book. His first post is about unemployment:

We’re in a different era now – an era of declining living standards and a much bleaker future than Americans had become accustomed to. We know what needs to be done: Men and women should be put to work rebuilding the nation’s infrastructure. The education system needs to be revamped in ways that produce additional millions of students who are well-trained, creative and capable of critical thinking at a very high level. Green energy industries need to be developed on a massive scale. And so on.

But there is no chance, given the embarrassingly dysfunctional political environment in Washington, that any of the bold steps needed to ease the jobs crisis and brighten the nation’s future will be taken. The politicians have abdicated their responsibility, thus insuring that the long dark night of the American economy will continue.

I never read Bob Herbert as much as I should have when he was at the Times. I feel bad about that, because looking over his work there, and comparing it to the rest of what they put up on their editorial page (other than Krugman), there is no doubt that he really was the conscience of the paper. I’m looking forward to reading his posts at Demos.

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Previous Post: « the wrong critique, Roald Dahl edition
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Reader Interactions

22Comments

  1. 1.

    shortstop

    June 8, 2011 at 11:11 am

    I never read Bob Herbert as much as I should have when he was at the Times. I feel bad about that, because looking over his work there, and comparing it to the rest of what they put up on their editorial page (other than Krugman), there is no doubt that he really was the conscience of the paper.

    I feel exactly the same way. He has a relatively dry and unengaging voice, which can obscure the fact that there’s a lot of good stuff there.

  2. 2.

    WereBear

    June 8, 2011 at 11:13 am

    The Great Shift begins.

    Keith Olbermann (who I like) on Current TV June 20th.

    There will be mourning for Irrelevant Media; but only for what it had accomplished.

    It is a travesty of a parody now.

  3. 3.

    Fred

    June 8, 2011 at 11:15 am

    You are looking forward to him talking about a dark future in apocalyptic terms? Sounds like a hoot!

  4. 4.

    Breezeblock

    June 8, 2011 at 11:23 am

    Thanks for posting that column. It’s pretty much how I feel, but it’s bleak to read it from someone smarter than me.

    I feel like stepping in front of a bus.

  5. 5.

    stuckinred

    June 8, 2011 at 11:24 am

    I always like him and not just because we were in Korea at roughly the same time.

  6. 6.

    Whiskey Screams from a Guy With No Short-Term Memory

    June 8, 2011 at 11:24 am

    Bob Herbert was the best columnist the Times had. No surprise that he had to go (and he got out just in time IMHO, as the paper has gone to the GOP and to shit – but I repeat myself.)

  7. 7.

    The Snarxist Formerly Known As Kryptik

    June 8, 2011 at 11:25 am

    @Breezeblock:

    It’s like an unstoppable juggernaut of suck and Randianism that continues to snowball, isn’t it?

  8. 8.

    jwb

    June 8, 2011 at 11:26 am

    @WereBear: We’re in the stage of fragmentation and won’t really know how it shakes out until the terms of the reconsolidation are clear.

  9. 9.

    UncertaintyVicePrincipal

    June 8, 2011 at 11:36 am

    Yeah it’s a wasteland out there, more and more. I checked in to look at the Washington Post the other day after having not read it for a year now, I love the way they’ve now divided pundit writing into “from the left” and “from the right”, with people like Krauthammer and Gerson and George Will being balanced on the “left” by people like….. Ruth Marcus.

    I swear she’s going to end up as a FOX anchor one day, she’s always been a typical Villager but you can see her drifting farther into classic Lieberman scold territory and there’s only one way that one ends.

  10. 10.

    PurpleGirl

    June 8, 2011 at 12:06 pm

    @WereBear: I don’t have the site bookmarked but KO is already putting up videos for Current TV.

  11. 11.

    Shrillhouse

    June 8, 2011 at 12:21 pm

    Cool. I’m a huge Hebert fan. One of the most articulate, passionate, and honest voices in American media.

  12. 12.

    MarkJ

    June 8, 2011 at 12:48 pm

    This post sends Richard Dreyfuss into a slow burn, but Bob was generally one of the best of the punditry.

  13. 13.

    Linda Featheringill

    June 8, 2011 at 12:48 pm

    I’m the first commenter on Bob’s column!

    Okay, that’s not particularly earth shaking but if you appreciate his writing, go to the link given above and let him know.

    :-)

  14. 14.

    WereBear

    June 8, 2011 at 1:01 pm

    @PurpleGirl: Thanks for bringing that up! He has Special Comments & such.

  15. 15.

    TJ

    June 8, 2011 at 1:03 pm

    Our pols used up all their bold on the banksters. We get the temerity.

  16. 16.

    Pancake

    June 8, 2011 at 1:33 pm

    Bob Herbert was a joke at the NYT, and acknowledged as such by other Timesmen. It was often noted by his fellow scribes that Herbert had come up with at most two or three somewhat original thoughts in his entire professional life, and he continued to recycle them weekly in his columns for several decades.

  17. 17.

    tomvox1

    June 8, 2011 at 1:49 pm

    @Pancake:

    Yes, only two or three: social justice, economic justice, accountability for the powerful.

    How boring for you and the Timesmen. Or maybe they just liked to bitch because he worked his way up from the Star-Ledger & NY Daily News and not the Crimson.

  18. 18.

    RalfW

    June 8, 2011 at 2:39 pm

    I know the Glenn post above squashed this one by being 11 minutes later, and about sex and a vacuous media, but even seeing that shrill Bob gets 17 comments and cockswain Weiner gets 125 is telling, ain’t it.

  19. 19.

    rickstersherpa

    June 8, 2011 at 3:05 pm

    @tomvox1: Yes, all the koolz kids like Sully, Brooksie, and Tweety wanted to talk about Weiner’s wenier, Monica Lewinsky, and how cool Dubya looked with the codpiece set up on his flight suit and all dull old Bob Herbert wanted to write about was how the upper 1% were screwing over the rest of us. Yes, he could have done it more colorfully, but proably would have been booted sooner from the Times op ed pages (Bob Somerby and Dean Baker both write a more colorful prose than Bob Herbert, and one can see he how far that has taken them beyond a blogs and Somerby’s stand-up routine. NOT!)

  20. 20.

    Barry

    June 8, 2011 at 4:42 pm

    @Pancake: Two or three would be one or two more than Friedman or Brooks or Dowd.

  21. 21.

    PanurgeATL

    June 8, 2011 at 11:14 pm

    @Breezeblock:

    You know, I’m not really so sure that eloquently making people want to step in front of a bus is really doing America much good. I mean, I know he’s one of the good guys, but WTF good does something like this do?

  22. 22.

    mclaren

    June 8, 2011 at 11:19 pm

    To be fair, Herbert’s nostrums offer the usual warmed-over cliches and wouldn’t solve America’s problems.

    Let’s run through Herbert’s prescriptions one by one to see how counterproductive they actually are:

    [1]”Men and women should be put to work rebuilding the nation’s infrastructure.” Why? Advanced infrastructure in America would only prove useful if American corporations could compete with the rest of the world economically by hiring U.S. workers. But with peasants in China willing to work for a couple of cents per hour, the only way American workers can possibly compete with the workers in the rest of the world is if the American workers are in prison. Spending money on U.S. infrastructure, therefore, represents a total waste of money…while spending money on building more prisons and putting more Americans in ’em is a great investment. Take a look at the huge booming business in American prison-manufactured clothing lines, like prison blues. This is the future of the American labor force: making clothes in prison. Advanced infrastructure isn’t the future of the American labor force: American workers need $7 an hour, while workers in the rest of the world need 10 cents an hour. American workers can’t compete unless they’re in prison.

    [2] “The education system needs to be revamped in ways that produce additional millions of students who are well-trained, creative and capable of critical thinking at a very high level.” This is just stupid. Look at the stats: foreign students are cleaning our clock. American students get wiped out whenever they enroll in tough subjects like engineering or pre-med or the hard sciences. Asians and third world students dominate the top of the grading curves in all these classes. American students can’t compete, and even if they could, what’s the point of developing American students who are “well-trained, creative and capable of critical thinking at a very high level”? No corporation will hire an American engineer becuase they can hire 10 Chinese Stanford-graduate engineers for the same price. American students are avoiding professions that require training and creativity and critical thinking because dirt-poor starving Indian and Asian students can do all these things and do ’em far cheaper and far better. American students are flocking into law and communications and foreign policy studies and criminal law and and other useless worthless programs because those are the feeder programs for the cushy jobs like lobbyist and coprporate lawyer and DHS agent and military drone operator and other useless pointless jobs that are the only kinds of jobs in America today with job security and a high salary.

    [3] “Green energy industries need to be developed on a massive scale.” No, we already have plenty of green energy industries, we just don’t want to use ’em. Nuclear power is the greenest energy there is: American hate and fear it and haven’t built a nuclear plant in 30 years. Bicycles are far greener than cars, but American loath bicycles and worship their polluting overpriced crappy cars. Solar electric power based on a Sterling engine boiler is an ancient technology and well-developed, Americans merely refuse to build ’em. We’d rather suck the Saudi cock and proclaim that it tastes like chicken while driving ourselves to our doom in our giant land-yacht SUVs.

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