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You are here: Home / Politics / Politicans / David Brooks Giving A Seminar At The Aspen Institute / Lifestyles of the rich and famous

Lifestyles of the rich and famous

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These are some of the people who like to lecture liberal elites for being out of touch:

David Gregory, host of NBC’s Meet The Press, and Bret Baier, host of Fox News’s Special Report, are among the latest applicants to the Chevy Chase Club, the historic social club that has catered to Washington’s wealthiest for over a century.

[….]

The Chevy Chase Club was founded in 1892. As recently as 1976, it did not accept Jewish or African-American members, according to a report in the New York Times. And despite reforms, some who have visited the club believe it has maintained an atmosphere reminiscent of earlier days.

“Order a cocktail at the Chevy Chase country-club and you’ll step back into ante-bellum Savannah,” one British reporter for The Telegraph observed last year. “The blacks wait on Wasps, showing all the deference expected of them. You won’t find many Cohens either, lounging on the well-kept lawn.”

Reader Interactions

72Comments

  1. 1.

    Walker

    Country clubs, yawn. Grew up with them in the South (father was a rural NC doctor, so it comes with the territory). Crappy food, lots pretentiousness.

  2. 2.

    MariedeGournay

    Dull places for dull people. God Gregory gets more on my nerves the more I learn about him.

  3. 3.

    reflectionephemeral

    That’s not out of touch at all. That’s the way things are supposed to be, the way they were in truer, freer, 1950s America, “back before we knew we had a race problem.”

    It’s not like Gregory and Baier were suggesting anything that would alienate Real America, like requiring insurance plans to cover contraception for women, or not invading arbitrarily selected foreign countries. Their actions were as neutral and normal as could be.

  5. 5.

    EdTheRed

    Hmmmm…David Gregory’s application will give them a bit of heartburn, I suppose: what is a club with a history of excluding Jews to do with a Villager of the First Order when he also happens to be a Member of the Tribe?

    I’m guessing they’ll either go for his Villager cred or not realize that he’s Jewish. Say hello to Judge Smails for me, David!

  6. 6.

    barkleyg

    AHH, reminds me of the good ol times before whites had to Clamor for STATES RIGHTS ! When whitie knew his place,

    and more importantly, all non- whities KNEW Their Place

  8. 8.

    MikeJ

    @EdTheRed: Nahm they’ll take him and be happy to. It;s not like he’s a very jewy jew, and then they can point at him him and say, “see , we’re not bigots any more!”

  11. 11.

    barkleyg

    Growing up in West L.A., we had a “Big” country club that was whites only, in a very liberal part of Los Angeles. We used to kid that if they could only find a Jewish, Black, Japanese
    Doctor, or Lawyer( it was that longgg ago), they could take care of their “problem” in one fell swoop!

  15. 15.

    David Koch

    Doug, this post isn’t fair. There’s not a hint of elitism with Gregory. See, he’s the salt of the earth.

  18. 18.

    Warren Terra

    @EdTheRed:

    I’m guessing they’ll either go for his Villager cred or not realize that he’s Jewish. Say hello to Judge Smails for me, David!

    I’m Jewish, and pay some attention to this stuff, and I had no idea David Gregory was a member of the Tribe.

    Possibly it’s because if most Jews are, as Eric Idle memorably put it, “Red Sea Pedestrians”, David Gregory seems like the sort of guy who was thoroughly pampered and chauffeured – no hoofing it for him! He should fit right in, the sort of Socially Acceptable Jew who’s more WASP than the WASPs, the Jewish equivalent of an Uncle Tom.

  19. 19.

    Mike in NC

    This just means that David Gregory isn’t limited to spending only Sunday mornings surrounded by other Republicans.

  20. 20.

    Amir Khalid

    They have private clubs for the elite everywhere. Because part of the specialness of being an elite is getting to pal around with your peers. But perhaps this particular hangout for the 1% is moving with the times, in accepting non-white, non-Christian people into their ranks. I see a Hossein Fateh and a Shahin Samadi (Muslim-sounding names to me) listed as membership applicants along with David Gregory and Bret Baier.

  21. 21.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    $80K membership fee just to not to have risk the chance of eating with Jew. Now that is Marie Antoinette dumb.

  24. 24.

    tomvox1

    I wonder if TPM’s History Expert and budding gotcha columnist, Benjy Sarlin, will one day also have the honor of applying:

    Obama Mangles U.S., World History In Energy Speech: President Obama got a laugh out of a Maryland audience on Thursday when he mocked the Republican Party in a speech, comparing their skepticism of alternative energy to the “Flat Earth Society” in Christopher Columbus’ day and President Rutherford B. Hayes’ apparent dismissal of the telephone. But while Obama thinks the GOP is in need of a science lesson, he may need to bone up on history himself.

    Sarlin and Josh “Wannabe MSM” Marshall sure seem to be working really, really hard to get invited into the Village. This FP article with the sensational headline reads like 3rd rate Maureen Dowd.

  27. 27.

    Schlemizel

    Little Dickie is a member of the tribe?!? Who knew? If the doof had as many WASP pricks sticking out of him as he as had stuck into him he would look like a porcupine. They have to let him in

  28. 28.

    geg6

    Gawd, there really is no one I detest more than Dancin’ Dave, especially now that Pumpkinhead Timmeh kicked the bucket. I hope he gets in because he and the type of people who would belong to such a club deserve each other. I can’t imagine a more horrid bunch to have to socialize with and, to top it off, have to pay top dollar to do it.

  30. 30.

    Hill Dweller

    @tomvox1: The Hayes quote(which I’ve heard before) is untrue, but they really twisted themselves(almost Politifact-like) in knots to criticize the Columbus material.

    TPM seems to be following in Politico’s footsteps by writing stories they know will get linked on winger sites.

  35. 35.

    Corner Stone

    In reply to streaming NCAA BB games:

    Go to ncaa.com/march-madness
    Pay the $3.99 to be able to watch all the games, it’s worth every penny.

  36. 36.

    Death Panel Truck

    @reflectionephemeral:

    That’s the way things are supposed to be, the way they were in truer, freer, 1950s America, “back before we knew we had a race problem.”

    “She (Eleanor Roosevelt) was the one who discovered the coloreds in this country! We never knew dey was dere!”

    –Archie Bunker, 1971

  38. 38.

    PTirebiter

    @tomvox1: I’ve noticed that too. TPM was marginally interesting before, and now between the ridiculous headlines, non existent editorial skills and their habit of putting the last three or four words of a story after the jump, they’ve become consciously avoidable for me.

  39. 39.

    BGinCHI

    Is that the country club that trips and falls a lot? Or the one that had a hard time getting to Wally World?

    Jump you fuckers.

  41. 41.

    MattF

    I’ll give you all a hint about the DC suburbs. Pat Buchanan lives in Chevy Chase. David Brooks and Tom Friedman live in Bethesda. Dan Snyder lives in Potomac. Now, go figure it out.

  44. 44.

    Death Panel Truck

    @Death Panel Truck: Here’s the full quote by Archie Bunker, the original Tea Partier:

    Well, let me tell you one thing about Richard E. Nixon. He knows how to keep his wife Pat home. Roosevelt could never do that with Eleanor. She was always out on the loose. Running around with the coloreds. Tellin’ ’em they was gettin’ the short end of the stick. She was the one who discovered the coloreds in this country! We never knew dey was there!

  45. 45.

    JPL

    @tomvox1: It’s even worse than that. You know who he plagiarized from Ronald Reagan that’s who since he used the same line. Never trust what a repub says is my motto.

  46. 46.

    PTirebiter

    @Hill Dweller: No doubt, remember all the flack Bachman got from radical leftists like Tweety over her saying the founders worked tirelessly to end slavery? Exactly the same.

  48. 48.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    are we bashing David “Class Warfare” Gregory? David “Governor Christie, May I Sit In Your Lap While You Tell Me About Cutting Entitelments” Gregory? David “We’re Not Talking About The Fat Cats! It’s People Like You And Me!” Gregory? David “Kick Down, Kiss Up” Gregory? Okay. Here’s teh story about how he belittled a waitresss in a restaurant while eating with Tim Russert, Russert pretty much told him he was a dick.

    Russert chewed Gregory out for his tactless behavior. “Russert warned Gregory never to behave that way in front of him again,” says a spy.

  51. 51.

    Suffern ACE

    @tomvox1: And it’s not even an interesting article. It’s like it was written by the “Friends of Hayes” society. Next up – how the compromise of 1877 was totally worth it.

  53. 53.

    EconWatcher

    @Jim, Foolish Literalist:

    That’s always been one of my rules of thumb in judging potential friends, girlfriends, etc.: If they’re rude to the wait staff in a restaurant, that’s all you need to know. Same for admin assistants at work.

  54. 54.

    Amir Khalid

    I remember the TV show Lifestyles Of The Rich and Famous. It was the Donald Trump aesthetic all over, and as I recall it hit the public eye about the same time as The Donald. It consisted of a fat Aussie, Robin Leach, shouting at you about all the fabulously exotic places where the fabulously rich liked to hang, the fabulously expensive shit they owned and the fabulously cool things they did. I guess the rich bastards let Leach put them on TV as a way of outsourcing their bragging — which they, of course, had too much class to do by themselves.

  57. 57.

    EconWatcher

    @Jim, Foolish Literalist:

    By the way, after I clicked on your link, I was forced to (very slightly) upgrade my opinion of George W. Bush. I remembered the incident when Bush made fun of a reporter for speaking French to Jacques Chirac, which us liberal folk discussed at the time as being yet another example of Bush’s proud ignorance and provincialism.

    But according to your link, the reporter was Gregory, and Bush was responding to a long pattern of douchiness from Greogry. So, for once, good job, George.

  58. 58.

    Amir Khalid

    @BGinCHI:
    Stevie said Suarez put two of those goals on a plate for him. Liverpool firing on all cylinders is a sweet thing to behold. Alas, it just doesn’t happen often enough.

  59. 59.

    tomvox1

    @Suffern ACE:

    Yeah, it was like the most banal “gotcha” in the history of gotchas. Even had to drag the late Stephen Jay Gould into it to make himself seem erudite. Whatta maroon.

  60. 60.

    serge

    Reminds me of when I was much younger there, and Kenwood Country Club, just outside the DC line, refused to let a guest bring Arthur Ashe with him to play tennis.

    Who has an RPG when you need one? Hell, where’s Rodney Dangerfield when you need him?

  63. 63.

    kay

    TPM does read email. You’ll get a response, with follow-up questions, and then it starts to feel complicated, too much work, and by then you’ve moved on anyway…

    But they do respond to emails.

  64. 64.

    JenJen

    Here’s a link to that article in The Telegraph; it’s kind of hilarious and is framed around the US success of “Downton Abbey:”

    Americans are turning into British-style snobs

    This part made me howl:

    British Library linguists have discovered that more and more Americans are using British English (schedule instead of “skedule”, lift instead of elevator, tomato rather than to-may-to).

    Seriously?? I would laugh my ass off at anybody who said “sheh-dule” while employing an American accent. Who wouldn’t? It annoys me enough when people use “queue.” But then again, I’m just one of the rubes so what the fuck do I know?

  65. 65.

    Uncle Cosmo

    @Death Panel Truck: The greatest thing about Allinda Fambly was that the whole family could gather around the set & for half an hour a week laugh their asses off together.

    The saddest part was that while we kids were laughing our asses off at Archie thinking Whadda fuckin’ maroon!, our folks were laughing their asses off with Archie, thinking Thass right! You tell ’em, Arch!

  66. 66.

    Uncle Cosmo

    @JenJen:

    I would laugh my ass off at anybody who said “sheh-dule” while employing an American accent.

    Better yet, go the Dorothy Parker route & tell ’em they’re full of skit!

    (FTR, anyone who doesn’t believe that Brits & Yanks are really “two nations divided by a common tongue” need only consider the UK versions of automotive terms: petrol, lorry, bonnet, boot, tyre, kerb, roundabout, flyover, verge, metalled, macadam, chippings, dual carriageway, etc. etc. etc.)

  68. 68.

    JenJen

    @Jim, Foolish Literalist: For what it’s worth, I’ve made Tim Russert a cocktail or seven through the years and I can assure you, he was neither a kind patron nor a good tipper. Which makes that anecdote about him scolding David Gregory all the richer! Thanks for that!

  69. 69.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @JenJen: That kind of puts my worldview back into focus. I’ve heard that and a few other stories about him (he ran interference for Olbermann with the NBC suits, for example) that made me wonder if the bloated, self-satisfied prick who went after Al Gore with such vengeance might be a misimpression.

  70. 70.

    noodler

    gotta raise the BS flag on this one. I live about a mile from CCC and belong to another local CC (and on the bog there too). I go to CCC a few times a year and this is inaccurate:

    “Order a cocktail at the Chevy Chase country-club and you’ll step back into ante-bellum Savannah,” one British reporter for The Telegraph observed last year. “The blacks wait on Wasps, showing all the deference expected of them. You won’t find many Cohens either, lounging on the well-kept lawn.”

    But there was one snooty woman who admonished me for using my blackberry INSIDE the clubhouse…

    Mr. Tony belongs to CCC as well.

    Congressional Country Club in Bethesda, now that’s another story

  71. 71.

    Tom65

    My grandfather was a member. You have to remember that DC is still very much a southern town in its sensibilities, although not nearly as much as it was, say, 45 years ago.

    The club itself kinda sucks – the golf course is nothing to write home about, and the facilities exude a kind of tattered nobility. Lots of old money there; it’s a cave-dweller (local term for ancient MD/DC families) favorite. By the way, Pat Buchanan grew up in that neighborhood, too.

  72. 72.

    alex milstein

    I grew up in a small town on Long Island Sound in Westchester county about 20 miles north of NYC. When my family moved there in 1950 there were so few of us Jews that the synagogue was a house purchased for that purpose until it was sensible to start building one. There were a couple of country clubs and a couple of beach/sailing clubs where Jews need not bother to apply. But with the growth of the Jewish community in the general area, came not only a country club and beach club of their own…but a question we were all asked: Why are you Jews so clannish that you have to be together all the time?

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