Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

But frankly mr. cole, I’ll be happier when you get back to telling us to go fuck ourselves.

Take hopelessness and turn it into resilience.

An almost top 10,000 blog!

Our job is not to persuade republicans but to defeat them.

Too often we confuse noise with substance. too often we confuse setbacks with defeat.

Whoever he was, that guy was nuts.

All your base are belong to Tunch.

Republican obstruction dressed up as bipartisanship. Again.

The worst democrat is better than the best republican.

Nothing worth doing is easy.

So it was an October Surprise A Day, like an Advent calendar but for crime.

Red lights blinking on democracy’s dashboard

They fucked up the fucking up of the fuckup!

You don’t get rid of your umbrella while it’s still raining.

When your entire life is steeped in white supremacy, equality feels like discrimination.

The words do not have to be perfect.

Battle won, war still ongoing.

Today’s GOP: why go just far enough when too far is right there?

A sufficient plurality of insane, greedy people can tank any democratic system ever devised, apparently.

Since when do we limit our critiques to things we could do better ourselves?

Thanks to your bullshit, we are now under siege.

I’ve spoken to my cat about this, but it doesn’t seem to do any good.

My years-long effort to drive family and friends away has really paid off this year.

Only Democrats have agency, apparently.

You are here: Home / Politics / Politicans / David Brooks Giving A Seminar At The Aspen Institute / Trolling in the deep

Trolling in the deep

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Bobo is just fucking with us, right?

At the Aspen Ideas Festival, we’re asking the gathered range of financial and political jet-setters one big question a day. Today: How does the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold Obamacare alter the legacy of Chief Justice John Roberts?

David Brooks, columnist for The New York Times

“It says he’s a Burkean minimalist who didn’t want to create an institutional crisis by asserting aggressive court power. Also, he took the opportunity to reshape the  commerce clause so it was all about self-restraint and restraining others.”

Reader Interactions

106Comments

  4. 4.

    Sarah

    Can someone explain what that means? I totally don’t get it, but would like to join in the mocking.

  6. 6.

    gogol's wife

    He doesn’t read BJ so he doesn’t know that the very word “Burkean” has been drained of any serious content it may once have had.

    Hilarious!

  8. 8.

    Gin & Tonic

    That David Brooks mask that DougJ is wearing is *so* lifelike, you’d almost swear it was actually Brooks.

  9. 9.

    Gin & Tonic

    That David Brooks mask that DougJ is wearing is *so* lifelike, you’d almost swear it was actually Brooks.

  11. 11.

    JPL

    Reading comprehension is hard work… wtf is David saying this time. Please leave a comment cuz I’m off to find those Applebees salad bars.. yum

  12. 12.

    schrodinger's cat

    But what does Sully think? Is Roberts the new Oakeshottian conservative now?

  13. 13.

    jl

    “it was all about self-restraint and restraining others”

    Fetish alert. Who knew? But at least it looks like he is careful about safe-words.

  14. 14.

    Elizabelle

    Good evening.

    It amazes me the SC decision was so closely held. That apparently neither Obama nor Boehner knew the results until the decision was handed down.

    OK; now to read the earlier threads. First chance to catch up with you since before 9:00 am Eastern.

  19. 19.

    anthrosciguy

    He doesn’t read BJ so he doesn’t know that the very word “Burkean” has been drained of any serious content it may once have had.

    I had the most incredibly Burkean Whopper at Burger King the other day.

  24. 24.

    Frankensteinbeck

    Since this is confusing the masses, I will translate:

    ‘Roberts didn’t rule in a crazy person way, which would have been gauche. I like that, especially since someone told me that his ruling could be used as a tool to destroy the rest of the social safety net in a dignified way that pretends to care about the rule of law. Oh, and I’d better drop in an impressive sounding name so people will think I’m educated.’

  26. 26.

    danielx

    @Gin & Tonic:

    It’s true. And – I have to admit – I’ve never noticed how much David Brooks resembles a woodchuck. But when I read that “Burkean minimalist” bit, I knew it was nothing but the genuine article. I’m beginning to think that the word salad generator software Brooks uses to write his columns has been ported to his brain, and has taken over. This may actually be an improvement, as the software has to be more self aware than Brooks is.

  27. 27.

    j

    Roberts figured out that it is called “The ROBERTS Court”.

    Those 4 other Fascists can do whatever their GOP overlords want and ooze away into the history books, but Roberts is a young guy, and he has a lifetime ahead of him of ridicule and scorn. which WILL be in the history books.

    Renquist was an addled ddrug addict in his Bush v. Gore years, and Roberts filled his shoes handily. But with THIS??

    The 4 Fascists wanted to kill the whole thing and give them the opportunity to erase the New Deal.

    Roberts KNOWS that he will be blamed for the Fascist take over of the USA so he sided with the sane people.

    I’ll bet that when President Obama is re-elected Fire Island Johnny will decide to tender his resignation and go into the private sector to make some major buck and not have to deal with Fat Tony and his lap dogs.

    He will use his seizures as an excuse.

  28. 28.

    DH

    Brooks is just jealous of the Mustache of Understanding’s Wanker of the Decade award, so he’s working overtime to win it next time,

    On a more serous note: In defense of Burke, sadly, nobody ever reads past his tirades about Revolutionary France(chivalry and Marie Antoinette and all that nonsense) to look at what we should really remember him for: his attempt to impeach Warren Hastings, the corrupt Lord over India in the day. The principle he espoused was the equality of the law for both Great Britain and India(in the 1790s)! It failed on that day, but it remains our STANDARD.

  29. 29.

    Rita R.

    You must’ve been keeping this post title it in your back pocket for a long time waiting for the absolute perfect opportunity to use it.

  33. 33.

    Davis X. Machina

    Burke was actually a rather interesting fellow, far more to him than the caricature made of him in recent times by American conservatives — or ‘conservatives’.

    Nice piece in the current American Scholar on him.

  34. 34.

    BGinCHI

    When we eventually find out that David Brooks and “DougJ” are really the same person, I for one am going to say Nicely played, sir, nicely played.

  36. 36.

    quannlace

    Frst thought was, ‘What the heck is the Aspen Ideas Festival?’

    Googled it and got this, ‘The Aspen Ideas Festival is dedicated to Engaging Ideas that Matter through the annual Aspen Ideas Festival,”

    Oh, well, that clears everything up.

  37. 37.

    Geoduck

    @j:

    I’ll bet that when President Obama is re-elected Fire Island Johnny will decide to tender his resignation and go into the private sector to make some major buck and not have to deal with Fat Tony and his lap dogs.

    Nah. We’re stuck with him for at least twenty years. Scalia or Thomas might decide they don’t want to hang around for another four years.

  39. 39.

    rikyrah

    I got an email earlier today from a Sistafriend. Between the two of us, I am the political junkie- we don’t talk politics very much. But, her email was so simple. She said,

    ” I was worried FOR HIM.”

    She didn’t have to explain to me who HIM was. I understood.

    I respect President Barack Obama for many reasons, most among them is the fact that he inherited a mess, and in addition to trying to clean it up, he CHOSE to tackle healthcare. It wasn’t the ‘safe’ thing to do, but it was the right thing to do.

    There has been a concerted effort from the moment this President was sworn in, to diminish and disrespect all that he has done and tried to do. To try and erase this man’s place in history.

    Today’s decision will take care of that.

    Loved this final piece from Rev. Al’s show yesterday.

    http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/45755884/#48005283

  40. 40.

    Heliopause

    “It says he’s a Burkean minimalist

    Leaving Doug’s moment of triumph aside…

    he took the opportunity to reshape the commerce clause

    I ain’t no fancy-pants lawyer, but I don’t get how a “minimalist” can “reshape” the Constitution.

  42. 42.

    gogol's wife

    @rikyrah:

    I’m with your Sistafriend. I take it all so personally on his behalf. Last night in the middle of the night I was getting mad again about that guy who interrupted him in the Rose Garden. What other President has ever had to put up with this? During a formal Rose Garden statement? He is heroic for not losing it completely.

  43. 43.

    pragmatism

    @JPL: nice JPL. i’ve had enough of bobo so i’m throwing out the safe word. god bless pierce for skewering bobo each time he vomits out a column.

  46. 46.

    danielx

    @sven:

    Since it’s 98 degrees on the back porch at 8:25 pm on June fucking 28th in central Indiana*, you may well be right since a Corona fresh out of the freezer mit lime is sliding down nicely. So far so good…however, if I read ‘Hayekian modesty’ even once it’s going to be straight to the 1800 tequila.

    Not even July; I’m playing a BoDeans album from 1988 with a couple of songs about the midwest drought of that year. Thirty mph SSW wind and no rain for eight weeks, and the farmers are pretty much hanging it up and writing this year off, which sucks. Even though my fair state is mostly about heavy industry, economically speaking, when the farmers get toasted the economy goes to the dogs in the small towns and it wasn’t exactly booming anyway, to put it mildly. Lotta Ford F-150s won’t get replaced this year.

    Also, too – usually it sounds like an infantry firefight outside in these parts the week before the 4th of July. Not this year, nope, nada. Which surprises me, since even in the ‘burbs there are people who think ‘hell far, it’s jest a little bitty sky rocket’…as the area turns into Colorado.

  50. 50.

    Comrade Mary

    Also, he took the opportunity to reshape the commerce clause so it was all about self-restraint and restraining others.

    Is Brooks telling us that he really wants his very own gimp suit?

  51. 51.

    tam

    Jeebus help me, my first instinct was that the quote was Doug J-penned snark.

    @Geoduck:

    Nah. We’re stuck with him for at least twenty years. Scalia or Thomas might decide they don’t want to hang around for another four years.

    I hope you’re right. My impression is that if Obama wins in November, Scalia will stubbornly stick it out through 2016, if only to sabotage as much of the president’s agenda as he can.

  52. 52.

    Marcellus Shale, Public Dick

    what i learned from foster brooks’ and mel brooks’ brother from another mother is that burkean minimalism is an amorphous and ever expanding construct. its a post-structuralist mosaic upon which any and all meaning can be assigned.

    amirte

  54. 54.

    Ben Cisco

    @gogol’s wife:

    I take it all so personally on his behalf.

    As a black man closing in on the big Five-O, THIS times infinity. I love it when he wins, especially and precisely because of the bullshit he has to put up with. He is a Jackie Robinson for our times, no doubt.

  55. 55.

    Roger Moore

    @Ben Cisco:

    He is a Jackie Robinson for our times, no doubt.

    No disrespect meant to Mr. Robinson, who is one of my greatest personal heroes, but he’s a footnote compared to President Obama. I don’t think the full extent of the crap Obama has taken will come out until most of the people involved are dead, but it will shock everyone when it does.

  56. 56.

    Omnes Omnibus

    “It says he’s a Burkean minimalist who didn’t want to create an institutional crisis by asserting aggressive court power. Also, he took the opportunity to reshape the commerce clause so it was all about self-restraint and restraining others.”

    I take back anything I have ever said about anyone on this blog not understanding the law or how courts work. This is the Platonic ideal of not understanding the law or the courts. Or anything for that matter. Does that statement even have meaning?

  58. 58.

    burnspbesq

    I didn’t realize Brooks was so into restraints.

    We should take up a collection and send him a gift certificate for a dominatrix.

  59. 59.

    Hal

    @rikyrah:

    There has been a concerted effort from the moment this President was sworn in, to diminish and disrespect all that he has done and tried to do. To try and erase this man’s place in history.

    I try not to take things personally, but I feel my blood pressure rise when so much of the criticism seems to revolve around race.

    What were his grades in college, where was he born, what about that name? Just how did he pay for college?

    There is something wrong with this country when Bristol Palin can question Obama’s role as a father, or when you can be a mainstream birther like Trump and not be completely ignored for the sheer stupidity of your beliefs or comments.

  63. 63.

    SamR

    @freelancer: I know. So amazing. Literally cannot believe he used the phrase “burkean minimalist” while in Aspen.

    The only thing that’s missing is the comment that David Broder is probably smiling at this ruling from heaven.

  65. 65.

    AA+ Bonds

    Everyone who quotes Burke approvingly should be guillotined

    It’s the pragmatic choice

  69. 69.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @AA+ Bonds: You might want to read some of his works from before the French Revolution scared the living shit out of him. He wasn’t bad on toleration and fairness.

  71. 71.

    AA+ Bonds

    “On my best observation, compared with my best enquiries I found [the French] nobility for the greater part composed of men of an high spirit, and of a delicate sense of honour, both with regard to themselves individually, and with regard to their whole corps over who they kept, beyond what is common in other countries, a censorial eye . . . .

    “As to their behavior to the inferior classes, they appeared to me to comport themselves toward them with good nature . . . .”

  73. 73.

    AA+ Bonds

    Burke was the sort of shithead who got white planters’ panties wet in the States, all the folks who founded the country and then sold Tom Paine down the river

    Fuck all of them and superfuck David Brooks

  77. 77.

    trollhattan

    @Gin & Tonic:

    My first thought, exactly. DougJ-Bobo has gone triple-meta and I need a drink. “A Burkean gimlet, please, and make it a double.

  78. 78.

    AA+ Bonds

    @Omnes Omnibus:

    “I am very apprehensive, that so long as the Slavery continues some means for its supply will be found. If so, I am persuaded that it is better to allow the evil, in order to correct it, than by endeavouring to forbid, what we cannot be able wholly to prevent, to leave it under an illegal, and therefore an unreformed, existence. It is not that my plan does not lead to the extinction of the Slave Trade; but it is through a very slow progress, the chief effect of which is to be operated in our own plantations; by rendering, in a length of time, all foreign supply unnecessary.” –Edmund Burke, Sketch of the Negro Code

  80. 80.

    AA+ Bonds

    I heartily encourage reading Burke which will teach you all about the thoughts within the heads of the American elite

  81. 81.

    AA+ Bonds

    @Omnes Omnibus:

    Just quoting what Edmund would have had to say about Solomon’s family

    The wider point is that what you catch with honey is a gigantic fucking space vermin that rams its tubular maw into your gut and begins to inhale

    Burkeans should be tolerated – in museums

  82. 82.

    Bobby Thomson

    @Elizabelle:

    It amazes me the SC decision was so closely held.

    Not that they always do, mind you, but lawyers are trained to keep secrets.

  83. 83.

    AxelFoley

    David Brooks, columnist for The New York Times
    “It says he’s a Burkean minimalist who didn’t want to create an institutional crisis by asserting aggressive court power. Also, he took the opportunity to reshape the commerce clause so it was all about self-restraint and restraining others.”

    Wait, what?

  84. 84.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @AA+ Bonds: “Under the pressure of the cares and sorrows of our mortal condition, men have at all times, and in all countries, called in some physical aid to their moral consolations — wine, beer, opium, brandy, or tobacco.”

  85. 85.

    AA+ Bonds

    I mean Edmund Burke was all about trying a little tenderness with that Slave Trade, “Taking for my basis that I had an incurable evil to deal with, I cast about how I should make it as small an evil as possible, and draw out of it some collateral good.”

  86. 86.

    AA+ Bonds

    I like the way he bullshits, don’t get me wrong, I am all about delivering that “in another life we could have been brothers” speech to the ghost of Edmund Burke right before crossing the streams and erasing him from history

  87. 87.

    AA+ Bonds

    Hell if I sucked a good aristocratic dick like Edmund Burke they might pay me enough to be David Brooks

  88. 88.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @AA+ Bonds: Burke wrote enough and changed enough over his career that one can probably find a quotation from him supporting just about anything.

    ETA: I don’t really care all that much for Burkean things anyway. From that timeframe I am more of a Dantoniste.

  89. 89.

    Sly

    David Brooks is an odd little man who fantasizes about having conversations with people who have been dead for around two centuries and magically discovering that they somehow believe everything he does. He is, perhaps, the world’s first stupid nerd.

    Now excuse me while I go ask David Hume and John Stuart Mill what they think about the Earned Income Tax Credit, even though I already know they like it a lot and that proves how great it is.

  90. 90.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @Sly: Mill and Hume are usually drunk by this time in the evening; you’ll have trouble talking to them about anything but tits* and football.

    *Their term, not mine.

    Edited slightly

  91. 91.

    AA+ Bonds

    I can just imagine David Brooks on the edge of his seat in front of a widescreen earlier today, waiting to learn whose dick will be in his mouth next

  92. 92.

    AA+ Bonds

    At the Aspen Ideas Festival, we’re asking the gathered range of financial and political jet-setters one big question a day.

    “Where should we mail your teeth”

  93. 93.

    AA+ Bonds

    @Omnes Omnibus:

    Burke wrote enough and changed enough over his career that one can probably find a quotation from him supporting just about anything

    . . . that wouldn’t get him in trouble with the money

  96. 96.

    Odie Hugh Manatee

    So that’s what Doug J. Brooks looks like. The Burkean features on his face are a dead giveaway.

  97. 97.

    SamR

    @Sarah: If you’ll look at the post’s tag, you’ll get an idea. Basically, DougJ is always particularly agitated by not the stark-raving-mad right but by the reasonable-sounding-but-ultimately-crazy-as-well-right (not to mention being super-corrupt).

    The ideal of the joke is David Brooks and a bunch of billionaires sitting around Aspen having fois gras and white wines brought to them while discussing how “Burkean restraint” requires that “hard choices” be made which will require “sacrifices”—all code for “we get even more, granny gets her Social Security gutted and has to live on the street.”

    But its never been quite this true to life before now.

  98. 98.

    dmbeaster

    All this crap about how Roberts allegedly and sneakily undermined Commerce Clause interpretations that underpin the modern view of Federal power. His comments on this are meaningless dicta, and binding on no one. None of the majority joined in that portion of his opinion. He is going solo on that view, and established no law on the point.

    Moreover, when the court upholds a law, it typically never makes a point of saying that other arguments to uphold the law have no validity. It is long established Supreme Court practice to not do so, particularly when it involves an issue of constitutionality. It is part of the tradition of restraint the underlies the basic fact that Supreme Court review and Marbury v. Madison are not set forth in the constitution – best to indulge this use of power carefully and only when truly necessary so as not to undermine its use too much. Roberts fools no one by doing so, and established no precedent.

    Brooks and his ilk have been repeating this nonsense for the same reason they spray Fabreeze after a particularly stinky one. Sorry David, this decision still smells like a turd for all you Burkeans.

  99. 99.

    Narcissus

    @SamR: It’d be kind of awesome if they were all sitting there in the lodge at aspen or wherever and a death-squad of granny’s showed up

  100. 100.

    Valdivia

    in this picture Brooks looks like such a nebech, except he is in reality the anti-nebech as he could’t care less about other people’s problems.

  101. 101.

    burnspbesq

    @AA+ Bonds:

    Everyone who quotes Burke approvingly should be guillotined

    Does that include disinterring Keynes and guillotining whatever is left of his corpse, you stupid shit?

  102. 102.

    Citizen_X

    Needs moar Oakshottian succor.

    Oh, and concerning the Aspen Ideas Festival, with its gathered range of financial and political jet-setters: are you sure you guys are opposed to the domestic deployment of Predator drones?

  106. 106.

    El Cid

    You call it “trolling”.

    Brooks calls it “useful shit he found at Balloon Juice to fill up this fucking column with.”

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