Categorical Aperitif

Matt Taibbi's piece on David Brooks and the DLC is very much worth reading—even if, as I suspect, Taibbi is wrong about Brooks lacking a penis.

Brooks is the perfect priest of American conservatism, and by conservatism I don't mean the bloodthirsty, gun-toting, go-back-to-Africa, welfare-bashing right-winger conservatism of the NRA and Sean Hannity and the Bible Belt. I mean the dickless, power-worshipping, good-consumer pragmatic conservatism of Times readers and those other Bobos in Paradise who have exquisitely developed taste in furniture, coffee and television programming but would rather leave the uglier questions of politics to more decisive people, so long as they aren't dangerous radicals like Michael Moore or Markos Zuniga.

That's why the marriage of David Brooks and the Democratic Leadership Council makes perfect sense. It's repugnant and the kind of thing one should shield young children from knowing about, but it makes perfect sense. Both prefer a policy of being "cautious soldiers," "incrementalists" who shun upheavals and vote the status quo, although they subscribe to this policy for different reasons.

Brooks worships the status quo because he has no penis and wants to spend the rest of his life buying periwinkle bath towels without troubling interruptions of conscience. The DLC, a nonprofit created in the mid-1980s to help big business have a say in the Democratic Party platform, supports the status quo because they are paid agents of the commercial interests that define it.

Moreover, Brooks and the DLC have this in common: While they both frown on the open flag-waving and ostentatious religiosity of the talk-radio right-wing as being gauche and in bad form, they're only truly offended by people of their own background who happen to be idealistic.

Hence the recurring backlash by both against the various angry electoral challenges to the establishment of the Democratic Party -- including, most recently, the campaign of Ned Lamont, challenger to Joe Lieberman's Senate Seat in Connecticut.

Indeed, Brook's recent "liberal inquisition" column on the Lieberman-Lamont race was hysterical in more ways than one. But Taibbi's piece brought to mind a vintage bit of Brooks—a sentence so jaw-droppingly silly and/or shameless that it's permanently etched into my memory as quite possibly the dumbest, hackiest thing I've ever seen come off the pen of a New York Times columnist (and that's saying something). This is from Brooks's column (also available here for free)of November 4, 2003, a column with the portentous title "A Burden Too Heavy to Put Down" (emphases mine):

Somehow, over the next six months, until the Iraqis are capable of their own defense, the Bush administration is going to have to remind us again and again that Iraq is the Battle of Midway in the war on terror, the crucial turning point where either we will crush the terrorists' spirit or they will crush ours.

When I first read this, I was mostly taken by the insane analogy: a guerrilla war against ragtag insurgents in a desert country which we invaded under false pretences is like a massive naval battle against the sophisticated forces of a sovereign nation that had attacked us by surprise six months earlier? Even if we're generous to Brooks and focus not on the hilariously bad analogy but on the "turning point" assertion—the Battle of Midway was the turning point in the Pacific War in the sense that it marked the end of Japanese advance and the beginning of Japanese retreat—well, the war in the Pacific dragged on another three years, but it ended in a clear victory for us; by contrast, here we are, almost three years after Brooks's column, and even Thomas Friedman is throwing in the towel on Iraq. Oops.

But wait! Looking at it again now, I see...why, yes—Brooks actually said, "over the next six months, until the Iraqis are capable of their own defense." It's a Friedman! And, hey, according to FAIR's own chronology of the Friedman, Friedman's first invocation of the Friedman didn't occur until November 30, 2003—almost four weeks after Brooks suggested that by early May, 2004, things would be all better in Iraq and we wouldn't have to be reminded that, dammit, this is the Battle of Midway all over again, it really is. Friedman did not invent the Friedman; Brooks has been its bastard father all along! So he does have a penis. We might have a situation here akin to the dispute over whether Leibniz or Newton invented calculus, but then calculus is actually good for something. Perhaps the Friedman/Brooks priority dispute is closer to that over who invented television: we may argue over who deserves first credit for it, but we can all agree that, all these years later, their invention is mostly full of crap.

I still boggle over Brooks's metaphor. If you actually believe that there's a strong analogy between the Battle of Midway and the war in Iraq, then you're an idiot. If you don't actually believe that there's such an analogy but you profess it anyway in order to associate Bush's unnecessary, unjustified, and unintelligent invasion of Iraq with World War II, then you're a whore. Either way, by saying such things on the pages of the New York Times, you've earned a measure of contempt. So pile on, Matt Taibbi. David Brooks has earned scads of it.

The only way Iraq could be called "the Battle of Midway in the war on terror" is if our response to the Pearl Harbor attack had involved the invasion of Equador. (And if George W. Bush had been in office then, it would have. You just know it.) Alas that the war in Iraq is more like the invasion of Manchuria in the war on terror—and that we're on the dark side of that analogy.

And no amount of periwinkle bath towels will change that.

See/hear/read Greg Mitchell on today's Democracy Now!, talking about his new book, So Wrong for So Long: How the Press, the Pundits—and the President—Failed on Iraq. A taste:

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about the “Iraq Follies,” and you’ve summarized this in a recent piece you did, the eighteen things we’ve already forgotten about the media’s flawed coverage of Iraq.

GREG MITCHELL: Right. Well, it’s really going back to the run-up and past the run-up, all the various commentators, like Chris Matthews or Bill O’Reilly or David Brooks and Tom Friedman—people like to poke fun at Tom Friedman for the so-called “Friedman Unit,” where he continually every six months would say, “Let’s give the war another six months,” and that went on for four years. But that was actually—

AMY GOODMAN: Thomas Friedman of the New York Times

GREG MITCHELL: Yeah, Thomas Friedman, yeah. But that was actually sort of a majority position. If you go back—I had to write at Editor & Publisher—and it’s all collected in the book—about every three months, I would write a column saying, “When is the first major newspaper going to come out for a—to reverse course and to begin a pullout?” And every three months, I would write this, and it never happened and never happened, until last year. So the Thomas Friedman situation really was the mainstream view.

Except that, as I pointed out three Friedmans ago, Thomas Friedman didn't invent the Friedman Unit; his equally misguided Times colleague David Brooks did. FAIR traces Friedman's first invocation of the magic six-month interval back to November 30, 2003, but his colleague Brooks said this three weeks earlier, on November 4, 2003:

Somehow, over the next six months, until the Iraqis are capable of their own defense, the Bush administration is going to have to remind us again and again that Iraq is the Battle of Midway in the war on terror, the crucial turning point where either we will crush the terrorists' spirit or they will crush ours.

I know, I know: that Midway analogy is so glaringly stupid that it distracts the attention from that "over the next six months," so casually tossed in at the beginning. Still, there it sits. David Brooks invented the Friedman Unit. I've suggested renaming it the Brooks Standard Unit or BSU, but I must admit, that doesn't have the euphonious zing of "the Friedman" or "the FU." Anyway.

Amy's conversation with Greg Mitchell is worth a read/view/listen if you'd like a quick refresher course in the many media disgraces that helped to bring us to where we are today. Surely somebody out there needs to induce vomiting?

I don't know that there's any big-name opinion columnist (and, God help us, frequent PBS/NPR guest bloviator) that I despise more than I despise David Brooks, and there is no one who takes him down better for his deceptive, whiny, toadying, class-war-decrying, privilege-serving missives than Matt Taibbi:

And even if I were to accept the Brooksian view of an upper class that must be looked to to fix things and take care of the lower classes and create the needed wealth to help us escape our economic crisis, the whole point is that this upper class he is talking about has abdicated that very responsibility — and, perhaps having reached the cynical conclusion that our society is not worth saving, has taken on a new mission that involves not creating wealth for all but simply absconding with whatever wealth is remaining.

It’s not pessimism or “combative divisiveness” to talk about these problems and insist that they get fixed. On the contrary, it’s a very positive view of what citizenship is to believe that everyone has a real role in fixing his country’s problems, and that when we identify problems, we should try to do something about them because we might actually succeed.

On the other hand, telling oneself that when powerful people “rig the game” one should just tolerate it, because one’s best hope for seeing the situation fixed rests in hoping those same powerful people fix it themselves — I would describe that as pessimism, or something worse than pessimism. The whole point of America is that we are all supposed to be our own masters, never viewing anyone as being by birth or situation inherently better or more capable than ourselves, and so the notion of relying upon some nebulous class of investment bankers to “channel opportunity” from on high strikes me as being un-American.

And besides, the fact that a lot of these guys have made a lot of money recently doesn’t make them “upper class.” They’re the same assholes we all were in high school and college, except that they made some very particular moral choices in adulthood, and became criminals, and have now arranged things so that they’re going to be tough as hell to catch. And when they fall, which a lot of them will… I mean a lot of these guys are ten seconds from losing it all and spending the next ten years working the laundry room at Danbury or pushing shopping carts under the FDR expressway. And they know it. These people aren’t the nobility. They’re people just like us, only stupider and less ashamed of themselves.

Which perhaps explains Brooks' desperate defense of them against the envious, self-destructive straw-man populists that rampage through his column (and perhaps through his mind as well, though I doubt that he actually believes the caricatures he traffics in): he can't help but rally to the aid of his own kind.

In yesterday's column, the Krugmeister briefly reviews the connection of free-market ideolatry to "Big Shitpile" and closes with some thoughts to which I dearly, dearly, dearly wish the Democrats would pay attention:

Given the role of conservative ideology in the mortgage disaster, it’s puzzling that Democrats haven’t been more aggressive about making the disaster an issue for the 2008 election. They should be: It’s hard to imagine a more graphic demonstration of what’s wrong with their opponents’ economic beliefs.

A-freaking-men. And a double a-freaking-men to this, the actual last line of Krugman's column:

David Brooks is off today.

Well, David Brooks is off one way or another pretty much every day, but never mind.

For more from the Krugman, check out last Sunday's Media Matters with Bob McChesney (Real Audio/MP3 download). The first few minutes of the "conversation" (after the Media Minutes segment) are kind of funny—there's some sort of audio mix-up, and we're treated to several minutes of aural confusion, amidst which an increasingly annoyed Krugman can periodically be heard asking "Hello?...Hello?...Is anybody there?" until the connections get sorted out (there's a profound political metaphor in here somewhere, I know)—but then the rest of the program is both enlightening and enjoyable. Nash Bob says check it out.

As I think I've said before, there is no pundit I despise more than I despise David Brooks. Enjoy as Dean Baker takes a break from slapping around the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal to slap Bobo around instead.

The Colbert Report's takedown of this guy is a small masterpiece—better than its squalid subject deserves, probably, but oh well:

In other news, Jimmy Cliff!

OK—stand back while I apply the electrodes to this thing and try to zap it back to life.

***lightning flashes, lights flicker, dramatic music swells***

It's alive...It's alive...etc.

OK. Mmm-hmm. Ahem. *adjusts hair* *adjusts tie* *adjusts underwear* Actually, I'd wanted to kick-start this thing again last week, but Tropical Storm Fay intervened. Ye gods, what a bitch. At first, all the forecasts had her hitting on the west coast of Florida, no big deal for us on the east central coast. Then the forecasts kept shifting east, and she was going to go through Orlando, and then she was going to go through Titusville, until finally she wound up coming right at Melbourne, parking herself offshore for a couple of days, and drenching us with about two feet of rain: lots of flooding, schools closed, etc. Long story short: I will never scoff at "a mere tropical storm" again.

On top of other things, I've also been dealing with my elderly uncle. He had a bad fall about a month ago—bad cut on one hand, broken thumb on the other hand, and two cracked vertebrae in his neck—and has been in hospital and rehab ever since. Supposedly, I'll be taking him home tomorrow. After several weeks of rehab center living (and rehab center food), I know he'll be glad to get back to his own apartment, even if he still has some weeks of recovery ahead.

I haven't seen much of the Democratic Convention yet—I hope to catch the Obama and Springsteen show tomorrow night—but I have been listening to the coverage on Democracy Now!, which has expanded to two hours daily while covering the conventions. I don't have cable, so the blabfests on CNN, Fox, and MSNBC are, mercifully, not an option, nor do the old-time networks hold much appeal—not even PBS, as the thought of "analysis" by Mark Shields and David Brooks makes me throw up a little just typing this. *urp* Anyway, those looking for serious convention coverage could do a lot worse than to tune in to DN! this week and next. Highlights so far:

• Amy Goodman and Glenn Greenwald talk about trying to crash the AT&T Blue Dog Democrats Thank-You-for-Retroactive-Telecom-Immunity bash;
• Harper's publisher Rick MacArthur dishes up some real dirt on Obama—his connection to Chicago machine politics, his embrace of Joe Lieberman, etc., that is, not that "he's an America-hating secret Muslim" crap;
• Jeremy Scahill is turned loose with a camera team and drives Senator Carl Levin into the conventionally wise arms of Joe Klein.

Oh, and apparently the innovation in "security" this year is police officers who are kind of, um, secret:

JACOB [from Berkeley Copwatch]: 99 percent of the officers tonight that are operating—look behind me—have no identification, which is against the law. An officer has to be identified by a badge or a nameplate. If you look behind me at all these sheriffs, there is not one of them identifiable. As you can see, these guys could hurt us at any given time, and we would not know how to hold them accountable. We can’t identify these guys. These guys are operating with complete impunity.

EILEEN CLANCY [I-Witness Video]: Well, what we saw last night was that people had planned to be out in the streets demonstrating, and the police obviously were aware it, because they were out in huge numbers. Some people have told me they think that the police outnumbered the demonstrators as much as two-to-one or more.

The police, in the last couple of days in Denver, have been carrying extraordinary array of armaments. The federal government gave Denver $50 million for security, and the police are wearing all spanking new uniforms and riot gear and carrying grenade launchers for teargas and things like that.

But one of the things we’ve seen that’s really troubling is that, well, last night, I have never seen so many police officers with so little identification. We have provided photographs of police officers not wearing appropriate identification and nameplates to the ACLU and the People’s Law Project here in Denver, and they are doing an investigation of it.

I even saw, I mean, police officers with—bicycle police officers with nunchucks, which is a lethal martial arts weapon, and they had them, and they were, you know, in their hands and ready to go last night.

One of the people from Rochester Indymedia told me that he saw essentially sort of a plume of smoke over the demonstrators that were boxed in by the police, so they were trapped. They were not allowed to leave. They were not given a dispersal order. One of our camera people spoke to a police officer, asked what type of gas, and they were told it was CS gas. This is the kind of thing—it’s quite dangerous, of course, to use on, you know, just the random members of the public. So it’s—there were ninety-one arrests at that location.

What we had seen for the prior couple of days is very few arrests but a tremendous amount of harassment: vehicles being stopped; identification being requested; searches being done on vehicles and people without consent; people thrown down on the ground in handcuffs, held for awhile and then let go.

And part of the problem is, when they just let them go like that, there’s no really record of who that police officer was, what the basis for the detention was. And, you know, you can’t even really sue. What the heck are you going to do? You don’t know who stopped you, almost. You don’t know what it was about. But it’s very intimidating. It’s very much harassment. In some cases—in one instance, at least, one group of people was told they were on a terrorist watch list. So those people—some of those people were detained, and some of those people have been arrested.

Of course, Democracy Now! was the first place I heard about the "Gitmo on the Platte" revelations. Listening to them sometimes is like hearing the slow death rattle of America, I swear. But it's still preferable to Chris Matthews.

Atrios pointed me to this. I made the mistake of looking at the comments. Oy. The general sentiment that the New York Times is some sort of liberal mouthpiece for the Democratic Party is bad enough—are these people ignorant of the Times' relentless coverage of the Whitewater "scandal"? of what the Times did to Al Gore in 2000? of Judith Miller? of the Times' rush to embrace the abortive coup against (democratically elected) Hugo Chavez in 2002? of the Times' reliably neoliberal positions on trade and corporate power? of the presence of William Kristol, David Brooks, and Thomas "Suck On This" Friedman in the Times' editorial pages? of the Times' silence (shared with the rest of the corporate media) on the Winter Soldier II hearings? etc. etc. etc.—but read down a ways and it's kind of like that scene in Jaws where Roy Scheider and Richard Dreyfuss cut open the belly of the shark on the pier and all kinds of sickening, half-digested crap comes pouring out: there are references to "jackass liberal demonRATS," for example, and a war opponent is referred to as a "pink pussy"—oops, sorry, forgot the capitalization, that's "Pink pussy"—and anyone who contests the claim that the NYT is a "leftist" paper is dismissed as a "snooty, skinny, post-modern, self-important, supercilious, Jon Stewart-wannabe ignoramus" (skinny? post-modern?), and, God help me, there are non-ironic references to "ChiComs" and to making the liberals sorry by having all the clever, productive people (such as the ones who spend hours typing semiliterate comments at mediabistro.com, presumably) "stop the engine of the world" by doing "an 'Atlas Shrugged'," which in less ranting hands might be a great name for a dance, now that I think about it.

Gah. Interestingly, though, even as they rave at the various liberal/Democratic/media/pacifist/socialist/communist/America-hating straw men that march perpetually through their minds, even the wingnuttiest of wingnuts in those comments seem desperate to distance themselves from George W. Bush. I guess I should take that as a small sign of hope.

Via Atrios and Larry Johnson, my attention has been called to a magnificent takedown of contemptible David "Iraq is the Battle of Midway in the war on terror" Brooks by the man who first noticed the "Nigergate Thuggery," David Corn. Don't miss it.

Krugman Wins Nobel Prize for Economics

STOCKHOLM (Reuters) — The American economist Paul Krugman won the 2008 Nobel prize for economics for bringing together analysis of trade patterns and where economic activity takes place, the prize committee said on Monday.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said the prestigious 10 million crown ($1.4 million) prize recognized Mr. Krugman’s formulation of a new theory to answer questions driving world-wide urbanization.

“He has thereby integrated the previously disparate research fields of international trade and economic geography,” the committee said in its statement.

For an enlightening contrast between Paul Krugman and fellow New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman (we'll leave David "Iraq is the Battle of Midway in the war on terror" Brooks out of it), see Tom Tomorrow.

Congratulations, Professor.

One of my favorite lines in one of my favorite episodes of Mystery Science Theater 3000 is in their savaging of the lame 1970 airport movie San Francisco International. There's a scene in which mellow-macho airport cop Clu Gulagher is investigating an altercation at a snack counter or something; the aggrieved party is a blubbering reactionary businessman who has filled Clu Gulagher's well-coiffed head with tales of how he was brutally assaulted for no reason by a dirty, smelly, evil, longhaired hippie guy. Determined in his mellowness to hear both sides of the story, Clu Gulagher invites the hippie guy into his office. In walks a stereotypically bedenimed, befringed, beatifically smiling, handsome young countercultural dreamboat, prompting Mike to quip, with typical MST perfect timing, "Oh, a made-for-TV hippie."

That is exactly what came to mind when I noticed FAIR going after Mark Shields for a typical recent NewsHour performance wherein this "TV leftist" dutifully bashed Democrats for sucking up to "coddled interest groups." While some of the NewsHour's segments are quite good, there are few more annoying spectacles on Earth than those "perspective" segments where they trot out David "Iraq is the Battle of Midway in the War on Terror" Brooks, pair him with some wimpy, mushy made-for-TV "leftist" like Mark Shields or E.J. Dionne, and have cockroach-eyed Jim Lehrer feed them lame questions to which they reply with bucketloads of spin, conventional wisdom, and banalities. Veritable emetics in video form, they are.

Mind you, your average made-for-TV leftist is a step up from your average Fox Democrat, but that's not saying much.

Granted, few members of the upper punditocracy merit as much contempt as David "Bobo" "Iraq is the Battle of Midway in the War on Terror" Brooks, but jeez, Larry Johnson, leave his poor mailbox alone. It could be worse: