Oy

If you read David Brooks today you might find that of all the things he wants cut military spending ain't among them.  Nope, according to the Times second silliest columnist the only solution is the cutting of "entitlements." Why that might be so, oddly enough, he fails to articulate.

Way to enhance the public discussion, Brooksy.

Odd Morning

I was going to comment on David Brooks' attempt to prove that being a moderate meant one agreed with him on all things political and cultural when I was distracted by a headline that read Officer Held in Plot to Cook Women and Eat Them. It seems that a NYC police officer planned to kidnap, rape, cook, and eat women.

Happy Halloween.

David Brooks

likes Mitt Romney because they both lie like rugs. I was going to write something about today's bullshit but this is much better. It has charts and everything. Brooks' is deal is to sound like he 1) has a clue 2) takes the problems confronting the world seriously so that he can 3) prove it is all the Democrats fault.

He likes the way the rest of us breathe and, to be blunt, he needs find a new line of work. I am thinking that he, Mitt, and Ryan can start a road show selling omni-balsamic reinvigorator. Indeed, like the whole panoply of Melville's confidence men, the Three Liepateers and the Right have nothing to sell that doesn't depend out the purchaser's credulity, which is too say their voters have been had.

Also, too.

Return to Normal

David Brooks today:

On the one hand, you see the Republicans taking the initiative, offering rejuvenating reform. On the other hand, you see an exhausted Democratic Party, which says: We don’t have an agenda, but we really don’t like theirs. Given these options, the choice is pretty clear.

Which is true so long as you ignore the Democrats economic agenda, growing green energy agenda, commitment  to mass transit, and so forth. Even more interestingly, the Democrats have actual policies to achieve reasonable goals as opposed to the Republicans notion of no taxes on the rich leading to the creation of 57 bazillion new private sector jobs.

He thus continues and expands the Republican festival of lies.

Opposite Day

I was going to write something about David Brooks', professional idiot, latest monstrosity, but stopped when I realized that his evidence derived from "history Web sites that track such things" as rampage killings is almost assuredly Wikipedia and that all of his actual experience in "read[ing] through the assessments that have been done by the F.B.I., the Secret Service and various psychologists" is slighter than his regard for facts, intellectual honesty, and careful reading. So decided not to.

Instead lets consider the "you didn't build that" controversy.  Obama recently pointed out the obvious about the social nature of personal success and the right went nuts. Madison Wisconsin and other college towns have lower unemployment because bosses and investors know that they can get a highly educated work force. And they did not build the University or the fine public schools, the parks, and recreational infrastructure, etc.

Romney knows this, and I don't mean his remarks on the socialized nature of athletic success.  I don't  mean his borrow 20k from your folks to start a business to start a business notion; although, so one, so far as I know, picks their parents; therefore, those who can borrow succeed because of the luck of the draw.

This last point, I think, explains the virulence of the Right's response to Obama's bland truism. If success is a combination of luck and socialism, in its broadest sense, than failure is a combination of luck and socialism, or its lack, which -- in turn -- vitiates the whole of the Reactionary/Conservative/Neoliberal ideology. This fact of the matter means that the Right would have to disband, which they can't do. So they deny it even as they accept it as true.

Update, of sorts from Fox News more evidence that success grows from the efforts of others and ourselves:

Kilmeade: Clara, how do you feel about the President saying that you needed help to start this business. And just speak from — speak from within. All right, you know what? Let’s switch over to —
Younger sister Eliza yawns. Clara begins to speak.  
Kilmeade: Why don’t you answer that one?
Clara, age 7: I would say that’s rude because we worked very hard to build this business. But we did have help.
Kilmeade: And your help came from?
Clara, age 7: Our help came from our investors, our dad and stepmom, along with other friends and family.

And that says nothing about the roadway without which they would get no foot traffic.

UPDATE:
I just watched The Daily Show in which Louis Black made more or less the same argument. Great minds, or something, think similarly.

Lies

The Commerce Clause gives the Congress the power

To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes

Ronald Dworkin, with Justice Ginsburg concurring, argues that there is no constitutional limit to the state's power to regulate but rather political and practical limits only. The state in its regulation of commerce can only do what it can get away with.

David Brooks, who really is a horrid excuse for a man, praises Roberts' intellectually dishonest decision to support ACA on the wrong grounds as a shining example of "Burkean minimalism and self-control." It really isn't. This is something that Brooks must know as he accepts that the Roberts decision is a radical change in understanding of the scope and meaning of the CC as developed in Supreme Court decision. He argues that

[o]ver the years, the commerce clause in the Constitution has been distorted beyond recognition, giving Congress power to regulate all manner of activity (or inactivity). Roberts redefined the commerce clause in a way that limits the power of Washington. Congress is now going to have to be very careful when it tries to use the tax code and other measures to delve into areas that have, until now, been beyond its domain.

What is odd here is that the CC gives the state the power to regulate commerce, which meant and means much more than economic activity, and over the years the Courts have found that the state has the ability to regulate commerce under a clause designed to  give the state the power to regulate commerce. How is it Burkean  minimalism or humility to radically redefine a Constitutional clauses meaning?

What Brooks here seems to mean is that yes the radical wing of the Republican Party and its judicial enablers are one step closer to overturning the 20th century and returning the us to the 19th century.  What is odd here is the extent to which Brooks' notion of minimalism and humility are really stalking horses for radical reaction designed to ensure that the rich rule and poors suffer. I suspect, but do not know, that Brooks secretly endorses Tyler Cowen's argument that

[w]e need to accept the principle that sometimes poor people will die just because they are poor. 

For the nonp-Burkeans amongst the nonsocipathic segment of society, the fact that  radically unequal societies necessarily cause unnecessary deaths among the least amongst us is a sad reality. For Cowen it is a principle and this case it seems he means principle to function as a natural law.

Brooks pretends that an unelected official curtailing an enumerated power is not an example of judicial overreach; Cowen pretends that the results of human created misery and inequality are natural and, consequently, just. Both men are either liars or deluded and both are horrid little men.

Fatal Misreadings

Everybody remembers Ronald Reagan's misreading of Bruce Springsteen's Born in the USA. Not to be outdone David Brooks misreads Springsteen's entire body of work and proves once again that he lacks self-awareness. He has for some time now acted as a moral scold and reducing complicated socioeconomic phenomena to simple morality tales. He, it seems, is exempt from his desire for a more austere morally serious world. In order to better misunderstand Springsteen he and some of his

friends. . . financial sanity to the winds and went to follow him around Spain and France.

He finds himself baffled that Spaniards would chant "Born in the USA" because they weren't. Springsteen's popularity, he insists, is the result of

a paradox that the artists who have the widest global purchase are also the ones who have created the most local and distinctive story landscapes.

Here is the problem. Born in the USA is about being the victim of Neoliberalism war on humanity. In Spain right now that war is coming to a successful neoliberal conclusion. Springsteen's global popularity results from his writing songs that are thematically coherent and he often speaks to and for people who are being crushed by the  combined force of a cynical state apparatus allied with corporations or who are in a desperate struggle to make sense of a life that just plain didn't work out.

These concerns aren't narrowly local and have nothing to do with Brooks' "paracosm" blather. The Neoliberals have successfully transformed much of the world in a way that hurts most of us. And with rare exceptions few people look back on their lives and see them unblemished by compromise and failure. The fact that he explores these universal themes with upbeat music and fantastic stage show is just more evidence that Homer sang like rock star.

Over to the Daily Beast serial dolt Andrew Sullivan reads an article on Mexico that argues the root cause of the mess and violence in Mexico, which really sounds like a hellscape of a place to live, is

The PAN is often described as center-right, the PRI as center-left, and the country’s third party, the Party of the Democratic Revolution (P.R.D.), as left-wing. But these labels carry little weight in Mexico today. “The parties have no ideology,” a magazine editor in Mexico City told me. “That aspect is meaningless. Power here is about money.” The P.R.D. candidate, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, a popular former mayor of Mexico City, who nearly won the Presidency in 2006, has moved toward the center this year, dropping his confrontational rhetoric. Indeed, in 2010 the P.R.D. and the purportedly rightist PAN combined forces successfully, backing the same candidates for governor in three state elections. The PAN and the PRI are both avidly pro-business. But it was the PRI that presided over the privatization of more than a thousand state companies during the nineteen-eighties and nineties. Carlos Salinas, during his sexenio, privatized hundreds of companies, as well as Mexico’s banking system, turning a lucky circle of his friends into billionaires. This creation of a new economic élite, with effective monopolies in fields such as transportation, mining, and telecommunications, resembles the creation, around the same time, of the new crony-capitalist oligarchy in Russia. And in Mexico nearly all its beneficiaries owe their fortunes to the PRI, not the PAN.

 In other words,  Mexico is a hellscape of a place to live because of ideological convergence around notions of privatizations and reverance for "job creators" leading to massive economic inequality and chronic underfunding of necessary state functions, which is another way of saying Neoliberalism.

Sullivan, who really is a silly little may, insists that the article is

[a] must-read from William Finnegan reports on the country's organized crime epidemic, fueled by the Drug War.

Like Brooks' misreading, which serves to protect his readers from the cold hard fact that more people suffer under and find the new economic system a misery making machine, this reading obscures the real cause of the worlds problems by pointing toward one of Sullivan's hobby horses, legalization, while ignoring or more precisely lying about  the actual cause of  the world's misery: neoliberalism, which is his preferred ideology.

Both men should do the decent thing and resign to spend more time gardening.

Nobody Likes Conservative Ideas

The other day one or another of the Balloon Juicers attacked a David Brooks essay for being a big ball of nothing.  DeBoer is, on the one hand, right. Brooks' essay is an extended example of how to avoid being explicit. On the other hand, paying even marginal attention to what he writes indicates that what Brooks thinks the Republicans will do is follow a more aggressive neoliberal line in the hopes, one expects, of completely destroying the economy and 100 percent recreating the 19th century.

As the whole ALEC thing indicates the more open and above board the Right is with its ideas and plans the less support it has. Lies, obfuscation, and "cultural war" are their primary means of avoiding the explicit.

They can't win a fair fight so they don't fight one. Brooks is a well paid spokesmodel for the Right whose job it is to squirt  squid ink instead of shedding light.

Just Authority

In David Brooks recent comment on the need for more authoritarianism and less democracy, he deploys the phrase "just authority" on more than one occasion and it seems to be an attempt to deflect claims that he is, in fact, arguing that Americans need to be more docile. The word just in this context can have a variety of meanings one, of course, would be just in the sense of "just war," which would mean something like morally sound because it adheres to a set of principals engraved by God or nature on the hearts of men.  Another meaning might be something like formally just, sort of legal positivism's notion that a law that follows the proper legislative procedures is a just law even if it stinks in the nostrils of decent folks.

Either way it is clear that Brooks wants great obeisance to authority. One wonders when his sharply worded attack on the reporter interrupted Obama during a press conference today., not exactly the first time this has happened.

So David Brooks the time has come to let the louts have it.

Education

David Brooks is as dumb as a box of rocks. You cannot improve students' ability to read and write while simultaneously refusing to fund the humanities. It, after all, the humanities that require reading and writing. No test replaces semester long projects and no neoliberal university gives a good god damn about reading and writing.

Balderdash, Nonsense, and Bullshit

As one looks round and about the world as it actually is, one of the more compelling conclusions is that the current system isn't all that hot. Indeed, looking backward at the long history of the present, one might conclude that the violence, both moral and physical,[1] necessary to create the various version of a centralized state aren't out weighed by the current misery and its likely continuation. Indeed, as you and I are not moral cretins, when we consider what is to be done, we conclude that it ought to be something rather different.

Perhaps, as Graeber suggestively suggests, the future might look like a society bound together by mutual respect and material reciprocity, which is really just another way of saying the future is not going to be a neoliberal laboratory for the creation of sociopaths.

On the other hand, if you have no moral center and don't particularly care if the world continues past your next paycheck, which is to say you are David Brooks, you might write of seeking an alternative method of social organization and melioration as a

prevailing service religion [that] underestimates the problem of disorder. Many of the activists talk as if the world can be healed if we could only insert more care, compassion and resources into it.

The very idea that improving the world depends on creating a nonviolent, nonhierarchical social solution is impossible because

[h]istory is not kind to this assumption. Most poverty and suffering — whether in a country, a family or a person — flows from disorganization. A stable social order is an artificial accomplishment, the result of an accumulation of habits, hectoring, moral stricture and physical coercion. Once order is dissolved, it takes hard measures to restore it. 

Leaving aside what Brooks knows about history and historiography, he seems to think that the socio-political order we currently enjoy, and by we he means America, is not only an but the ideal set of social, political , and economic relations and, furthermore, with no evidence at all, he implies that the long strange path to the present is a natural one.

These are both commonplaces of the neoliberal thinkers, whose job it is convince the rest of us that change is impossible because the inhuman and dehumanizing present is culmination of human progress and the ideal expression of humanities essential nature.

This position is, of course, balderdash, nonsense, and bullshit of the highest order. But it does show how Brooks sticks to his chosen profession with a tenacity that reality cannot dim nor possibility mar. On the plus side, given that he is wrong about everything, the efforts of those he belittles might indicate that they are winning.

He is a horrid little man, who like nothing better than to smother the potentially effective alternatives to markets because it pays the rent.



[1] By moral, I mean something like Elias' Civilizing Process.

He Has Met The Enemy And His Is Them

David Brooks has a column up in which he laments the crazification of the Republican Party and castigates those mealy-mouthed RINOs who signed the Party's death notice by either moving to the right or tacitly endorsing the Tea Party/Glenn Beck crazies.

Well, you know if you, David Brooks, spent your career courageously standing up for reasonable conservatism then reasonable conservatism is another way of saying middle-brow bullshit enabling crazy talk. Just the other day, Brooks was lamenting the moral failure of the poors because it meant that they weren't able to get the jobs he and his fellows had shipped to China.

He writes columns based on serious misunderstandings or deliberate distortions of his source material; he writes books based on a serious misunderstandings or deliberate distortions of reality and science. His foray into castigating the poors' moral decline led him into further idiocy. The man is a walking, talking, living, and breathing advertisement of the complicity of the "reasonable" Republican elite in the creation of a small and growing ever smaller Party of racists, thugs, and war mongers.

More likely than not, he wrote this column because he decided he needed to pretend to abhor the situation he created. Why that is, I have no idea. The man's ignorance, mendacity, and intellectual dishonesty have so far served to make him one of the highest profile horrid little men in these United States, where laughter shall always be the best medicine. You would think now that his particular flock of chickens are coming home he would openly celebrating.

But maybe a lifetime spent in spewing squid ink hither and yon has made it impossible for the horrid little man to tell the truth.

UPDATE:
I forgot to mention that he is just the right height.

WWJD?

These two posts (the second via) do a nice job of making clear how little David Brooks knows about the ubiquity of athletes as aggressive Christians. There something else that bothers me. Brooks goes on about how

[f]or many religious teachers, humility is the primary virtue.

And he seems to think that Jeremy Lin is trying to be authentically humble and live for God. Humility in action:



The fact of the matter is that no athlete is living for god or asking themselves What Would Jesus Do because if they did they would listen to Jesus and follow his advice for the riches of the world:

21Then Jesus beholding him loved him, and said unto him, One thing thou lackest: go thy way, sell whatsoever thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come, take up the cross, and follow me. 22And he was sad at that saying, and went away grieved: for he had great possessions.
23And Jesus looked round about, and saith unto his disciples, How hardly shall they that have riches enter into the kingdom of God! 24And the disciples were astonished at his words. But Jesus answereth again, and saith unto them, Children, how hard is it for them that trust in riches to enter into the kingdom of God! 25It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God. 26And they were astonished out of measure, saying among themselves, Who then can be saved? 27And Jesus looking upon them saith, With men it is impossible, but not with God: for with God all things are possible.

 It's just not that hard. Take care of the poor and work to create a world in that cares for the poor and the downtrodden regardless that's WJWD.

Who Says Bankers Are Morons?

Irmgard Greiner in Germany is who. She was sold a investment by her bank that sequestered a portion of her wealth for 20 years. She would 108 years old when her money became available. Despite an ombudsman's ruling against the bank, it refuses to disgorge her money. As a result of its refusal to give her 40K euros back, the bank lost 500k euros in accounts and investments plus control over the money, as -- I assume -- executor after she dies.  Morons like these caused the economic collapse. Idiots like David Brooks think its the fault of poors who refuse to be "bourgeois" and that all we need is some damned disciplining of the poors by the riches and all will be well. 

If The Facts Are Against You, Lie

David Brooks tells lies in order to blame the poor for the lack of viable jobs. He insists that

In the half-century between 1962 and the present, America has become more prosperous, peaceful and fair, but the social fabric has deteriorated. Social trust has plummeted. Society has segmented. The share of Americans born out of wedlock is now at 40 percent and rising.

It's the "fair" and the prosperity that are doing a lot of the work in his overarching argument that are clearly lies. Fewer people have more of the wealth and capture more of the income now than ever before. That means that the prosperity created is divided with out regard to fairness. Indeed, we know that institutions dedicated to creating opportunity for the poors have been consistently underfunded by twits like David Brooks.

He concludes with the idea that the way forward

requires bourgeois paternalism: Building organizations and structures that induce people to behave responsibly rather than irresponsibly and, yes, sometimes using government to do so.

Social repair requires sociological thinking. The depressing lesson of the last few weeks is that the public debate is dominated by people who stopped thinking in 1975.

By those who have stopped thinking, he means "liberals" who reject the notion that the decline in traditional morals led to the creation of an underclass. Oddly enough, his position is the same one proposed by the rich in the 19th century in response to the social question. He has, in other words, stopped thinking in 1875.

It's clear that the current economic system doesn't work and everyday see an increase in its dysfunction. Brooks and his fellow travelers blame the victims of the neoliberal economic order while useful idiots insist that an ever larger number of poors can find wealth and satisfaction serving the ever decreasing number but ever wealthier plutocrats.

Vote

One reason I'm still glad to have voted for Obama, he is comfortable in his own skin:

And another, he married a real American woman.



David Brooks, on the other hand, is an  idiot. In the course of an "essay" on Mitt Romney as an inauthentic human being but an authentic robotic sociopath,[1] admits that

I don’t actually know what sort of person Romney is. He’s a reticent man. He’s unwilling to talk about his roots, home and family history, so it is hard to understand what’s really going on in his head.

And there you have it. He writes a column about someone's personality while admitting he knows nothing about it. True, I guess, Brooks really wants to offer Romney advice on how to overcome his "appearance" of being a robotic sociopath but isn't Brooks a little to comfortable about writing from a position of complete ignorance.

[1] Brooks, of course, used some vague sociological language from some ancient book he sort of remembers from his undergraduate days but that's what he meant to say.

Ads and Super Bowl

I did watch the game and saw the Clint Eastwood ad. But this:



is a completely stupid idea. Here is a write up of the "thinking" behind the ad. The shorter version is show a non ad in a very small market and hope that it goes viral. Not, of course, that anyone is going to drink more or less Old Milwaukee because of the ad but rather because

despite its tiny TV audience, the Old Milwaukee ad managed to outperform some of the nationally broadcast Super Bowl commercials in an increasingly important metric of Super Bowl advertising bragging rights: chatter on social-media networks. According to a study by the Boston-based advertising agency Mullen, Ferrell’s Old Milwaukee ad has so far generated 1,640 mentions on Twitter. That’s significantly more buzz than was created by some of the national Super Bowl spots, including ones for Cadillac (which generated 345 Tweets), Century 21 (520 Tweets), Lexus (922 Tweets), CareerBuilder (1,001 tweets), and Hulu (1,191 Tweets).

How many bottles moved? Well obviously we can't know that yet. But surely waiting to see if the ad had the result ads are supposed to have, increased sales, would be the first step toward calling the whole thing "brilliant." No?

Who knows Farrell has been creating small niche ads for Old Milwaukee for a while and maybe they work. Here is one:



And here are some others.

But surely there have to be some kind of numbers for increased sales or not in those markets. Why, you ask, do I bring this up instead of mocking David Brooks' latest insult to the practice of reasoned argument? Simple, I don't think advertising works and this seems a perfect example of it not working. Also, who video tapes the tv show they are watching from a camera?

No Way Out

According to David Brooks there is no way out of the current mess. He argues that

[e]ffective rebellion isn’t just expressing your personal feelings. It means replacing one set of authorities and institutions with a better set of authorities and institutions. Authorities and institutions don’t repress the passions of the heart, the way some young people now suppose. They give them focus and a means to turn passion into change.

So I ask when MLK and others worked on creating a new society in which the older institutions of white supremacy were overthrown in favor of a truly egalitarian and just society, where did they look for "authorities and institutions"? Christ's message was clearly King's finger post but the world he and his fellows sought to create wasn't reliant and indeed could not be reliant on any older set of institutions because all the older sets of institutions relied on some kind of hierarchy in which some subset of this or that civilization ruled while others were ruled and in which inequality was assumed to be natural.

In short, what Brooks here advocates for, as I read him he sees Marx and socialism as ruled out of court always already becuase -- you know -- Stalin, grasping some early erroneous system of hierarchy and privilege.

One of the reasons that I thought Graeber's book on debt was so intellectually stimulating was his refusal to make predictions or to impose on a chaotic moment some self-limiting solutions. What happens next is unknowable but our best hope is to try something new.

When an Idiot Endorses a Racist

you get David Brooks' column on Charles Murray. Murray's racist nonsense on i.q. has long since been debunked and his general ignorance detfly exposed and the place of his argument in the history of racist clap trap made clear. Today Brooks, one assumes  inadvertently, exposes his own racist assumptions about the world. He suggests that when it comes to the issue of "behavioral differences" between rich and poor people is where

Murray is at his best, and he’s mostly using data on white Americans, so the effects of race and other complicating factors don’t come into play.

The horrid little man thinks that 1) white isn't a race or its a "normal" race or the racial effects of being white are good or that blacks are so fundamentally different that we can't discuss similarly situated whites and blacks, 2) racial determinates trump all else or genetics is destiny, and 3) Murry ought to be taken seriously.[1]

Brooks makes sure to mention that the vast and growing inequality of income and wealth aren't the main drivers of unequal and unjust outcomes but rather it is the failure of the poors to act bourgeois. This retrograde neoconservative bladerdash finds its roots in the intellectually bankrupt tradition of Gertrude Himmelfarb and the nonsense of Diedre McCloskey. This notion that the poors are poor because they want moral virtue is an old lie perpetuated by the haves to give a gloss to their power. In Victorian England, for example, the poors were notorious for their failure to marry and general promiscuity, sound familiar? Well it wasn't true then and it isn't true now. You can read all about the old lies here.

Just like Murray's desperate and doomed attempt to reanimate the corpse of "scientific racism," Brooks' attempt to insist that the our unjust and unequal society hinges on the moral turpitude of the poors is more bullshit and squid ink designed to keep meaningful change at bay. Brooks, in one short column, has managed to conflate racist nonsense with historical fantasies to create a festering stew of ignorance that, as his policy proposal suggests, offers nothing other than more of the same misery to the many attended bycontinued opulence for the few.

What a wretched little man.

[1] If you want to object that Brooks really means that America's fundamental racism makes  it impossible to treat blacks and whites alike in a sociological study, I say 1) bullshit and 2) then he ought to have the "courage" to say so.

Intellectually Dishonest

is the proper phrase for David Brooks most recent op-ed bit. He bewails the smallness of the President's ideas:

It’s sad to compare that era of bigness to the medium-sized policy morsels that President Obama put in his State of the Union address. He had some big themes in the speech, but the policies were mere appetizers. The Republicans absurdly call Obama a European socialist on the stump, but the Obama we saw Tuesday night was a liberal incrementalist.

There was nothing big, like tax reform or entitlement reform. There was no comprehensive effort to restore trust in government by sweeping away the tax credits and special-interest schemes that entangle Washington. Ninety percent of American workers work in the service economy, but Obama spoke mostly about manufacturing.

Instead, there were a series of modest proposals that poll well. In that sense, it was the Democratic version of Newt Gingrich’s original “Contract With America” — a series of medium-size ideas with 80 percent approval ratings.

I thought the speech was fairly awful in that it is a continuation of Obama's centerist neoliberalism with his usual dose of competence, which is why I voted for the guy. Brooks doesn't really care about the speech's content, however. Here is a link to the number of times the great dolt used the words Burke and Humility in the same essay.

For Brooks, you see, the big, the grandeous, the game changing ideas are a violation of Burkean humility and, consequently, dangerous and ruled always already out of court. Like Burke, Brooks is the pickle-herring in the puppet-show of nonsense who defends the current manifest unfairness and tyranny in the present by insisting that rapid change is worse than the disease. Both accept that there is a disease but both reject any attempts to end it that require making the kind of fundamental alterations of things as they are. Why? Because the current manifest unfairness is the result of centuries of evolution in political, cultural, and social arrangements and to change them is a slap in the face to our ancestors, even if they were criminal thugs, and because the wrong sort might emerge as the new runners of things.

So Brooks castigation of Obama for timidity exposes his role in the current neoliberal intellectual world. It's his job to provide some pious bullshit that criticizes Obama without being the kind of race based crap that Gingrich and his ilk trot out. Furthermore, unlike George Will or Charles Krauthammer, Brooks has to appear to act more in sadness than in anger.

One final  point, one of the few things in the speech that Brooks liked was the idea that community colleges should become the state supported apprentice programs of America's private sector. This is the kind of dangerous neoliberal clap trap that threatens to transform this country into China. We need to stop thinking that the purpose of humanity in a social situation is to increase the economic efficiency of the "free" market system.