Tweet
David Brooks, today, seems a little anemic, as if he were Bela Lugosi with all glare and no teeth. He writes like an old man pretending to be young, a novice historian of papal power on his first visit to the Vatican. He sees the artwork, smells the incense, and hears the swirl of robes, and feigns obliviousness to the skeletons in the closets, the archives and the sewers.
For St. David, conservatism is as pure and efficient as theoretical capitalism. Both are devoid of people, guile, ambition, lies, cheating, desperate choices and desperate measures, and a press and punditry that ranks on the "clean" scale about as high as James Ellroy’s LA cops.
Today, he play acts as Obama making choices about health care policy. Here’s his typically false premise:
Because you [Brooks-as-Obama] have a lofty perspective on things, you know there are basically two ways to fix this mess. There is the liberal way, in which the government takes over the health care system and decides who gets what. And then there is the conservative way, in which cost-conscious consumers make choices in the context of a competitive marketplace.
Brooks caricatures the left as a monolithic group that wants government to swaddle it in a cradle-to-grave security blanket, no matter how moth-eaten. He caricatures conservatives more grossly, as fiscally prudent politicians who empower America’s health care consumers with full information and choice, and who enable a working, competitive market of honest, fair dealing suppliers of quality "insurance" products.
Bobo’s descriptions fit neither today’s neocons nor the skewed, high-cost, anti-competitive, choiceless market in health care insurance. They are so unreal, he must have borrowed them from a Lynn Cheney-approved Texas textbook. Does our seasoned reporter know as little about the marketplace and politicians as that novice at the Vatican? Or is he a more willing liar than I imagine?
My vote is that he’s a bigger liar. Why? Because having set up his false premise, he has Mr. Obama delegating the policy and the program – and control over your daily lives! – to the bogeyman that’s always under his typewriter: anonymous imaginary Washington technocrats. And because this is how Bobo ends his hissy fit over Mr. Obama’s presumed victory on health care policy:
Not bad for a skinny guy with big ears.
I bet no one liked Bobo as a kid either.
14 Comments
That photo is a night vision scope security camera still of a “Blue Technocrat”, taken at whine o’clock in the morning.
Great pic. What bad articles did Bobo do to earn this abiding interest of yours in his empty words that echo the sound of one hand clapping?
Bobo is the sneeze, the itchy nose, the watery eyes that tell you something is coming. Might be a cold, might be the flu, might be SARS or HIV. The banal Bobo will calm you, comfort you, then misdiagnose you and prescribe you the drug of choice his suppliers most want to move that day, for which they are endlessly generous and grateful. An industry famous for its lack of self-regulation needs an occasional placard posted outside the offices of its most prominent and least effective practitioners.
The style of your reply reminds me of Stephen Fry for some reason. Anyway, I see your point. He’s a failure qua stealth advocate for the establishment.
David Brooks is an advocate for the Right, not just the establishment. Unlike the semi-literate Jonah Goldberg and the openly pompous and vacuous Bill Kristol, David Brooks is soft-spoken, literate and able to manipulate literature, philosophy and history to his ends.
He’s rather like the false beggar who can quote the Bible and Shakespeare in Conan Doyle’s Holmes story, The Man with the Twisted Lip. He so stood out from the crowd of London beggars – exhausted, broken, stunted from birth to death – that his beggings paid for his lifestyle as a “respectable country gentleman”. That is, when he took off his disguise and went home to momma.
Bobo isn’t so much to write home about, except that he is one of movement conservatism’s shiniest public objects, living in the limelight of the Beltway suburbs, PBS and the NYT. His propaganda is often obvious, sometimes subtle. But it is the ends to which he puts it that is most alarming: a GOP that makes Richard Nixon, his White House tapes and racist Southern strategy seem house-trained by comparison.
That never would’ve occurred to me that he was of such consequence. I thought the beggar was a regimental type soldier betrayed, btw.
“Of consequence to whom” is the question. Normally, to few who frequent FDL, but he’s listened to and, surprisingly, taken at face value by many. Not just those inside the Beltway, but among the Times and the WSJ’s general readership, not to mention viewers of The NewsHour on PBS. Mr. Bobo’s patrons keep raising the height of his pulpit.
I have no reason to doubt his earnestness, but his more valuable quality to the WSJ is that he’s able to put a decent face on the Conservative movement. They’ve been embarrassed for a while now and he helps sooth the angst.
It doesn’t make him more right.
I think there’s every reason to doubt the earnestness of Bobo’s arguments.
He may be an earnest conservative, but he knows what he’s selling as “conservative” isn’t conservative, any more than Ronald Reagan or John Wayne/Marion Morrison actually went to war or themselves brought down the Soviet state.
It takes considerable ingenuity to bend the literary and historical information Bobo uses as raw material into the “conservative” concoctions he creates. He may follow the myth of Burke beloved of neocons – the period where Burke was reacting to the excesses of the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution. But he knows Cheney, Newt and Rush are nothing like him.
Bobo is a propagandist, not an intellectually honest, frank follower and decipherer of legitimate Republican politicians of today.
This is a typical Brooks strawman. Misrepresent the liberal position in a negative way and make the toxic “You’re on your own, jack” conservative position sound meek and mild in comparison. Cost-conscious consumers? I suppose that’s one way to describe the 40 million plus Americans without health coverage or for the tens of millions of others whose coverage is poor. I’m guessing most of those would love a government program like Medicare to cover them.
I agree that Brooks’ shtik is to sound reasonable but I have to ask how many thousands have to die just so Brooks sponsors can keep their profits up?
Well said!
My physics instructor always used to say, “It’s not the answer that’s important, it’s the question.” On reflection, I think that was his variant on the story that Einstein or Feynman’s parent kept asking him every day after school, “Did you ask a good question today?”
Hugh, you ask a question generals, CEO’s and politicians don’t ask – “What was the price today?” They may ask how many did “we” lose. They rarely ask how many on the other side were lost. Obama, for example, now wants to hide how many his bombs kill in Afghanistan, and how many prisoners were tortured or lost (even under his predecessor’s regime), just as Bush never wanted a count kept of how many Iraqi dead there were.
I don’t think Brooks or his sponsors ever ask your question, nor would it occur to them to do so. That’s why the reins of power they so love need to be shortened, and for some of them, taken out of their hands completely.
He suggests either total gov’t control or none — no in-between. In the financial industry there’s a similar situation. They suppose Dems would control everything or there has to be complete free markets (so the strong can slug the weak).
But, there’s another (perhaps) middle-way where gov’t re-forms the market rules to protect investors and patients by setting limits (such as credit card rates or not letting insurers to interfere with doctors), adjusting incentives to help ensure the financial costs go where they should and the benefits go where they should (without hurting anyone too much) and in a few limited cases enabling people to do good things such as creating co-ops or helping more kids become doctors & nurses or helping more people set up low-cost or not-for-profit health care outfits.
Apparently Republicans can’t see any role for government which isn’t bad.
They’re still the party which despises government in all it’s roles and forms.
BTW, where did ya get the pic of Dick Cheney?
I guess Bobo really got to Obama with his quip about, “Not bad for a skinny guy with big ears.” Kathleen Sebelius’ abrupt about face on the reach of a public insurance option – and the administration’s commitment that it would be structured so as NEVER to evolve into a single payer system – is an admission that health insurers and their well-heeled, fully government insured and pensioned CongressCritters are winning the debate.