A few months ago the New York Times decided, "Hey, conservatives are just not getting their voices heard enough today. Let's hire a second tier propagandist to write a bi-weekly column."
Notice how I didn't call David Brooks a third-tier propagandist. He's smarter than that, and the third tier was getting pretty full already. As was the fourth tier, the fifth tier....
David Brooks used to be the editor of The Weekly Standard, a Washington magazaine that fueled Newt Gingrich, the Clinton impeachment, abolishing the Department of Education (yes), etc. So now Brooks writes for the Times. Brilliant.
Here's some of his latest column, along with some witty and trenchant commentary. Okay, fine. Here's some of his latest column along with some angry guy yelling at him from behind a laptop from 1,000 miles away.
In the current issue of The Weekly Standard, Fred Barnes argues that we have seen the birth of a Republican majority. In 1992, Barnes points out, Republicans held 176 House seats. Today, they hold 229. In 1992, the G.O.P. controlled 8 state legislatures; now it controls 21. In 1992, there were 18 Republican governors; now there are 27.
Wow. That's not at all self-serving and hollow to quote the magazine you ran up until a few months ago. And what a rock-solid trend too. Why it goes all the way back to.....11 years ago!
After some nonsense and deliberately misrepresentative information about some of the Democratic presidential candidates:
John Edwards has the most persuasive theory. He argues that most voters do not place candidates on a neat left-right continuum. But they are really good at sensing who shares their values. They are really good at knowing who respects them and who doesn't. Edwards's theory is that the Democrats' besetting sin over the past few decades has been snobbery.
Okay, we got it. You have a problem with Clinton's cock. I think you made that point for about a decade at the Weekly Standard. So what else you got? Is screwing poor people while lowering the capital gains tax a sin? How about selling weapons to Iran to fight a dirty guerilla war in Nicaragua? Sin? How about breaking and entering into the National Headquarters of the domestic political opposition, lying about it, lying about lying about it, then resigning in disgrace before....you know what, fuck it.
"My campaign is a different Democratic campaign," Edwards said in his announcement speech. "Not only will I run for the real America, I will run in the real America. . . . Democrats too often act like rural America is just someplace to fly over between a fund-raiser in Manhattan and a fund-raiser in Beverly Hills."
This here is actually Edwards, not Brooks, doing his impersonation of Rush Limbaugh. Fuck you Edwards. I like a lot of what you do and say, but living in the Carolinas does not give you some fucking insight into "America" that people who live in New York just don't see. If I stay in the middle of the country a little longer, can I play that card against Coastal Republicans for the rest of my life? "I know you think you live in America Mr. Giuliani, you foreign sounding commie bastard..."
Except for Bill Clinton, Democrats have nominated presidential candidates who try to figure out Middle American values by reading the polls, instead of feeling them in their gut. If they do it again, the long, slow slide will continue.
Wow. Brooks missed an opporunity to take a lame swipe at the Big Dog and actually said something that could be interpreted as....sort of complimentary in a backhanded way and vaguely uncritical. Ann Coulter will have Brooks' house burned to the ground by the time his column hits the stands tomorrow.
But the rest of that sentence really got to me. Jimmy Carter didn't represent "Middle American values"? Peanut farmer is too chic for you? Walter Mondale who came out of the DEMOCRATIC FARM LABOR party in FUCKING MINNESOTA didn't represent "Middle American values"? He was right in the middle! I guess Dukakis couldn't possibly embody those values because he was from liberal Massachusettes while his opponent George H.W. Bush was from a REAL American state like....Connecticut! What the fuck? And Al Gore, yeah, nobody says, "up from hardscrabble beginnings" like his opponent in 2000. No wonder more people voted for that monkey in a man suit...oh right....THEY DIDN'T!
The next person to try and define for me what "real Middle American values are," is going to get my "real Middle American foot" up his "real Middle American ass." Or would that be too sinful?
Posted by mike at October 21, 2003 12:17 AM