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This morning Republican-American and overpaid NYT columnist/pundit (pardon the redundancy) David Brooks opines away on a Democratic Party he sees working to "lose touch with America". The column's "money quote" (same as that quoted in BarbinMD's Abbreviated Pundit Roundup -- I purposefully don't link, btw: NYT requires "Registration" to read):
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"It’s not that interesting to watch the Democrats lose touch with America. That’s because the plotline is exactly the same. The party is led by insular liberals from big cities and the coasts, who neither understand nor sympathize with moderates. They have their own cherry-picking pollsters, their own media and activist cocoon, their own plans to lavishly spend borrowed money to buy votes."
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Brooks is right. Partially.
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It's not THE Democratic Party that's losing touch, though, it's those Democrats hell-bent to toady-up to the GOP and shill for the Insurance Industry that have dutifully lost touch with Americans who don't want the GOP and Insurance Industry to control our government and our lives.
Of course, Brooks often speaks about the Alternate Universe America without first informing his readers, or employer. Brooks is often sloppy that way.
Brooks' proclivity to revel and glorify in wrongness is a thing to behold.
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"The party is led by insular liberals from big cities and the coasts..."
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Actually, the Party is lead by Barack Obama, a man born in Hawaii to a mom from Kansas and whose early career was tempered in the low-income areas of Chicago. The Party's also lead by Tim Kaine, a man born in Minnesota, was raised in Missouri, who practiced law in Richmond, Virginia before becoming Governor of that Commonwealth -- oh, and who worked at a Jesuit Mission in Honduras. The Party's also lead by millions of Americans from every part of the country; mostly who are not wealthy and who are not "insular".
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In Brooks' BizarroWorld, it's only Democrats who engage "cherry-picking pollsters" to do their dirty work. That would be in contrast to objective GOP- and Blue Dog-type pollsters like Fox News.
Brooks' most amazingly audacious, written-without-batting-an-eye oxymoron is his neologism: "activist cocoon". I'm trying to figure out exactly what an "activist cocoon" is.
It seems to me that hundreds of thousands of Americans' grassroots efforts to break-through the wall of corporate lobbyists that surround Congress and to sway Vichy Democrats to remove their lips from the hindquarters of the Health Insurance Moguls just. long. enough. to side with the majority of American people for a few weeks are not the actions of people living in a "cocoon". Indeed, it evidences people all around the country trying to get such Dems (Republicans are a bought-and-sold lost cause, of course) out of their Capitol Hill cocoon.
David Brooks, who grew up in New York City and lives in Beltway Bethesda, wouldn't understand this, though.
BenGoshi
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