David Brooks, daring upholder of shallow conventional wisdom

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Saturday May 22, 2010 · 2:35 PM PDT

2010/05/22 · 14:35

David Brooks, throughout his long history as a pundit, consistently seems to love drawing sweeping generalizations from just a handful of anecdotal examples. Sometimes even just one. In his latest column, he's resorted to using an imaginary one.

And since Brooks is making up the example to suit his predetermined thesis, he gets to ignore inconvenient realities. His little fable elides quiet a few along the way, some of them rather significant...

[excerpted from my blog]

lawman

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Monday May 10, 2010 · 11:21 PM PDT

2010/05/10 · 23:21

Why? Why does a presidential administration that came into office on the diligent labor and fervent hopes of progressives continue to send progressives the message that it doesn't need them, indeed that it doesn't even care what they think, that their principles and passions are nothing more than chips to be bargained away as evidence of the White House's "post-partisan" cred?

A Supreme Court vacancy is always a huge opportunity, and my personal hopes for Obama's choice when this one arose could be summed up in just three words: please be bold. I had hoped that for a change Obama might recapture the spirit that animated his campaign and decide that, if the GOP is determined to give him a fight, he'll make it one with stakes worth winning.

But once again, he didn't.

[Condensed from my blog]

lawman

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Sunday April 11, 2010 · 4:34 AM PDT

2010/04/11 · 04:34

Either way, it's definitely disturbing, and (a term I don't often use) downright un-American.

What is? The fact that the Obama White House has ordered the CIA to assassinate an American citizen, wherever and whenever he may be found. A man who's been charged with no crime, much less convicted of one.

The ostensible reason? "Terrorism," of course.

That this is absolutely unconscionable and inexcusable should go without saying. But apparently it doesn't, since people I know to be smart, thoughtful liberals have been making excuses for it. I'm astonished to find no discussion of it here on DK. [ETA: revisiting my search, I did find a few diaries.] So let's talk about it for a bit.

Poll

41 votes Show Results

Do you support Obama putting an American citizen on an assassination hit list without due process of law?

41 votes Vote Now!

Do you support Obama putting an American citizen on an assassination hit list without due process of law?

Yes

6 votes

34 votes

Why haven't I heard more about this?

1 vote

Health care is making me sick

lawman

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Monday March 15, 2010 · 8:48 AM PDT

2010/03/15 · 08:48

As the health care reform debate enters what appears to be the home stretch (albeit not for the first time), what Washington is offering us (the citizenry) boils down to a choice between bad and worse. The legislation now under consideration, both the Senate bill and the slight variation on same presented as "Obama's bill," is the end result of a process that has methodically stripped away almost everything that made this reform effort worth undertaking in the first place. They've thrown out the baby and kept the bathwater.

And yet, we have to hope it passes.

[Angsty details below the fold, and a somewhat longer version at my blog...]

lawman

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Wednesday September 16, 2009 · 10:56 AM PDT

2009/09/16 · 10:56

(And thank heaven for that.)

So Sen. Max Baucus's Finance Committee has finally released a health care "reform" bill, months after every other committee charged with the task. (Or a "Chairman's Mark" version of one, at least—i.e., something actually readable by laymen [pdf]).

The predictable result? It's awful. Any Democrat who would vote for a bill that looks like this has absolutely no political sense whatsoever, much less policy sense, and should be drummed out of office on general principle.

Fortunately, most of them seem to realize that.

[crossposted]

lawman

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Saturday August 15, 2009 · 4:01 AM PDT

2009/08/15 · 04:01

Even as Dick Armey's dick army continues to do the disruptive dirty work of its corporate-funded organizers (an onion Rachel Maddow has ably peeled for public view), even as its footsoldiers continue to spout fear-drenched talk-radio-esque bullshit about euthanasia, baby killing, and the evil plans of that Fascist Socialist Muslim Negro in the White House (who's really from Kenya, you know!)...

... some folks at the top of the Establishment, those who understand the real interests at stake here and who are actually capable of making calm, methodical arguments (i.e., they don't think whoever shouts loudest wins), are showing their hand just a little too boldly.

Just as the right-wing culture warriors are perpetually projecting onto the left their own penchants for intolerance and bullying, likewise class war in America is almost always a top-down phenomenon, even as its practitioners try to cast it as the exact opposite. Case study: Fortune Magazine editor-at-large Shawn Tully's recent pieces attacking what he dismissively terms "Obamacare."

lawman

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Wednesday May 13, 2009 · 2:45 PM PDT

2009/05/13 · 14:45

Dick Cheney’s been all over the mass media lately, defending the past administration’s record on torture in interviews on Sunday talk shows like "Face the Nation" and on Fox News, and in speeches at friendly venues like the American Enterprise Institute. When media outlets aren’t talking to him they’re talking about him, in numerous "think pieces" in the written press and today on NPR’s "Talk of the Nation."

From the point of view of the Democratic party, of course, you could hardly ask for a better spokesperson for the opposition. He’s even less lovable than Rush Limbaugh. Short of enlisting Darth Vader, the GOP couldn’t find a better way to push its public approval numbers down toward the single digits.

But much of the public discussion seems to be focused around the question of whether it’s "appropriate" for a former Vice President to be so outspoken in criticizing the current administration. And that question fundamentally misunderstands what’s actually going on here.

lawman

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Friday March 20, 2009 · 12:03 PM PDT

2009/03/20 · 12:03

Newsweek's Fareed Zakaria wrote a column last week that elicited considerable debate, in which he framed Obama as moving to reverse the Bush administration's "imperial foreign policy."

Well, today, we saw some of that reversal in action. We're all welcoming the arrival of spring... but in the Persian world, it's not just a change of seasons, it's a major holiday, a new year celebration known as Nowruz. And President Obama seized that occasion today to release a public message to the people and government of Iran, focusing on the theme of new beginnings in relations between Iran and the United States.

It's no understatement to call it a rhetorical masterstroke.

[crossposted...]

lawman

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Monday March 02, 2009 · 12:43 PM PST

2009/03/02 · 12:43

There's been a lot of jibber-jabber about Obama's proposed budget. I may jus the adding to the din, but I thought I'd share my thoughts as I attempted to pull the pieces together and form some coherent opinions.

I'm just going from the press coverage, of course. I haven't read the actual federal budget the administration presented to Congress. (Have you ever tried to read a federal budget? Even in outline form, they're large. And arcane. The legislators themselves don't usually bother. They have lobbyists for that sort of thing...)

Anyway, I'm going to tackle this one in bullet-point format, starting with the largest category:

Good Things About Obama's Budget

lawman

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Tuesday February 10, 2009 · 12:54 AM PST

2009/02/10 · 00:54

Not to step on the toes of those who're analyzing this in fine-toothed-comb detail, but let's just take a moment for the view from a mile up...

It's a nice refreshing tingly feeling, isn't it, to watch a president who clearly not only understands complex economic concepts, but is even capable of boiling them down into simplified versions for the press? (Even if he's occasionally visibly frustrated by the need to do so.) Bush always came across as just barely in command of the PowerPoint version of reality some adviser had walked him through, and painfully incapable of going into greater depth about anything.

The corporate media, of course (at least so far as I saw on NBC), was preoccupied with the fleeting meme that strategically speaking, Obama should have done this a week ago. That, however, utterly misses every point worth getting.

lawman

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Wednesday November 05, 2008 · 11:25 AM PST

2008/11/05 · 11:25

Six years ago, at a rally in Chicago’s Daley Plaza, I heard Barack Obama speak out against the then-imminent invasion of Iraq. He was only a state senator at the time, and not the only elected official present nor the most prominent. He was not the keynote speaker, just one of many... but afterward, my girlfriend and I agreed that his speech was the most memorable of the afternoon.

Four years ago, in a banquet hall at the Chicago Hyatt, I attended the victory party for Obama’s U.S. Senate race. He spoke around the theme that has become his enduring mantra—"Yes We Can." Everyone was enthusiastic, and there were many comments about what an incredible multi-ethnic, multi-racial coalition he had put together, the most impressive demographic cross-section since Harold Washington’s mayoral victory two decades earlier. There were perhaps a thousand people in the room.

Last night, on a beautiful Indian-summer evening, I stood in Grant Park among a crowd that was orders of magnitude larger.

lawman

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Friday October 17, 2008 · 1:52 AM PDT

2008/10/17 · 01:52

As John McCain continues to trail Barack Obama badly in the polls, Republicans are reacting in different ways. Quite a few prominent conservatives are openly abandoning McCain, or at least singing the death knell for his campaign. From one perspective, this is just a matter of reasonably intelligent people seeing the writing on the wall, and (at least) distancing themselves from the debacle or (perhaps) acknowledging that they really, genuinely don’t have a good ticket. From another perspective, though, it’s a matter of rats leaving a sinking ship, and these "disloyal" figures are to be excoriated by True Conservatives.

What’s happening is that "movement" conservatives are getting a taste of the anxiety and self-doubt that non-conservatives have been suffering for years... The difference is, they’re not used to it.

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David Brooks, daring upholder of shallow conventional wisdom

The Court drifts further to the right: another Kagan diary

Orwellian or Kafkaesque? I can't decide.

Health care is making me sick

The Baucus bill looks to be DOA

The inverted class warfare over health care

Attack dog Cheney

Damn, this guy is good: Obama's message to Iran

Obama's budget: the good, the bad, and the ?...

Now THAT was a press conference

A night to remember

Why the right wing just doesn't get it any more