The quotable Charles Pierce: David Brooks needs to RTFM

Apparently David Brooks thinks the United States Constitution, a purely political how-to manual for organizing and operating a strong, centralized government is a moral and economic treatise whose main purpose was to make the riff-raff aware of what they owe to their betters.  In other words, he thinks it was written by Charles Murray and not James Madison in constant consultation with Thomas Jefferson.  The problem today, according to Brooks, is that the riff-raff have gotten above themselves and need a good scolding if not a stern slapping down. How dare they think they are entitled to the easy life Brooks and his rich friends have earned by virtue of being, well, rich.  Charles Pierce has a few things to say about that but he finishes with this:

Does this person, with his vast spaces for entertainment, honestly believe that the people who depend on things like Medicaid and Social Security, and small-business loans and Pell grants, are emboldened by the circumstances of their lives? Does he believe that these people who are living paycheck-to-paycheck and only asking that the system be a little bit more fair are actually as smug and entitled as every syllable he's ever written proclaims Brooks to be? All over America, people are absolutely petrified that somebody in their family might get sick, thereby bankrupting them forever. All over America, people are worried that their mortgages are laden with small-print land mines. All over America, people are living in sheer abject terror that the job will disappear, or the rest of their 401K will go up in smoke, or grandma's Alzheimer's will offer them the choice of eating government cheese or letting the old girl die in her own filth in some unregulated nursing home. These are the people that David Brooks believes are destroying the country because their unreasoning hubris prevents government from making their lives even more difficult.

Comments

[RalfW]

Our dear Mister Brooks is quite the prat, no?

Why just the other day, he was claiming that Bain and the other vulture capitalists are, wait for it...
Reformers! Yes, ladies and gentlemen, that job you lost so that Mitt & Co. could asset-strip and charge gigantic "management" fees, hey, you were being reformed! SUre, they got rich as s&!t, and you lost your employment, health insurance, and quite possibly your house, your marriage, or lots of other collateral damage.

But it was just in the service of efficiency and the morally cleansing reform.

Yeah, thanks Bobo.

[democommie]

Why anyone pays attention to hacks like Brooks is beyond me. It would seem that people who are invested enough in the process to seek understanding would be astute enough to recognize the con. Brooks made his bones by simply lying about Anita Hill. He is, demonstrably, a liar; anyone who puts any stock in his words is a fool.