Brooks to Working Class: "You're Not Poor Enough (Yet)"

Brooks To Working Class: “You’re Not Poor Enough (Yet)”

David Brooks chides liberals today in “Dollars and Sense” for their excess of concern for the poor, suggesting that liberals have adopted an overly negative view of reality. Liberals are so bummed out because they’ve “read thousands of gloomy articles about downsizing, outsourcing and wage stagnation”. Somewhere, there are liberal statistician/elves slavering away, compiling dreary economic statistics to keep their liberal masters in a state of permanent midnight. Always with the negative waves Moriarty, always with the negative waves.

It’s the usual Brooks mush, citing to unidentified opinion polls to support his peculiar suppositions. He cheerily cites to an essay that estimated that “only” 19 percent of males and 27 percent of females are poor or working poor. Uh, wake me when it reaches 50 percent? Brooks takes flight from an article posted on a Democratic website over the summer by Steve Rose, whom Brooks mislabels as a “liberal economist”. If he were a true liberal, his stuff wouldn’t be up at DonkeyRising. If you look at Rose’s work, he is clearly in the “Brooks wing” of the Democratic Party. You find such nuggets as “While liberals think that having more than 45 million people being uninsured is a travesty, it still means that over 80 percent of the population does have coverage”. That’s like Vince Ricardo touting the CIA as a career choice: “Are you interested in joining? The benefits are terrific. The trick is not to get killed. That's really the key to the benefit program.”

So the key to learning how to stop worrying and love the economic bomb is to be within the majority who have health insurance, and who are not among the poor or working poor. Along those lines, Brooks references an anonymous poll that ostensibly demonstrates that families with average annual incomes “feel as if they're doing quite well and don't feel oppressed by forces beyond their control.” You can just imagine the wording of that poll/p.o.s.

Brooks eventually gets to the reason he’s been spooning out his economic fluffernutter, when he ties it into his stock social/cultural theories of American conservative values. I like to think of Brooks as the Times’ domestic Moustache of Understanding. Tom “Aarfy” Friedman patrols the foreign beat, while Brooks walks among us, right here at home, misconstruing the blindingly obvious at every turn. Values Are Flat. Or something like that.

Brooks advises: "If you are a middle-class woman, you have more to fear from divorce than from outsourcing. If you have a daughter, you're right to worry more about her having a child before marriage than about her being a victim of globalization. This country's prosperity is threatened more by homes where no one reads to children than it is by big pharmaceutical companies. . . . Conservatives, especially evangelicals, have had free rein to offer their own recipe for social renewal: churches that restrain male selfishness, decency standards that check hedonism, social norms that discourage childbearing outside wedlock."

So, if the Democratic Party is to survive, its future must be as a kind of marginalized Amen Corner to the Rightwing of the Republican Party. We must all throw in with the effort to convince the poor and working poor that they need to get married up, religioused up, and hung up, before they can be initiated into the Magical World of the Morally Prosperous! Pay no mind to your lack of a job, money for rent, healthcare, etc. Those things are just nagging distractions.

If, on the other hand, you evince concern over the economic, health and educational conditions that produce poverty, you are necessarily selfish, a hedonist, a bastard promoter, and necessarily against families, niceness and heaven itself.

From the foldings of its robe, it brought two children;wretched, abject, frightful, hideous, miserable. They kneltdown at its feet, and clung upon the outside of its garment.

'Oh, Man. look here. Look, look, down here.' exclaimed the Ghost.

They were a boy and a girl. Yellow, meagre, ragged, scowling,wolfish; but prostrate, too, in their humility. Wheregraceful youth should have filled their features out, andtouched them with its freshest tints, a stale and shrivelledhand, like that of age, had pinched, and twisted them, andpulled them into shreds. Where angels might have satenthroned, devils lurked, and glared out menacing. Nochange, no degradation, no perversion of humanity, in anygrade, through all the mysteries of wonderful creation, hasmonsters half so horrible and dread. Scrooge started back, appalled. Having them shown to himin this way, he tried to say they were fine children, butthe words choked themselves, rather than be parties to a lieof such enormous magnitude.

'Spirit. are they yours.' Scrooge could say no more.

'They are Man's,' said the Spirit, looking down uponthem. 'And they cling to me, appealing from their fathers.This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both,and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy,for on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless thewriting be erased. Deny it.' cried the Spirit, stretching outits hand towards the city. 'Slander those who tell it ye.Admit it for your factious purposes, and make it worse.And abide the end.' 'Have they no refuge or resource.' cried Scrooge. 'Are there no prisons.' said the Spirit, turning on himfor the last time with his own words. 'Are there no workhouses.'"

The Sociopathic Presidency

UPDATE: Bob Herbert Picks assembles some of Bush's greatest hits in today's column "A President Who Can Do No Right" (registration required):

"This guy is something. Remember his "Top Gun" moment aboard the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln? And his famous taunt — "Bring 'em on" — to the insurgents in Iraq? His breathtaking arrogance is exceeded only by his incompetence. And that's the real problem. That's where you'll find the mind-boggling destructiveness of this regime, in its incompetence"

Incompetence, of course, but that is too generous by half, because many of Bush's follies were in the face of emphatic, dire warning of the consequences. It is not as if the Bush Administration suffers merely from a want of execution.

We had in Lincoln, the Depressive Presidency, in Kennedy the Compulsive Disorder Presidency, and in Nixon the Paranoid Presidency. Now with Bush, we are indeed fortunate to be living through (knock-on-wood) the first Sociopathic Presidency! Bush's behavior closely tracks the diagnostic models for anti-social personality disorder, in his cunning, lying, lack of empathy or remorse, his irritability and his impulsiveness. But never mind all that head-doctor mumbo-jumbo, gobbley-gook. You don't need a doctorate to know two-bit rednecked peckerwood guttertrash when you see it.

It is important to keep in mind that most of these displays of scaliness in Bush were open and notorious, peeking out of the most tightly scripted and stage-crafted image cocoon in the history of politics. So here are some of the highlights:

1) Bringing coat hanger ass-branding to Yale;

2) Bailing on Guard Service while his contemporaries were dying in Viet Nam -- couldn't even care enough for them (or for his Poppy's reputation) to show up, preferring coke, cough syrup and Bourbon to his dress-up "service";

3) Yucking it up about presiding over the Texas-style execution of Karla Faye Tucker;

4) Disinterest in his daughter's emergency appendectomy -- Bushie has such a lot of hard bark on him that he barely felt a thing -- didn't hurt a bit -- why, I understand Bushie didn't even need a local for it;

5) Too busy playing the Crawford Cowboy during the summer of 2001 to heed specific warnings of impending OBL use of airliners as weapons against Americans on US soil;

6) "Bring it On!" While our military hunkered down and endured IED's;

7) Blah, blah blah-ing his way through his stock "War on Terror" speech, while on the golf course! "I call upon all nations to do everything they can to stop these terrorist killers. Thank you. Now, watch this drive."

8) Hilarious "Where are those darned WMDs?" comedy bit while the dead or maimed count climbed higher than a pinball machine about to tilt (still cracks me up!);

9) Presidential sanctioning of the torture and murder of naked Sunni cabdrivers (and as an added starter -- throwing the poor grunts doing his dirty work for him under the bus at the earliest opportunity);

10) Refusal to acknowledge the dead and maimed returning from Iraq while taking month-long vacations to allow "good crisp decision-making" , citing need to "get on with his life", while the "volunteer" army recycles endlessly back to Iraq;

11) Celebrating the drowning of New Orleans with icecream cake and crooning -- "Here's a little ditty and I hope you'll like, I call it "The Kat Five Blues" ";

12) On his recent visit to a military hospital, equating his drunken brushcutting scratches with amputees and disfigurements of war; and

13) Chiding the stricken Aerial Sharon for his bad diet and slovenly exercise regime.

Of course there are many more examples that support an observational diagnosis of the President, than can be wedged into a top dozen-or-so list, things people close to Bush see every day, like his inappropriate smirking and joking when confronted with tragedy, his inability to distinguish between America and himself (for the hundredth time, jerky, we love America, God, and our military – its you we have a problem with). And just pallin' around with the likes of that creep Cheney, and with DeLay is a bad sign.

Free Speech in the Police State

In a speech timed to avoid mainstream media detection, with the press corps preoccupied with the Alito confirmation showhearings, President Bush today magnanimously and courageously proposed to allow Americans to actually debate the war in Iraq, despite there being elections scheduled in the coming calendar year. Funny, I hadn't realized that we now need a Presidential Benediction before we dare speak. Inalienable rights and all that. But hold on, now, don't go thinking Bush has gone all free-love hippie on us, as there will be limits on this free speechifying, and he is going to be the guy calling the fouls:

"We face an added challenge in the months ahead: The campaign season will soon be upon us -- and that means our nation must carry on this war in an election year. There is a vigorous debate about the war in Iraq today, and we should not fear the debate. It's one of the great strengths of our democracy that we can discuss our differences openly and honestly -- even in times of war. Yet we must remember there is a difference between responsible and irresponsible debate -- and it's even more important to conduct this debate responsibly when American troops are risking their lives overseas. . . . The American people know the difference between responsible and irresponsible debate when they see it. They know the difference between honest critics who question the way the war is being prosecuted and partisan critics who claim that we acted in Iraq because of oil, or because of Israel, or because we misled the American people. . . . When our soldiers hear politicians in Washington question the mission they are risking their lives to accomplish, it hurts their morale. . . . So I ask all Americans to hold their elected leaders to account, and demand a debate that brings credit to our democracy -- not comfort to our adversaries."


Bush is for Free Speech the same way his EPA is for "Clean Skies". Of course it is a hack partisan speech, before another hand-picked, "you-betcha Sir!" audience, so I hardly expect eloquence, but his speech, equating serious dissent with disloyalty, is a grave insult to Americans and patriots everywhere. It is sickening to see Bush again using our military as his human shield against the normal accountability of our democracy.

He sends our young soldiers to fall and die in his elective, fraud-in-the-inducement war in Iraq without adequate armor, logistical support or even a decent interval of real aforethought about the consequences. There's no exit strategy? There's no strategy, period. This Administration uses the military in a way that can only be described as contemptuous. The lives and welfare of our troops are tweaked throughout the American election cycle like they're just another of Karl Rove's little toys, jerked hither and yon. They are set upon the dirty tasks of the worst of our Chickenhawk Neocons back home, set to torture and murder under color of administration "authorization", although that "authority" seems to dissipate like smoke in a haze of legal memorandum and specious legal argument when light is shown on our dark practices, leaving the grunts and the brass behind to take still another hit for the Administration. Our men and women are set upon tasks that violate their own and our American heritage and our laws, and that defile the military's code of honor, earned at such steep price.

The military is left to hunker down without the benefit of a coherent mission, huddling behind shabby, cheap armor, while off-budget money gushes all over the debris around them to be siphoned off by who-knows-what. Every dollar down Chilabi's blackhole, every dollar misappropriated by some conservative-connected contractor corporation, is a dollar that could have gone to save the arm, the leg, the face, or the life of one of our under-armored soldiers.

But it is irresponsible, it is disloyal, it is treachery, to take note or to speak of the grave misconduct of this war by the Bush administration? We are to stand mutely by while our military is dissipated and degraded by these Administration creatures? We are permitted to ask "how?" but not "why"? In Bush's speech, the only honest inquiry concerning the war is the methodology of its prosecution. He seems to be operating under the impression that having put the lie over to get us into Iraq, he is freed from the consequences of it, even as our men and women continue to suffer and die in service to it.

Bearings in the Age of Bush

Democrats first have to come to grips with where the Ship of State founders in the political seas -- way the hell over in the lower right quadrant. We didn't get there with the unanimous approval of the deck hands, nor through outright hi-jacking of the pilot deck by the extreme right. We are a centrist ship, but we have been steadily plotted to the right through a series of incremental, zig-zagging tacking maneuvers, sometimes right into the wind (Bush is far to the right of the ship's hands on almost every issue). If these complicated tacking maneuvers can be interrupted, the prevailing winds will bring us all back to the middle reaches without there having to be a mutiny and a lurching turn of the wheel to the extreme left. These tacking maneuvers are often small things, almost silly, like gay marriage, the morbid obsession with abortion, Elmer Gantrying, race-tweaking, symbolic gun rights, etc., but the cumulative impact has been to move inexorably to the right, virtually since the day FDR died.

We need to be the party that replenishes and reinvents the New Deal Covenants. The party that rejects market-based governance, in all its amoral favoritism of those with access to the most marketable goods. We need to be the party that rejects the cynical idea that government only makes things worse, we need to be the party that tries, at great pain and cost, to rescue our health care system, instead of the party that exploits the crisis by adopting legislation that accelerates the cashing in on the sick and failing by the medical industrial complex. We are losing ground every hour in this fight. The mouthpieces continue to pretend we have word-class healthcare and dare to mock and to scorn more equitable, more healthy, and more health sustaining systems elsewhere. Anyone who understands actuarial principles knows that our current institutionalized larceny produces a steady growth in suffering, disease and death in our most needy citizens.

We need to be the party that anchors into the bedrock our social security and pension systems. Are we really ready to follow de-regulated markets to the point where our parents, even those who worked and saved and planned responsibly and honorably for their last years, become destitute and sick, at best a terrible drag on working families, at worst a third world disaster of Dickensian proportions?

We need to come to grips with the dark side of the corporatization of America. We have gone too far down the free-market trickle-down road. We need to reign in our corporations, to recognize that insulation from liability has loosed the bounds of common decency. Tort reform without liability reform is a license to kill and to maim -- your ass is simply a cost of doing business. We need to get over our infantile fixation on the ultra-wealthy and to recognize that often such unimaginable fortunes are amassed through an unconscionable rigging of the game. We have celebrated too long, those who are the best at fixing the game. We can not continue to have an economy that is incentivized by the desires of hundred-millionaires to become multi-billionaires, where the game is to concentrate wealth to black-hole density within the gilded class. If we crimp your style in your rise to Gatesville, to the point where you'll stamp your feet and just take your toys and go home, go right ahead. If you have bet your fortune on the continued market for $20,000 boob tubes and Bradley-Class SUVs, tough on you.

We need to be the Party that begins the long, maybe unattainable climb out of the pit where our foreign policy and credibility lies drowning in our own swill. We need to grow back up and recognize we can not be the exemplar for the world while we are sliding into ruin at home. We need to categorically reject torture and inhumane treatment of humans, and we need to re-center ourselves so that our foreign and domestic agendas are not driven by small numbers of religious fanatics in the middle east, aligned either directly or indirectly with oil-monied interests in our own mid and south west. How well did the Bush hands-off-the-middle-east-peace-process policy work out? Did Bush's disengagement from the peace process extricate us from that region's endless wallowing in violence and hatred? Or do those sorts of things tend to dominate as never before? The clinical proof is everywhere that neoconservatism is a necrotizing fasceitis on the body politic, and it is distressing to see still how many are willing to sign off on it so long as a narrow and very special interest of their's is given some diseased crumbs. Is your special interest so special, as to override our most cherished principles of justice, decency and fairness?

We need to be the party that recommits to the career diplomat, the career environmental engineer, the career teacher, the career government lawyer, the career government accountant, the career intelligence officer, the career emergency services worker, and the career scientist, even if it means there will less beak-wetting for party loyalists. We need to be the party that wants intelligence from the CIA and FBI, not political smokescreens. We need to rebuild our military, restore it to its honored traditions, to once again truly value what so many are still willing to give. We need to answer their sacrifice with a respect approaching sanctity, and to never spend that gift rashly or to waste it cynically. We need to answer their sacrifice with our support in real and monetary ways, not merely when our support redounds to our immediate political gain. Likewise, we need to fund and enact true safeguards of our national assets at home. Move away from the spinning of safety and toward the securing of it. It will cost our economy and it will cost our political capital, but it will be worth the price.

We need to reaffirm our commitment to our core American principles, to reject and rid ourselves of those who would encroach on our privacy, on the dignity of our homes, our friendships and our speech. We need to ratify by our official and covert conduct, the Bill of Rights.

We will need to be the party that does something about the coming housing crisis, or we will do for the family home, what the bankers did for the family farm in the dustbowl era. Only this time, within weeks of the first massive wave of foreclosures, dozens of self-financial-help gurus will hit the cable access airwaves selling the secret of growing rich from the newly dispossessed!

We need to know that greed is fucking awful and its appetite is bigger and more boundless than all the bounty that this nation still possesses. How many times does this have to be demonstrated to us before we'll see it and believe it?

We are floundering and we're arguing why, why, why, as more and more are gong under. Some blame the poor flounderers, but I'm not willing to cast them upon the waters and I feel only shame if we will go along for a lick and a promise that there's still one seat left on the boat for us. It seems like some people are counting along as the flounderer is going down for the 3rd and last time, and they seem to think that it is the most important thing in the world that the last words those poor blighters hear from us as they dip forever below the surface is that it is their fault. You should have learned to swim. . .glub, glub, gluuuuuu.

We need to be the party that emphatically denounces the evil cross-breeding of religion and politics. If Jesus keeps fucking everything up to a fare-thee-well, I will be for the active repression of organized religion in this country. Even though we sometimes push Ole Charlton Heston out in front, with his everybody-must-read-stone-tablets and his Winchester clutched in his cold, dying hands, we all know that it is Jesus who is the real trouble-maker. Why, in this age fanatical right-thinking, politically aware Christian warriors, armed with the awesome power of Presidential Prayer Teams, do we need privacy-intrusive, body-invasive legislation? Why don't we just pray away all the abortions? Why is it that when Good Old Pat Robertson was muttering his voodoo incantations against the Clinton Supreme Court, that Jesus sent cancer instead to Reinquist? Why not some excruciating disease for a cancer-is-too-good-for-them liberal justice? Maybe Jesus wants us to take matters into our own hands? How far a baby-step is it from praying for a Justice's death, to just going ahead and helping the prayer along? We need to be a party where the phrase "America is a Christian nation" is like ipecacc. If Jesus wanted a Christian Nation, he would have saved us the trouble and just ascended to the throne of the Truly Holy Roman Empire 2005 years ago (or else he would have made massive contributions to Abramoff's favorite shell corps). If I recall my bible correctly (and I can't recall the exact chapter and verse), Jesus said "pass" when the choice was before him. He didn't take the door that lead to earthly rule and instead said, "I'll take the Crown of Thorns and Crucifixion, Monty!" You know we are in the Bastard Age of King Scatus (everything, everyone he touches turns to shit) when in contrast, JFK, that moral cripple, sounds like Sir Thomas Moore when he talked about the separation of church and state. If we can excise the current crop of charlatans, each of us will be able to worship or commune as we see fit, subject to our inner conscious, secure and safe from State intrusion into this profoundly private interior realm.

If there is a man or woman out there who would run on this platform, give me Charlton Heston's gun and I'll shoot the yellow dog myself and vote without regard to party affiliation. Call me moderate.