NP - A Moral Scolding from David Brooks

[Joseph Tracy]

 According to polls by about 60 to 65 percent, the customer wants to end the wars and cut military spending . By close to the same percent, he customer wanted single pay medicare for all. By 80 percent. The customer wanted the big banks to fail or be reformed with some semblance of accountability.  Even when the majority show eminently good sense Brooks despises them. Only when the majority buys  the kind of lying war propaganda he pedaled to promote the invasion of Iraq does Brooks respect citizens. When the lies are exposed and the blood is in the streets and trillions are owed, he is on to the next scam of the one percent.
On May 18, 2012, at 4:53 PM, David Morris wrote:

> http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/david-brooks-age-of-innocence-8950471
> 
> David Brooks diagnoses ou National downfall:
> 
> "Leaders today do not believe their job is to restrain popular will.
> Their job is to flatter and satisfy it. A gigantic polling apparatus
> has developed to help leaders anticipate and respond to popular whims.
> Democratic politicians adopt the mind-set of marketing executives.
> Give the customer what he wants. The customer is always right."
> [...]
> "Having lost a sense of their own frailty, many voters have come to
> regard their desires as entitlements. The American decentralized
> system of checks and balances has transmogrified into a fragmented
> system that scatters responsibility. Congress is capable of passing
> laws that give people benefits with borrowed money, but it gridlocks
> when it tries to impose self-restraint.
> [...]
> "Western democratic systems were based on a balance between self-doubt
> and self-confidence. They worked because there were structures that
> protected the voters from themselves and the rulers from themselves.
> Once people lost a sense of their own weakness, the self-doubt went
> away and the chastening structures were overwhelmed. It became madness
> to restrain your own desires because surely your rivals over yonder
> would not be restraining theirs."
> 
> Charles Pierce responds:
> 
> Does this person 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. I'm fking done with this nonsense. The man should be
> pelted with rotting fish.
> 
> 
> Pierce is a treasure.