NP - A Moral Scolding from David Brooks

[David Morris]

That kind of praise is sheer dishonesty.

On Sun, May 20, 2012 at 8:02 AM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Brooks has gotten worse since he praised Ryan's budget way back for some kind of courage.....
>
> that kind of praise shows you value the system over people....
>
> From: Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net>
> To: P-list List <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> Sent: Sunday, May 20, 2012 8:56 AM
> Subject: Re: NP - A Moral Scolding from David Brooks
>
> 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.
>
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