"full Republican talking point mode"

Then, in full Republican talking point mode, Brooks tells us: "The House [health care] bill adds $239 billion to the federal deficit during the first 10 years, according to the Congressional Budget Office. It would pummel small businesses with an 8 percent payroll penalty. It would jack America’s top tax rate above those in Italy and France. Top earners in New York and California would be giving more than 55 percent of earnings to one government entity or another."

D. Brooks is about as pretty an example of inexplicable (not to say, ‘groundless’ or ‘unwarrantable’) celebrity as exists in the world. At some point in the past he or his parents presumably knew somebody who . . . knew somebody who . . . somebody.

But that was and this is now. D. Brooks is an established cultural monument. An excellent arrangement for the little laddie himself! He will never have to think again, he can tommyfriedmanate for the rest of his earthly days, letting other less celebrated persons get their views into the New York Times indirectly. (The theoretical economic side of Th. Friedman and D. Brooks is mildly interesting: is one to presume, on the basis of ‘rationality’ imputed to their employing corporation, that the latter well knows what Tweedledumb and Tweedledee are up to, that the NYTC consciously prefers to rent out NYTC opinion space in this roundabout way? I have no idea, though I can get as far as seeing why it would be irrational and counterproductive to describe this type of ideoproduct very frankly.)

However the problems of secret-sector business corporations with tasteless cultural monuments scattered all over the lawn are not ours or even Dr. Baker’s. Our problem is what to make of the material that little Tommy and little Davey ventriloquize for our reading pleasure. I’d suggest as a general rule that we make nothing of it all, ignore it completely except when we are quite sure where ‘their’ latest piffle is really coming from. Tommy quite often gives the name of his Edgar Bergen du jour away, but little Davey scarcely ever.

Yesterday’s piece will do as an example: it seems improbable that D. Brooks just ate lunch with N. Macchiavelli. Though it is easy enough to guess that he was hiring out his blankness to an agent of the Concord Coalition or the Peterson Pontificate, why bother guessing? One can get that product straight from the horses’ anatomy, after all.

Dr. Baker guesses himself -- "full Republican talking point mode" -- but that is so vague as to be useless. Unfortunately it is not so vague as to be incapable of distracting attention from the fact that little Davey is widely despised by militant extremist Republicans. [1]

Hence it is not surprising to find a commenter chez Baker commenting "What I find interesting is that the only two people I have seen referencing the $239 billion CBO score were Brooks and McConnell, both of whom used it to demagogue. Otherwise there seems to not be a peep...." -- that is to say, D. Brooks cannot have been simply rehashing an RNC agitprop handout.

Dreadful though this señorito is, as far as I have seen, it never sinks quite that low. [2] (Perhaps it was Neocomrade Senator A. M. McConnell in person that D. Brooks had lunch with?)

Happy days.


___
[1] http://tinyurl.com/n8xmzz will do.

In fact, Neocomrade Dr. R. Limbaugh himself barked ’n’ bellowed somethin’ similar against Master David yesterday, but it appears that one must be a card-carryin’ and dues-payin’ wingnut to search the Rushian website. ("Forget it!," says I.)

The nature of tommyfriedmanation and daveybrooksifying is such as to make it highly likely that pretty well everybody with fixed views of any sort will be irritated by these neobrats, and probably sooner rather than later. (The economic basis of the whole bratty shtyk really could do with some elucidation: will not most consumers remember one Tweedledumb op-ed that they considered idiotic or perverse more vividly than a hundred that they did not particularly mind? I.e., can Tommy and Davey really be worth what they cost? )


[2] Balance and fairness demand that this point be made more strongly. Much of the time, D. Brooks positively goes out of its way not to sound like a Party apologist. The mechanism seems to have been imprinted at a tender age with the quaint notion that the dignity of the ever-august New York Times Company would be impaired by absolutely unmistakable factionalism. This, too, appears from yesterday’s nitwit scribble: little Davey does not cheerlead for the collective and official GOP, it cheerleads for "Blue Dog Democrats[, t]hese brave moderates."

The Party of Wisdom and Virtue™ as such may be the only patron that one will never find the D. Brooks mechanism shillin’ for, just as one would be flabbergasted by a NYTC unsigned editorial so indiscreet as to allude to what "We Democrats" think or wish for.