Shorter David Brooks
Posted on October 3rd, 2008 by HTML Mencken
Above: Self-loathing, self-oafing, pseudo-sociologist
- Effete, pink-stuffed-shirt-wearing, know-it-alls on the coasts might not have been impressed with Sarah Palin’s debate performance, but people in the Heartland (all of whose hearts, I know in my heart of hearts, reside in the far-right place), will beg to differ, because they, like Palin, are earthy and real.
‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard. We are aware of all Internet traditions.™
First!! Holy shit, for real, too!
Why didn’t he just come out and say what he knew to be true: to those who were already going to vote McCain/Palin, she was just what they wanted her to be – loose with uncomfortable facts, and just about as folksy as one could get. To the rest of the country, she was a wind up Barbie doll with a case of verbal diarrhea, spouting untruths and platitudes with no consideration for the content of the question.
Well when you chase each five-minute Ifill-led segment with a shot of hard liquor, as I do, Palin looks victorious when compared with… well, not Joe Biden, but with the expectations David Brooks (whom I read religiously) has established for her.
Drill, baby, drill!
FRISTER POST
Seriously: Palin and David Brooks have the same profoundly insulting, infantilizing view of us in the Heartland (for I live between the left coasts along with about half of America’s population – and around half of our Democrats and Republicans); we’re simple-minded idiots who can be readily appealed to by getting angry when someone uses a big word. We’re a bunch of ignorant bullies and we respect nothing but God, guns, and the Klan. We mispronounce words, we don’t know anything about culture or history, and education is insulting to us.
Monsieur et Madame, you fucking jackasses, we in Nevada have close to the worst public education system in the country because you vultures have been pumping money into any Stetson-wearing vampire who strides into our fucking state pretending to give a shit about statism. You want to trade our simple heartland values for your degenerate elitist society? Go right a-fucking-head. You see how real we Americans are when you have to raise your fucking children the same way we do.
And for the last fucking time, don’t go full Heart-tard. It never works.
With the bar set so low — “Did not fart while on stage” low — success doesn’t really mean much.
Also, we learned that Palin wants to be a Dick Cheney kind of VP. She’d better learn about newspapers, the supreme court, and all that before she sets out to be the next Gray Eminence.
I think competence is required to be a Gray Eminence, but loose morals are optional.
Also: McCain now thinks we need to stand up to Crony Capitalism. After voting for the newer, porkier bailout. Years after his brush with it in the S&L scandal. Do tell, John. What is the plan to deal with it? See how much money the capitalists will give you to shut up?
If you don’t read Tom the Dancing Bug, enjoy. And start reading Tom the Dancing Bug, for Christ’s sake. Do you have a condition or something??
And in a country that is furious with Washington, she presented herself as a radical alternative.
Yay! Finally someone who’ll do whatever crazy thing it takes to, uh, be crazy or something!
Aiaiaiayeeee. Thanks so much for your deeply insightful horse race analysis.
David, what do you think of the idea of Sarah Palin with her finger on THE BUTTON? Before you answer, think what it’s like to give teenage boys cars, guns and whiskey. Take your time, there’s a good bobo.
Bobo’s off his meds again. Somebody guide him back to the home fopr the mindboggled and he will be fine. Just do not let him near any sharp objects.
Duly noted and laughed at.
But John McCain re-invented himself as the reformer after that! How can anyone put him down after his come-to-jesus moment twenty years ago? He’s been born-again as a man of the people. Not like that Obama. When was he involved in a major financial scandal? This lack of experience is very troubling.
OT: Holy shit, K-Load is on NPR’s To The Point and she’s every bit as incoherent verbally as she is in print. Not that that should come as any surprise but still, that there is 300 lbs. of dumb.
In last night’s Ugly Betty episode, Wilhelmina Slater decides she wants Betty to be her protege. Betty has a daydream about what this would be like, becoming the next Wilhelmina – inhabiting that evil persona and exploiting all that power. Betty, being a fairly sane, rational and, above all, moral person, is horrified by her vision and rejects the “opportunity.”
In last night’s Caribou Barbie episode, Barbie announced to the world that she’d absolutely LURV to be Wilhelmina Cheney’s protege, if such a position were hers to have – to inhabit that evil persona and exploit all that power – mainly because she doesn’t give a flying fuck about anything else.
In Brooks’ defense, he does a pretty god job of mocking himself. I was half-nauseated but thoroughly entertained with hte stoopid when I read it.
Ya know what bugs me? People from states that get more money from the Federal gov’t than they pay in taxes bitching about how taxes are too high. They have no idea how much it actually costs to do things.
The day I happen to bump into David Brooks at an Applebee’s salad bar is the day I believe anything he says.
Terrifying thought of the day: people like to think of this in terms of McCain dying, but between the 25th Amendment (formally mandating that Presidential power be devolved to the Vice-President in case of disability) and the advanced age of McCain, if he wins the Presidency it would be nearly impossible for her not to be acting President at least once. Cheney spent a little over two hours as President during a colonoscopy in 2002 (it wasn’t revealed until after the fact) and the same thing happened in 2007, which acting President Cheney classily used to write his granddaughters a letter excoriating the faggy Dems. Worth bearing in mind: at the time of the 2002 colonoscopy Dubya was just under fifty-five; John McCain, when sworn in, will be closer to 73 than 72.
To put it more bluntly: it might take a heart attack to put Palin in the Oval Office, but it’d only take two steak nights in a row to put Palin in front of the Button.
Just as the midcentury psychologist Abraham Maslow predicted, Republicans watching the debate had a hierarchy of needs.
Wow. That Maslow guy must have been a psychic!
handy said,
+10 points.
handy is the new winner of this thread.
Pardon: just short of fifty-six. I’m terrible with math, although in my defense nobody among the world’s most prestigious newspapers is paying me six figures a year to write about vector calculus in Chili’s.
She spoke with that calm, measured poise that marked her convention speech
Calm, measured poise? Um, no. What I saw was forced smile, panicky eyes, rushed delivery. I guess that disqualifies me for David Brooks’ job.
Which seems to be taking the GOP’s desired outcome and making it seem as if that’s what actually happened. In-a-hurry headline glancers are going to see that ‘Palin Rebound’ and assume that she won. Well done, Bobo.
Urrrppp, election?
Shame on you insulting his journalistic credentials like that. David Brooks is one of America’s foremost thinkers; we can clearly note this by his ability to project the Republican narrative in the absence of any evidence.
No, no, not the debate. Who watches debates? Bo-ring; the Heartland doesn’t have time for that. No, I mean Brooks boldly and independently came to a conclusion without direct coaching from the nearest Party organ. Comrade Brooks would make Reagan proud.
Why do I even read or watch politics when I can just put Blazing Saddles into the DVD player?
Give the Governor a harumph!
And I didn’t think the Republican party could give us a guy more like William J. Le Petomane than George W. Bush. Turns out I was right, they had to go get a woman to be more like William J. Le Petomane than Dubyah.
“By the end of the debate, most Republicans were not crouching behind the couch, but standing on it.”
They weren’t brung up right.
Aww. Descriptive troll is descriptive.
Meanwhile, in the Real World, where Applebee’s don’t have salad bars and David Brooks is a pathetic overpaid buffoon, nearly every poll conducted after the debate had Palin getting pwn3d. So if easy-going incompetence (as opposed to the poop-your-pants variety thereof) was the goal, congrats Bobo Brooks and stenographer pals, your gal succeeded. For the rest of us, not so much.
Shorter Rich Lowry
Projecting through the Screen
I believe that the shade of lipstick David Brooks is wearing in that photo is called “Pitbull Pink.”
Don’t you just love that moose in the headlights look that Palin gets whenever someone asks her something more complicated than “what is your name?”
If Hillary pushed the glass ceiling up a bit, that dumb bitch Palin brought it back down again. All she seems to do is propagate pre-feminist stereotypes.
The most Palin can do now is persuade a few more paleo-conservatives to lever their gargantuan backsides off the sofa and waddle down to the polling station. That demographic isn’t enough to swing an election in this climate.
Don’t forget bespectacled. Effete, pink-stuffed-shirt-wearing, know-it-alls on the coasts are always bespectacled.
It’s not just that. Remember when Bill and Hillary worked so hard to shield their daughter from the media? Palin’s family are media props. Her children, her *young* children, are being thrust onto the national stage.
I guess those are the family values that appeal to republicans. That, and “no butt sex.” Wait, why is that a family value?
Nobody ever helped a hick but a hick herself.
Biden was much more favorably embraced by the “Heartland” that’s had it up to the gills with the hard-right’s bulls— folksiness. Facts trump style.
Errr…….’bout that Heartland stuff?
http://www.boingboing.net/2008/10/03/american-fascist-wes.html
Wow. I mean, just, wow. Consider:
1. Biden clearly won the debate. Even Bobo thinks so:
2. Her biggest accomplishment was to distance herself from the Bush Administration, although you’d think that people seriously upset with the Bush Administration would vote for a party other than that of the Bush Administration.
3. Mooseburger even managed to overstep the bounds of “civility” – usually a capital crime in pundit circles:
IOW, David wants you to vote Democrat.
Original Scores
——————-
handy: 10
Scoring
——————
Good parenting award: MzNicky + 4 points
Fashionista award: David Robinson + 2 points
VPILF award: Dave + 7 points
Pedantically important: Oracle + 4 points
New Scores:
—————–
MzNicky: 4
David Robinson: 2
Dave: 7
Oracle: 4
handy: 10
Leader is still handy.
Palin. She’s not too proud to ask for pity votes.
Yo yo yo my pajama homiez its da ole perfizzle here wit da shizzle of heh. indizzle. swat im talkin about ya feels me?
I bet Palin could really knock ’em dead at the Applebees’ salad bar, if they had one.
All the cool salad bar types would turn and say, hey man, she’s one of us, and then all the awkward people who don’t know how to be cool at the franchise restaurant salad bar would go away sad.
“Palin’s family are media props. Her children, her *young* children, are being thrust onto the national stage.”
I’m not sure if that is entirely intentional. Okay, her family are just about the only asset Palin has, but since Bristol got pregnant, she had to bust out some aggressive PR to counter the obvious observations people were making regarding her stance on sex education, and the consequences in even her own family.
The Republican way of responding to a scandal is to make up their own version of the story, and repeat it long and loud. Given that tactic, It was inevitable that all of Palin’s family would be used as campaign props in a shameless way.
Even without Bristols pregnancy, (which I am convinced Mcain didn’t know about when he picked Palin), It seems very likely that Palin would have exploited the fact she has a son in the armed forces. It fits right in with the motherhood and apple pie image she is trying to project.
I think the overall thing to remember, is that Palin is definitely on the defence. She has some big question marks over her head. Like Mittens had his mormonism to justify, Palin has to settle doubts about her ability to be the president should Mcain pop his clogs.
She doesn’t seem to be dealing with it well though. She can’t project the neccesary aura of competence and experience. Biden has good answers to the same questions, and since Obama is young and healthy, the prospect of President Biden isn’t really on peoples minds, so he isn’t under the same scrutiny.
Biden is supposed to be the established politician who will back up the black young buck, and keep Obama’s experience from being a big issue. To reassure the undecided, all he has to do is be competent, reasoned, and slightly boring. He is succeeding magnificently at that! Not to mention that Mcain picking Palin in the first place practically does the job for him, by taking the competence question away from Obama, and directing it at Palin.
Speaking of salad bars, WTF?!?!
Nevermind their non-existence in Applebees (so David Brooks is out of touch even with his own bizarre image of hte Heartland, quelle grandé surprise) WTF type of standard for populism is “level of comfort at a salad bar”. NO ONE is fucking comfortable at a salad bar. It’s a fucking salad bar – a swirling cesspit of vegetables and other people’s sneezes.
I’ve just witnessed a one-man circle jerk of images and words!
Marge Gunderson would be proud!
The proles like whatever their benevolent right-wing masters say they like. Ask any right-wing journalist! Just consider yourself lucky they didn’t run with Plan A for the truly ridiculous closet case scandals; otherwise, we’d be dealing with a nationally syndicated columnist who devotes a few words a day to questioning how the American people can respect Obama when he’s too elitist to cruise undercover cops in an airport restroom.
I dare not click on the link, but please tell me that he calls her a guttersnipe.
Yeah, salad bars suck. The tongs never work right, and the tub of little bacon bits is always empty. At shitty eateries, going for the salad is usually just as much of a horrifying prospect as opting for the greaseburger.
I’ve just had a thought.. Remember how when Mittens had to justify his bat-shit religion, the media set the bar where JFK left it after his successful religion speech. Mitt failed miserably of course.
Palin is facing the question of proving her competency, and I think the bar was set by Obama. The selection of Biden, and the successful convention just about sorted things out for Obama. Not really one inspiring speech, but a few months of wise decisions, and managing to seem more mature than Mcain. (I think mature is the word to use.. Mcain acts like a child)
How could Palin manage to pull off the same? Well, if she had trounced Biden in the debate, maybe! But she didnt. Her only hope now is to be a real success on the campaign trail, but the GOP seems determined to keep her hidden away because she can’t be trusted under media scrutiny without handlers and a script. To really put the matter to rest, she has to do as well as Obama, or BETTER. Can you really see that happening?
David Brooks already has.
Then again, I guess Obama wouldn’t be comfortable in Candyland’s salad bar either, so what would we know.
That Maslow guy must have been a psychic!
Well, it’s a mixed bag. He also said the Cubs would win the World Series.
Hrrmm. Obama and Mcain at a salad bar:
(Obama deftly scoops several boiled eggs into his bowl)
Mcain: What the fucking cunt is this green stuff?
Obama: Iceburg lettuce, Senator.
(Mcain digs into the Bacon bits)
Mcain: Ahhh… Ahhh.. CHOO!!
I showed ’em, you betcha! Can Slow Joe give the 101st keyboarders the cheetos-stained boners? No, he can’t! I win, goshdarnit! Now gimme the keys to Cheney’s man-sized safe and look out, Ah-murricah, here comes the pitbull with lipstugygh-gurgit-klutburp-zubfuk…winkwinkwink… *plop*…
Used to be, I spent a lot of time saying “damn you Brando!” because ever since he came along it’s so fucking hard to understand what actors are saying.
Now I think I blame the sorry state of cinema and TV for the fact that so many Murricans don’t realize Sarah is a robot. Piss-poor acting is the overwhelming mode and the idjits have gotten used to it. They wouldn’t know great acting if… Gielgud bit them or something. And now they can’t tell the difference between sincerity and an animatronic bimbo. Pheh.
Marge Gunderson would be proud!
I was thinking she was pulling a full Jerry Lundegard myself. And we all know Jerry is a twat.
So…Gary Ruppert is David Brooks?
There are some moments when members of a political movement come together as one, sharing the same thoughts, feeling the same emotions, breathing the same shallow breaths.
Eeeewwwwww.
There are some moments when members of a political movement come together as one, sharing the same thoughts, feeling the same emotions, breathing the same shallow breaths.
I can only picture one of those enormous knots of snakes mating.
Frank Sinatra used to hold Rat Pack meetings at the salad bar. Man, those people knew how to party. The Rolling Stones used to throw their biggest parties at the salad bar. Princess Di really got her acceptance into the palace when she showed how cool she could be at the salad bar. But not Barack Obama. You could tell. He was dithering, waiting to see what the person in front of him picked. Such an awkward person, you almost felt embarrassed for how uncool he was at the salad bar.
I had no idea that cheetoh-dust was a viable masturbatory lubricant.
I hate snakes.
How about the mass spawning of palolo worms? Are you any happier with polychaete worms?
I keep telling youse…Marge Gunderson + Emmet Fitz-Hume = Palin:
“You betcha” + “Well of course their requests for subsidies was not Paraguayan in and of it is as it were the United States government would never have if the president, our president, had not and as far as I know that’s the way it will always be. Is that clear? ”
= Sarah Palin
And go bounding into the arms of the Cheney Administration!
Doggone it that Sarah Palin sure is smart, you betchya!
Oh. On behalf of a earlier post that got eated: FYWP!
(Fingers crossed and … Submit Comm-)
ftfy
Dear Peoples,
Wandering through the intertubes today, I happened to come across a certain VP candidate’s official email address. It was clearly posted by mistake since it was a failed redaction that has now been fixed. I’m sure that her campaign managers have upped her security and it’s not really hackable or anything, not that I have the skills or desire to do anything illegal. Who knows if it even actually gets in front of her eyes — it’s probably screened by some snide fucking NR intern. But what should I do with it?
Sign her up for Scientology?
Give it to obvious spam baiters?
Send it to Nigerian scammers?
You guys want it?
Forget it forever because public officials deserve our deference?
Drop the issue because this particular community doesn’t engage in that?
I’m open to ideas. The editors are welcome to tell me to STFU and drop it.
My favourite part was when she described Kissinger’s “passion for diplomacy.” Guess she’s too young to remember Chile and East Timor.
Methinks half those Palin glasses “flying off the shelves” were bought by dominatrixes, thrilled with this new angle to what is a very old act.
“Say I’m a reformer!” whack “Who’s gonna be President?” whack “You’ve been into the earmarks again, haven’t yah, naughty boy?” whack
Sorry, that should be “dominatrices.”
Just pour me an absinthe & call me K-Lo.
David Brooks could barely contain his glee during the post-debate discussion on PBS. Somebody has a crush.
The polls right after the debate may have favored Biden, but Palin impressed the only person who matters.
Wandering through the intertubes today, I happened to come across a certain VP candidate’s official email address.
Hey, that reminds me of something. Even though it’s so totally two weeks ago, whatever happened to the nefarious Palin Yahoo account e-mail hacking conspiracy? Couldn’t pin it on the hapless UT student/son of a Dem legislator, but the investigation was “ongoing,” last I heard. Disappeared down the trooper investigation memory hole? Where’s Truthless when you’d actually like to ask it something?
Palin and David Brooks have the same profoundly insulting, infantilizing view of us in the Heartland… we’re simple-minded idiots who can be readily appealed to by getting angry when someone uses a big word. We’re a bunch of ignorant bullies and we respect nothing but God, guns, and the Klan. We mispronounce words, we don’t know anything about culture or history, and education is insulting to us.
David Brooks, given every possible advantage to top the Western Civilization pyramid — white heterosexual male, upper-middle-class gated-community American upbringing, expensive Ivy League education, years of nonstop networking among the Media Village Idiot courtiers — ends up as Bobo, the blithering twit in pink buttondowns & fashionable eyeframes. Sarah Palin is the National Enquirer mirror-image of David Brooks: a lowly female from the Aryan Nation trailer-park heartland, bouncing through half-a-dozen no-name colleges, getting pregnant out of wedlock by a snowbilly GED candidate, working as the sports reporter on a third-string small-town news show, popping out a steady string of future Alaskan-welfare-dependents. And yet, she’s tirelessly labored to turn nothing more than a moderate physical attractiveness and a bottomless well of ambition-cum-spite into a major-party vice-presidential slot — a few thousand stolen votes & a gerontological accident away from Teh Leadership of the Free Wurld!!! No wonder Bobo Brooks can’t decide whether he should despise her, or just give up the last shreds of his pride and worship her as his personal GODDESS. She’s done ‘so much’ to validate his (very, very low) opinions about the Republican base… and yet, she’s not too proud to wink at
the teleprompterBobo Brooks personally, beaming live through his very own teevee…Damn, Anne. That’s brutal. And true.
You don’t pay me nearly enough…
I didn’t watch the whole thing. Did she ever say ‘Yer darn tootin’ or ‘Dagnab it!’?
SamFromUtah,
From the comments there,
unkind, but funny.
justme’s link reminded me:
And also parts of Alaska, apparently. You betcha!
Does doggone it count, henry lewis? ‘Cause I’m purty sure I heard that one! *wink!*
Exactly like McCain’s rictus, it made me think of a used-car salesman trying to pawn off a 1976 Pinto on a medicated out-patient.
Which would be great if he wasn’t still in office. FAIL.
Please tell me this is satire. She did nothing BUT flounder whenever she wasn’t yucking it up & mugging the camera. Needs more IQ.
Personally, I was rooting for Chuck Norris.
800 comments on that new york times opinion piece and i can’t find one that doesn’t rip him a new one and stuff laughter inside the hole.
She treated Bush as some historical curiosity from the distant past.
Just like all the other Republicans are doing. Yay Highlander 2 Presidency!
They wish.
Not to mention Jill St. John.
Not to mention Jill St. John.
I read that Kissinger was using her as cover – in that when he was supposedly off boinking her, he was really sneaking out to plan blowing up Cambodia or some such.
The man was (and is) ill whether that’s true or not, but if it is true, he’s really ill.
“…running against the entire East Coast.”
Well, not quite. They’ve managed to turn New Hampshire, Virginia, North Carolina and Florida against them, but they’ve still got Georgia and South Carolina, though it seems that it’s tightening up in Georgia.
So, how’s that workin’ out, Dave?
Wait a minute. I thought he already went on record as thinking she’s dumb as a box of hammers.
Or is he saying that she is, but he like a box of hammers?
Only things I can see that are impotent are McCain’s peter and your two shrunken, misfiring neurons.
BTW, should the Diebold election theft you predict happen, the rage (POTENT) will be directed squarely at the dumbfucking likes of Y-O-U for letting it happen. And the tar, feathers and pitchforks will follow shortly.
Hope you’ll have your running shoes on by then, because you sure as hell won’t be able to afford a car anymore.
You betcha.
I didn’t watch the whole thing. Did she ever say ‘Yer darn tootin’ or ‘Dagnab it!’?
No, no, no, those are for Southern use only. She went with the Midwestern variants, “You becha” and “Dog gone it”.
Or is he saying that she is, but he likes a box of hammers?
Box of hammers, bag of dicks, these are a few of his favorite things.
I thought those first two were actually quite Alaskan, in the form of stereotypical Yukon / Klondike impoverished crotchety elder gold prospecters?
Wow, Troofy, your Batshit Meme Compactness Ratio scores just continue to be off the charts.
There’s a reason we call it the heart-land. It’s because the brain isn’t here.
I thought those first two were actually quite Alaskan, in the form of stereotypical Yukon / Klondike impoverished crotchety elder gold prospecters?
Neither came off as “authentic” frontier gibberish though.
crotchety elder gold prospecters?
Best description yet of Grampy McInsane.
Thank you for perfecting the mental image I’ve had for the whole campaign.
Well, to be fair, this is coming from a guy who thought privatizing social security was going to unite all hard-working Americans against us degenerate liberals, that the Heartland would quickly cotton to Obama’s Moslem ways and throw us out, etc. It seems like he’s, I don’t know, ashamed of the stuff that no longer fits Hte Narrative™. But no – how could he be? He’s got nothing to be ashamed about. He’s always been skeptical about social security and he’s always known Obama was a Protestant.
In four years, he’ll have been watching with the other real Americans, fuming as Biden won the debate in spite of his treasonous liberalism. In fact, so will the remainder of the media, perhaps having also been paralyzed by the crippling liberal bias of the MSM. We’ve always been at war with Black Osama.
Oh look–I got the Loose Tooth to rage at me! Bwahahahahaaaaa, I’m gooooood.
Joke’s on Brooks. Palin is tanking.