Ezra Delivers An Elbow From The Sky

Ezra Klein's takedown of David Brooks entire column is a beauty to behold. I'll just leave you with the last two lines.

Brooks isn't wrong in the sense that "I disagree with him." He's wrong in the sense that the column requires a correction.

What a Liberal/Progressive Smackdown Looks Like

After Mike Murphy got his ass kicked (David Brooks was smart enough to STFU once they got rolling) by Rachel Maddow and E.J. Dionne this morning and Meet The Press, I will bet you David Gregory doesn't get many more "conservatives" to show up if they have to be on with those two.

*Video fixt



If only we could have them on every Sunday....

Congressman Paul "Herbert Hoover" Ryan

Congressman Ryan was just on "Morning Joe" promoting the House GOP alternative budget that he is releasing today. He said, I bullshit you not, that they are calling for a spending freeze on everything but defense and veterans spending. When the full details come out today I just want you to remember this clip from conservative columnist David Brooks.




At least Tweety was on the show at the same time and called it what it is, much to the ignorant Mika's dismay, Hooverism. I can't wait to see how this plan gets pilloried all day after its release.

The Villagers Will Gush Over Brooks' Column Today

But they shouldn't. David Brooks has what seems like a perfectly "centrist" op ed today in the New York Times. At first blush it would seem to take the Republican Party to task and extoll them to step their game up. But there strawmen abound all throughout the piece and there are even some pretty big contradictions. Allow me to explore.

The first three paragraphs start off pretty strong I would say.

The Democratic response to the economic crisis has its problems, but let’s face it, the current Republican response is totally misguided. The House minority leader, John Boehner, has called for a federal spending freeze for the rest of the year. In other words, after a decade of profligacy, the Republicans have decided to demand a rigid fiscal straitjacket at the one moment in the past 70 years when it is completely inappropriate.

The G.O.P. leaders have adopted a posture that allows the Democrats to make all the proposals while all the Republicans can say is “no.” They’ve apparently decided that it’s easier to repeat the familiar talking points than actually think through a response to the extraordinary crisis at hand.

If the Republicans wanted to do the country some good, they’d embrace an entirely different approach.

So lets check out this "new approach"

First, they’d take the current economic crisis more seriously than the Democrats. The Obama budget projects that the recession will be mild this year and the economy will come surging back in 2010. Democrats apparently think that dealing with the crisis is a part-time job, which leaves the afternoons free to work on long-range plans to reform education, health care, energy and a dozen smaller things. Democrats are counting on a quick recovery to help pay for these long-term projects.

Republicans could point out that this crisis is not just an opportunity to do other things. It’s a bloomin’ emergency.

Did you see what Brooks did there? He implied that the Democrats aren't taking the crisis seriously because they have pledged to tackle more than one issue at a time. I believe President Obama called it "walking and chewing bubblegum at the same time" last year when the financial crisis hit and John McCain tried to weasel out of the first debate. Now mind you Brooks doesn't really point out all of the ways that the Republicans have been unserious about the crisis. Nah, better to point out the ways HE thinks the Democrats haven't taken the crisis seriously. Nevermind that it was President Obama and the rest of the Democrats who kept saying the economy was in trouble last year. Nevermind that when President Obama said we were facing the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression during the campaign last year that the Republicans laughed it off and said he was using hyperbole and exaggeration. Nevermind that just recently the Republicans were saying that President Obama and the Democrats were using "fear mongering" over the economy when he gave sober analysis. No need to point all that out. Just say the Democrats aren't taking the crisis seriously because they aren't just focused on short term problems but also long term problems. Yeah that will teach those Republicans.

Second, Republicans could admit that they don’t know what the future holds, and they’re not going to try to make long-range plans based on assumptions that will be obsolete by summer. Unlike the Democrats, they’re not for making trillions of dollars in long-term spending commitments until they know where things stand.

Again notice that Brooks doesn't point out where Republicans have gone on. He just puts up the "it costs too much" strawman aimed squarely at the Democrats. It doesn't matter that we have big, fundamental problems in this country that have been neglected for decades like our reliance on foriegn oil, sky rocketing health care costs, and climate change. Nope, just say no to visions for reform because we don't know what the future holds. But isn't this pretty much the same approach that he says the Republicans should avoid in the first three paragraphs?

Third, Republicans could offer the public a realistic appraisal of the health of capitalism. Global capitalism is an innovative force, they could argue, but we have been reminded of its shortcomings. When exogenous forces like the rise of China and a flood of easy money hit the global marketplace, they can throw the entire system of out of whack, leading to a cascade of imbalances: higher debt, a grossly enlarged financial sector and unsustainable bubbles.

If the free market party doesn’t offer the public an honest appraisal of capitalism’s weaknesses, the public will never trust it to address them. Power will inevitably slide over to those who believe this crisis is a repudiation of global capitalism as a whole.

Now this was as close to an honest recommendation that you will find in the whole column yet there is still that big fat strawman at the end. The quote "those who believe this crisis is a repudiation of global capitalism as a whole" refers to whom exactly? Well the Democrats of course. Yet still the question remains, what ARE the weaknesses of capitalism??? You see David Brooks won't touch this because he knows it isn't capitalism thats the problem. Its the hands off approach to capitalism that Republicans have adopted meaning less regulation and less oversight which has led us to this crisis in our economy. But to make that admission would be to accept blame for the economic crisis. And of course Brooks would never recommend that the Republicans do that. The GOP is supposedly the party of personal responsibility but what they do best is point the finger at others.

Fourth, Republicans could get out in front of this crisis for once. That would mean being out front with ideas to support the wealth-creating parts of the economy rather than merely propping up the fading parts. That would mean supporting President Obama’s plan for global stimulus coordination, because right now most of the world is free-riding off our expenditures. That would mean eliminating all this populist talk about letting Citigroup fail, because a cascade of insolvency would inevitably lead to full-scale nationalization. It would mean coming up with a bold banking plan, rather than just whining about whatever the Democrats have on offer.

Check the contradiction here. First he says the Republicans can get out in front of the crisis. But then he admits that what they should be doing is supporting President Obama's plan that has already been put forth. How exactly is that getting in front of a crisis? But I digress.

Finally, Republicans could make it clear that that the emergency has to be followed by an era of balance.

I wonder how they could do this. I know, maybe they could convene a fiscal responsibility summit!!! But wait that might show that they weren't really taking the crisis seriously. Bummer.

When you get into the weeds of this op-ed its really just Brooks taking the opportunity to take more shots at President Obama and the Democrats while looking as if he is chastising his party. Grandstanding is the word that most comes to mind when I consider what he is doing here. Yeah he makes a point about calling for a spending freeze but what rational person is actually buying into that plan anyway? But you just wait, by the end of business today the Joe Kleins of the world will be exhalting David Brooks to the king of centrism and for having the "guts" to take on his party. I wish I was only joking.

Slaying Strawmen

David Brooks has a column up today in the New York times entitled "When Obamatons Respond". Basically Brooks uses the new en vogue technique of invoking "unnamed sources" to write a column about how he says some people in the White House responded to his previous high concern troll column about President Obama's budget. Funny, but I thought there used to be some parameters for using unnamed sources higher than them just telling you not to use their name. Nowadays however you would be hard pressed to find an article in a major newspaper that doesn't include quotes or thoughts from anonymous figures. But I digress.

Now some people will see this as progress since it would seem that Brooks is including the thoughts of people in the Obama administration in his discussion about his vision for the future of our country. But Brooks starts just about every paragraph with strawmen that only a Republican could love. So what I am going to do is excerpt from his article crossing out the strawman so you can get a feel for what was probably actually said by these unnamed officials and perhaps you can get the effect of how they probably actually responded rather than how Brooks wanted to frame it.

In the first place, they do not see themselves as a group of liberal crusaders. They see themselves as pragmatists who inherited a government and an economy that have been thrown out of whack. They’re not engaged in an ideological project to overturn the Reagan Revolution, a fight that was over long ago. They’re trying to restore balance: nurture an economy so that productivity gains are shared by the middle class and correct the irresponsible habits that developed during the Bush era.

The budget, they continue, isn’t some grand transformation of America. It raises taxes on energy and offsets them with tax cuts for the middle class. It raises taxes on the rich to a level slightly above where they were in the Clinton years and then uses the money as a down payment on health care reform. That’s what the budget does. It’s not the Russian Revolution.

Second, they argue, the Obama administration will not usher in an era of big government. Federal spending over the last generation has been about 20 percent of G.D.P. This year, it has surged to about 27 percent. But they aim to bring spending down to 22 percent of G.D.P. in a few years. And most of the increase, they insist, is caused by the aging of the population and the rise of mandatory entitlement spending. It’s not caused by big increases in the welfare state.

snip

Fourth, the White House claims the budget will not produce a sea of red ink. Deficits are now at a gargantuan 12 percent of G.D.P., but the White House aims to bring this down to 3.5 percent in 2012. Besides, the long-range debt is what matters, and on this subject President Obama is hawkish.

He is extremely committed to entitlement reform and is plotting politically feasible ways to reduce Social Security as well as health spending. The White House folks didn’t say this, but I got the impression they’d be willing to raise taxes on the bottom 95 percent of earners as part of an overall package.

Now at the end Brooks still wasn't at all convinced which leads me to ask why would anyone in the Obama administration try to convince him in the first place. That's what makes me suspicious of the whole supposed exchange, especially when there isn't one single solitary actual quote included in the article. Its just all his paraphrasing sprinkled with plenty of strawmen. Put together it adds up to yet another Brooks high concern troll editorial but I am sure plenty of Villagers will hold it up as some kind of gold standard of centrist journalism since after all its David Brooks.