David Brooks is a pretentious ASS!!

[skypilot]

I've never read any of his books (only excerpts) and don't really know much about him but I'm listening to him on AirAmerica right now and it's my opinion that he's nothing but a puffed up Paul Fussell wannabe. He also seems to desperately want to coin some term or phrase that will alway be associated with him. I've got one "asshole".

[pagerbear]

1. I've read some of his NYT op-ed pieces

...and I agree. He stinks.

[KissMyAsscroft]

2. Bush apologist jerkoff...

Will never hold Bush accountable for ANYTHING.

[GR]

3. Make That "Major League"...

ASSHOLE...Josh Marshall destroyed him yesterday...RE tax cuts for the rich...

[smirkymonkey]

4. David Brooks is a joke...

The day he became an op-ed columnist at the NYT was the day I completely lost whatever last little bit of respect I had for that once noble rag.

[bpilgrim]

5. he is... though at least he admited he didn't even read al's book

before he crticised it :puke:

peace

[bossfish]

6. Al is taking him apart right now...

Got him to admit he hadn't read either Molly Ivins' book or Franken's when he dismissed them as "ignorant".

[Cocoa]

15. reviewing books he hadn't read is Brooks's specialty

look at his thoughtful comments on Hillary's book. I emailed Brooks to ask if he really ever read Churchill or Roosevelt, or did he just stand in the bookstore and skim them.

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/political_wrap/jan-june03/sb_6-13.html

<snip>

The frustrating thing about the book to me is that like many politicians, including Ronald Reagan, she is incapable of having an interesting insight or an original thought. All these people who have these positions where they could really see something and say something interesting are just incapable of thinking in that way and the person who has the high power and also can write interestingly like a Winston Churchill or Teddy Roosevelt is so rare. So the book is kind of frustrating because it is frankly a little dull.

<snip>

JIM LEHRER: Have you read it? You talk like you have you've read it.

DAVID BROOKS: I read parts; I stood in the bookstore for about an hour looking at it; I did not buy it.

JIM LEHRER: You went into the book store and picked it up and, what, skimmed it?

[skypilot]

17. Very telling.

Very telling, indeed. He didn't even buy it. Doesn't he get paid enough. Shit, he could have just returned it later if he didn't like it.

[myrna minx]

7. From the Howler...

http://www.dailyhowler.com/dh040504.shtml


SHATTERED BROOKS! David Brooks invented his facts. At TNR, that’s fine and dandy:

SHATTERED BROOKS: As you may recall, David Brooks wrote a foolish-but-famous piece for the December 2001 Atlantic (see THE DAILY HOWLER, 12/21/01). “ARE WE REALLY ONE COUNTRY?” the cover asked. “A report from ‘Red’ and ‘Blue’ America.” Brooks, like a modern-day Thoreau, had gone out to limn the big questions:

HENRY THOREAU (1854): I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.
DAVID BROOKS (2001): I went to Franklin County because I wanted to get a sense of how deep the divide really is, to see how people there live, and to gauge how different their lives are from those in my part of America.

How absurd was Brooks’ piece? Because some states were “red” (had voted for Bush), and some states were “blue” (had voted for Gore), Brooks was afraid we might have become two different nations. So he went to see how differently life was being lived in these two different worlds. But as if to offer a cry for help, Brooks never got to the “red states” at all. Instead, he compared life in his home base (Montgomery County, Maryland) with life in the aforementioned Franklin County. Unfortunately, Franklin County is in Pennsylvania—and Pennsylvania is a “blue” state, just like Maryland! In short, Brooks compared life-styles in two blue states to see if we’d become separate red-and-blue countries. Little in his puzzling piece made much more sense than that.

[bpilgrim]

11. punk ran soon as he got the chance

he wouldn';t last a day on DU with his WEAK arguments.

i like the FACT that we got a 'paper-trail' on du ;->

peace

[Cocoa]

8. Michael Kinsley comments on his attempts to coin phrases

It must be embarrassing for him to be so transparent.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=103&topic_id=52881

The term ''Bobos'' (short for ''bourgeois bohemians'') almost joined Tom Wolfe classics like ''the right stuff'' and ''radical chic'' in the Coinage Hall of Fame. The test of a successful coinage (I state with Brooksian bluff-authority) is whether many people use the term without knowing where it came from. If ''Bobos'' ultimately fell short, keep in mind that the challenge was daunting. It would have had to displace a beloved and long-established incumbent -- ''yuppies'' -- describing roughly the same phenomenon. The near miss must have hurt. In his new book, Brooks flings coinage after coinage up against the zeitgeist, hoping that one will stick. Among the more promising contenders are the ''crunchy zone'' (one of his suburban slices), the ''meatloaf line'' (between distant suburbs, where they allegedly don't eat meatloaf, and real rural America, where they do), ''Patio Man'' (from an already famous Brooksian epic about purchasing a barbecue at Home Depot) and ''conquest shopping'' (from the same saga).

[SiouxJ]

9. Franken doing a great job

of letting him show just what an "asshole" he is.

[skypilot]

12. He sounded as though...

...he couldn't get off the phone fast enough. I bet he doesn't have a damned thing to do today except find another way to put the words "latte" and "liberal" in the same sentence.

[jdsmith]

10. Someone recently called him "The Conservative Liberals Love"

I.e., the way we once "loved" Bill Buckley (gee, his politics are reprehensible, but that sucker can sure polysyllabicate). But Brooks's ideas are obnoxious, especially so because he is "funny" (ain't enough quotation marks in the world to suggest the sarcasm in that characterization), and he joined together with Michael Kelly (another obnoxious, "funny" conservative writer, but R.I.P. anyway) to swing _The Atlantic_ so far to the right you can't recognize it anymore.

[AlCzervik]

13. I still don't understand

how brooks went from the Moonie owned Washington times to the NYT, what saffire and Will aren't rightwing enough?

[FighttheFuture]

14. Tries to sound "reasonable", but it is obvious pretext, else he...

is self delusional. Probably a bit of both.

I think Al was well on his way to pointing out his contradictions and weakness, but then the break came up and he "had other things to do". Brooks is an Ass. this is simply another fine confirmation. Good work Al!!

[skypilot]

16. I loved it when...

...he tried to go off on some tangent about conspiracy theories on the left when Franken had asked him about criticizing his book without having read it. Franken didn't let him get away with that shit. Brought him right back to the point. I don't think Franken likes this guy as much as he says.