porridge

(NOTE: Iraq War correspondent Patrick Graham will be joining us on tonight’s Late Nite thread at 11:00pm eastern, 8:00pm Pacific for a live chat. He is the author of the MacLean’s cover story that I wrote about here. We’re very excited to have him and hope that you guys can come by and show him a good old fashioned FDL welcome.)

David Brooks writes like mildew grows. His column today, “The Center Holds” is less an essay than an accretion of poorly chosen words and conjectures that makes yours truly yearn for the good old days (was it only last week?) when the Times Select wall kept this stuff contained and protected the unwary against random exposures.

Once again, Brooks is in full-throated warble about the glories of some non-existent “center”, and how it’s good that the Democrats in Congress have shafted the “bloggers, billionaires and activists on the left who make up the ‘netroots’.” Because, as Glenn Greenwald notes, “Brooks, of course, cares deeply about the health of the Democratic Party and wants only what is best for it”.

Completely unencumbered by facts, research, poll numbers, and in fact, virtually free of the craft of writing altogether, Brooks projects his own feelings about the state of the American political mind on to a mythical construct he calls “most Americans”, conjecturing that since he is The Cosmos, all Americans must be as frightened and alarmed by the netroots as he is.

Never mind that poll after poll demonstrates that the American people are disgusted with Congress’s current “appease the Republicans at all costs” tack. The Americans who voted in a Democratic majority are feeling some pretty severe pangs of buyer’s remorse. But Brooks, messiah-like, knows what America wants more than America itself and believes that the netroots must die, so that we all may live, allelu, allelu, now and forever, world without end, amen.

Citing “high school educated women in the Midwest, and the old Clinton establishment in Washington” as the Rosetta Stone of 2007’s grim realpolitik (but providing of course no evidence of any kind to back this framing up), Brooks declares that passion is dead, milquetoast is the new black, and that the Democrats in Congress are damn right to “privately detest the netroots’ self-righteousness and bullying”. Does Brooks even know any “high school educated women in the midwest” or are they just another figment of his overheated imagination?

It reminds me of when an old roommate of mine let his friend who was in the middle of a nasty, meth-fueled downward spiral crash on our sofa for a while. I came home from work one afternoon and found him in our darkened living room with blankets over the windows, doing bong-hits and watching the Weather Channel, goggle-eyed from days without sleep.

“Hey, Pete,” I said, “You okay?”

“The weather’s all fucked up,” he said, nodding at the screen, “It’s the Knights Templar. They’re putting uranium into the water-table.”

Oh, of course. The Knights Templar. Who knew?

Funny, most people I talk to outside Blogtopia “privately detest” Congress and think that the Iraq War is an awful mistake that should be reined in as quickly and decisively as is practicable. And I live in Athens, Georgia, which is hardly a hotbed of “coastal elites” and close personal friends of George Soros.

His crimes against reasoning aside, however, Brooks’s greatest sin may well be his (mis)use of the Great and Powerful English Language. Have a look at these sample paragraphs and see what you notice:

On “This Week With George Stephanopoulos,” Clinton could have vowed to vacate Iraq. Instead, she delivered hawkish mini-speeches that few Republicans would object to. She listed a series of threats and interests in the region and made it clear that she’d be willing to keep U.S. troops there to handle them.

The fact is, many Democratic politicians privately detest the netroots’ self-righteousness and bullying. They also know their party has a historic opportunity to pick up disaffected Republicans and moderates, so long as they don’t blow it by drifting into cuckoo land. They also know that a Democratic president is going to face challenges from Iran and elsewhere that are going to require hard-line, hawkish responses.

Finally, these Democrats understand their victory formula is not brain surgery. You have to be moderate on social issues, activist but not statist on domestic issues and hawkish on foreign policy. This time they’re not going to self-destructively deviate from that.

Yes, he uses the word “hawkish” three times in as many paragraphs. It appears Mr. Thesaurus has abandoned him again. You know, one of the first things my high school English teacher told me was that the third time you use a word, generally it’s time to go back and find a synonym. It’s basic, elementary composition, Bobo.

It makes me wish I worked at the Times, just so I could stand in Brooks’s office doorway with a pencil behind my ear and a copy of the Times Crossword and say, “Hey, Dave? I need a seven letter word that means ‘warlike’ and starts with an ‘h’. Any ideas? Heinous? Hairy-backed? Histrionic? What’s that, ‘hawkish’? No, that couldn’t possibly be it…try again.”

Brooks writes like day-old bowls of watery porridge. He is the kind of guy who buys himself a pair of white Keds to wear on the weekends at his Nantucket time-share and feels really, really good about it.

“Mmmmm,” he thinks, alighting from his Volvo and looking down fondly at what are surely the plainest, whitest sneakers ever made, “Classic.”

But thanks for sharing, Bobo. You’re providing us all with a valuable object lesson in the common pratfalls of the navel-gazing Beltway Insider, not to mention the dangers of becoming too calcified and comfortable in one’s sinecure. Let us know if you ever decide to write something about the America where people actually live, rather than the mist-shrouded Wonderland that apparently only exists between your pink little ears.

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