The questions Mitt himself raised are exactly what the country should be debating. After Wall Street’s self delusion and greed tanked the economy, throwing millions out of work and into fraud-laden foreclosures, the number one economic issue of our times should be whether the malefactors of wealth through financial engineering should be allowed anywhere near governmental power over the economy.

David Brooks chooses to accept Santorum’s family values bona fides uncritically. But working-class supporters of Rick Santorum should know the truth. If Santorum were really such a pro-family candidate, he would be a strident defender of Social Security, which helps keep families strong and encourages hard work. Santorum’s record shows that he is anything but.

For the most part David Brooks’ column is a confused diatribe against the Obama administration’s economic policies with a lecture on moral rectitude thrown in for good measure. He starts by condemning the efforts to stimulate the economy, which he misrepresents. Then it gets worse.

There are “three national pastimes” in Washington D.C., Brooks informed us: baseball, apple pie, and Congress raiding the Social Security Trust Fund. And the GOP just didn’t want to let that happen.

David Brooks wants to see the people of Spain, Portugal, Italy and elsewhere suffer, because their leaders were no more competent than the people at the ECB or the banks making loans in Germany, France and elsewhere. He thinks that they should endure long periods of high unemployment, see big cuts in the pensions for which they worked decades, and have education spending for their children reduced.

It’s always interesting to watch PBS News Hour’s exchange between David Brooks and Mark Shields. After all, they represent the 0.1 percent of Beltway elite conventional wisdom. So what did they note the Beltway has to say about the nightmarish Euro train wreck and the careening engines and cars headed our way? Nothing.

Is there a more easily rewarded person in America than David Brooks (other than every other conservative pundit of course)?

David Brooks delved deep into his storage locker of misinformation to tell readers that the idea of blaming the richest 1 Percent for the country’s problems is just silly. He told us that the really big ideas aren’t about reversing the upward redistribution of income from the top, they are from centrists who want to do things like cut our Social Security and make us pay more for health care.

New York Times columnist David Brooks has long been engaged in a stealth campaign against the discoveries of science – especially neuroscience – that validate a more egalitarian and humanistic political order.

Brooks has skillfully branded himself as the Pundit Who Will Tell You About New Findings in the Human Sciences. But in Brooks’ hands all the new science somehow becomes justification for top-down, conservative and even authoritarian government. It’s all just a magical confirmation of Hobbes.

David Brooks is really upset: We may have a lost decade because he is sitting there being right, standing in the middle, and the two extremes who control public debate won’t agree with him. But one side did the math, the other didn’t, and neither did Brooks.