Bobo (David Brooks) vs. Kos: What It All Means

[smoogatz]

I've been thinking about Brooks's incredibly shrill attack piece on Kos in yesterday's NYT, and enjoying the much smarter and funnier responses by Atrios and Digby. For them, Brooks is just another member of the self-appointed punditocracy, the wealthy and privileged class of professional bloviators who make a living telling us What It All Means. I won't go into the details of Brooks's little diatribe--shorter version: Kos is a big, mean scary alpha liberal and his readers are all robots who do his diabolical bidding without question and his writing partner is a (gasp!) liberal consultant who (double gasp!) gets PAID for his time--suffice it to say that Brooks is essentially on the warpath because Daily Kos gets more hits than he does, and dammit, that's very very bad for the future of the Shrimp Cocktail Circuit As We Know It. But of course it's more than that--and this is the part that Atrios and Digby overlook, or under-emphasize. Let's not forget that Brooks is, above all, a Rightwing Partisan Hack. And like all Rightwing Partisan Hacks, he has no answer for the emerging progressive message that Kos is helping to formulate: that the Iraq war is a disaster entered into under false pretenses, which Bushco has no plans to end as long as they're in office; that Bush's tax cuts for the rich and the resultant fiscal chaos are irresponsible to the point of criminality; that Bush did nothing to prevent the 9/11 attacks and then politicized them in order to provide cover for an unprecedented power grab; that Bush's callousness and incompetence have greatly exacerbated the suffering of the victims of hurricane Katrina; that the Republican congress is too busy lining its pockets and playing cheap political games to address even the most obvious and pressing concerns of the American people; that the entire Republican party's true raison d'etre is simply to represent the commercial interests of corporations and to hell with the American people; and that the mainstream, corporate-owned media are down on their knees, acting as willing enablers to the whole corrupt clusterfuck. Worse, Kos has a plan to turn the tables on the corporate master class (he calls it called "people-powered politics"--why, the nerve!), and therefore he must be neutralized. So they trot out Bobo, of all people, to wring his delicate hands and bare his little weiner-dog fangs and gentlemen, start your engines--let the Swift-Boating begin. Of course, nobody takes Brooks seriously anymore (if they ever did), and those of us who hang out in the lefty blogosphere have seen this trick again and again--the bogus ad hominem attacks on anyone who seems to be in a position of influence in the Democratic party. First it was Gore, then Kerry, then Murtha, and now it's Kos--and by extension everyone who reads him. Well, Robots, I have only one thing to say to you. To the gates!

[bleever]

1. "Brooks is just another member of the self-appointed punditocracy,

the wealthy and privileged class of professional bloviators who make a living telling us What It All Means."

Great post.

[Kelvin Mace]

2. Dude,

paragraphs are your friend. :)

Hard to read a mega 'graph like this

[smoogatz]

8. Well, don't strain yourself

on my account.

[Batgirl]

3. I like the part about baring "his little weiner-dog fangs"

nice rant

[Robbien]

4. The entire media system is set up to define progressive ideas as looney

The Pundits tell the public what they think progressive ideas are all about and then they scorn them.

This works only as long as Progressives are not allowed to get their true message out. This Lieberman/Lamont race has forced the corporate politicos (both Dem & GOP) to sit up and realize the Progressive base is organizing and may be a threat to politics as usual.

They believe they will win by trotting out their corporate pundits to disrupt and divide the Progressive base. What they don't realize is that only the corporate politicos pay any heed to their pundits. We see those paid hacks as what they are, paid hacks.

[itzamirakul]

5. Brooks makes me want to puke!

I'm glad that Kos has him digging in his ass to loosen his shorts from that rw tight anus.

[bobbieinok]

6. I heard an interview with Brooks when his book about Bobos came out

(Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There). I think I heard it on NPR.

At the time I didn't know anything about Brooks and his often weird writings for the NYT. I did think it was odd that he used much of his time to 'prove' how Clinton was the no. 1 example of what he was talking about when it seemed to me that W fit the profile much better.

[stuckinlodi]

7. Brooks is frightened

He knows Kos has more readers than he does, and he knows he's rapidly becoming irrelevant. This article was just the bleating of a mortally wounded man.