David Brooks: Tea Party people are stupid, but they are having an impact
(Photoshop via Doug Ross)
New York Times columnist David Brooks will never let an opportunity pass to remind you that he is an intellectual and you are a grimy member of the unwashed masses. His column today pays a back-handed tribute to the success of the Tea Party movement…while bemoaning the decline of influence among the “educated class” (e.g., David Brooks and Friends).
A taste of the bitter whine in the Fishwrap of Record:
The educated class believes in global warming, so public skepticism about global warming is on the rise. The educated class supports abortion rights, so public opinion is shifting against them. The educated class supports gun control, so opposition to gun control is mounting.
The story is the same in foreign affairs. The educated class is internationalist, so isolationist sentiment is now at an all-time high, according to a Pew Research Center survey. The educated class believes in multilateral action, so the number of Americans who believe we should “go our own way” has risen sharply.
A year ago, the Obama supporters were the passionate ones. Now the tea party brigades have all the intensity.
…The Obama administration is premised on the conviction that pragmatic federal leaders with professional expertise should have the power to implement programs to solve the country’s problems. Many Americans do not have faith in that sort of centralized expertise or in the political class generally.
And David Brooks has the audacity to paint Tea Party activists as the immature, mentally-challenged ones? Instead of acknowledging, for example, that man-made global theories are in peril because the data manipulation, suppression, and intimidation tactics of conniving, eco-radical academics have been exposed, Brooks paints public skepticism on the issue as a reactionary tantrum.
I remind you of Brooks’ fatally impaired powers of discernment regarding Obama’s “pragmatic federal leaders with professional expertise.” While he derides Tea Party participants as “teens,” he has slavered over Barack Obama like a lovesick tween from day one.
Remember this?
Jan. 20, 2009, will be a historic day. Barack Obama (Columbia, Harvard Law) will take the oath of office as his wife, Michelle (Princeton, Harvard Law), looks on proudly. Nearby, his foreign policy advisers will stand beaming, including perhaps Hillary Clinton (Wellesley, Yale Law), Jim Steinberg (Harvard, Yale Law) and Susan Rice (Stanford, Oxford D. Phil.).
The domestic policy team will be there, too, including Jason Furman (Harvard, Harvard Ph.D.), Austan Goolsbee (Yale, M.I.T. Ph.D.), Blair Levin (Yale, Yale Law), Peter Orszag (Princeton, London School of Economics Ph.D.) and, of course, the White House Counsel Greg Craig (Harvard, Yale Law)…
… Already the culture of the Obama administration is coming into focus. Its members are twice as smart as the poor reporters who have to cover them, three times if you include the columnists. They typically served in the Clinton administration and then, like Cincinnatus, retreated to the comforts of private life — that is, if Cincinnatus had worked at Goldman Sachs, Williams & Connolly or the Brookings Institution. So many of them send their kids to Georgetown Day School, the posh leftish private school in D.C. that they’ll be able to hold White House staff meetings in the carpool line.
And yet as much as I want to resent these overeducated Achievatrons (not to mention the incursion of a French-style government dominated by highly trained Enarchs), I find myself tremendously impressed by the Obama transition.
– Smarty pants/panting smarty David Brooks, NYT, 11/21/08
And this? From “The Story Behind the Brooks-Obama Bromance”…
That first encounter is still vivid in Brooks’s mind. “I remember distinctly an image of–we were sitting on his couches, and I was looking at his pant leg and his perfectly creased pant,” Brooks says, “and I’m thinking, a) he’s going to be president and b) he’ll be a very good president.” In the fall of 2006, two days after Obama’s The Audacity of Hope hit bookstores, Brooks published a glowing Times column. The headline was “Run, Barack, Run.”
***
He recognizes something similar in the current president. “Obama sees himself as a Burkean,” Brooks says. “He sees his view of the world as a view that understands complexity and the organic nature of change.” Moreover, after the Bush years, Brooks seems relieved to have an intellectual in the White House again. “I divide people into people who talk like us and who don’t talk like us,” he explains. “Of recent presidents, Clinton could sort of talk like us, but Obama is definitely–you could see him as a New Republic writer. He can do the jurisprudence, he can do the political philosophy, and he can do the politics. I think he’s more talented than anyone in my lifetime. I mean, he is pretty dazzling when he walks into a room. So, that’s why it’s important he doesn’t fuck this up.”
It’s David Brooks who needs to grow up. His Ivy League idol is an incompetent phony fermenting in a culture of corruption. You don’t need a PhD to see it.
***
Flashback: Iowahawk’s classic satire of Brooks…T Coddington Van Voorhees VII.
***
For a non-bitter, informed, and in-depth account of the Tea Party’s rise, check out John O’Hara’s new book: A New American Tea Party: The Counterrevolution Against Bailouts, Handouts, Reckless Spending, and More Taxes.
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So, anyone without a degree is now considered stupid? Please. My own family member with multiple advanced degrees taught at a University and she has publicly stated that anyone who disagrees with her liberal politics would receive a failing grade. What kind of “higher” that kind of education is that and who needs it? No one should be acting all pompous and superior because they have a college education–this country has produced many successful people without one.
David Brooks reminds me of an educated idiot for whom I once worked. He would design something, then give it to another tech and I to build. It wouldn’t work. We would go tell him that fact. He would tell us that it would work, and show us his multiple pages of mathematical calculations as proof.
We would show him the non-functioning prototype.
Guess who won?
By the by, I have a Bachelor of Science Degree in Electronics from Oklahoma State University (Go Cowboys!). I’d call myself “educated”.
Well said;
and correct and true.
I hope we do not repeat of the error of confusing the educated with the Narcissus-Brooks most certainly being of the Narcissus class. It is said that Narcissus still keeps gazing on his image in the waters of the river Styx. Brooks and Narcissus will be horrified when Miss Hillary is standing between them gazing
That and he is a pompous ass a previously mentioned.
Here is Brooks education from wikipedia – if you believe it.
Brooks was born in Toronto and grew up in New York City in Stuyvesant Town. He graduated from Radnor High School in Pennsylvania in 1979. He graduated from the University of Chicago in 1983 with a degree in history.
Oh, he wrote some books.
Degrees, IQ, professional accomplishments, are all good. And yet, the cowboys in my town have more common sense than Brooks. They are at least “educated” enough not to call anyone stupid.
Sure is trashy talk for someone so edumacated.
There are 10 kinds of people in the world: Those who understand binary, and those who don’t.
What an idiot.
I would pay big money to have Brooks go on O’Reilly, with Dennis Miller as guest host, and have Miller ask him to define the term “educated class.”
Now that’s entertainment….
The Soviet Union was based on the same premise.
Being one of the Untermenschen, am I allowed to point that out?
I thought that would be two
yes or no?
or
one and not one?
So there are/is/was only one kind of person?
Tylenol anyone?
Sean: Hey, Gerry, In the 1960s there was a young man that graduated from the University of Michigan. Did some brilliant work in mathematics. Specifically bounded harmonic functions. Then he went on to Berkeley. He was assistant professor. Showed amazing potential. Then he moved to Montana, and blew the competition away.
Lambeau: Yeah, so who was he?
Sean: Ted Kaczynski.
Lambeau: Haven’t heard of him.
Sean: [yelling to the bartender] Hey, Timmy!
Timmy: Yo.
Sean: Who’s Ted Kaczynski?
Timmy: Unabomber.
That will never happen, so I’ll answer it for Mr. Miller. “Educated class” means a group who have a degree higher than bachelors (preferably a doctorate or professorship in a big-name university) who mindlessly follow the Marxist-fascist crowd, rather than using the brains that God (or Darwinism) gave them.
I’m currently working on a master’s degree. About half way through. I work in R&D for a major corporation. Yet, according to Brooks, my opinions prove that I’m not one of the “educated class.”
Good. I never liked them inteleckchooals anyway.
Two (2) in binary notation is 10.
“This message is a sort of binary—extremely sophisticated, compressed…” Sounds like a 56k modem, doesn’t it?
Love that.
Would it be racist of me, or get me on some special “watch list”, to say that I’d enjoy having that as a bumper sticker….to put on my front bumper?
Brooks really comes across as an elitist. There are billions of people in the world. So many different cultures, so many different viewpoints. How narrow and arrogant of Brooks to think that his elite circle’s view of the world is the only correct view. I disagree with liberals and leftists on factual points, but I don’t think I’m better than them, just different. I think I’m right, and they’re wrong, but that’s different than thinking I’m better.
France is pretty much set up as the Plato’s Republic-elitist and tyrannical in prizing order over individual liberty- ideology and even have a special school system just for bureaucrats and lackeys. If you like France and women with mustaches who smell bad I guess it is ok.
French motto (Liberté, Equalité, Fraternité) translates to “Perfume over showers”. Poor Russians don’t have perfume or showers–just vodka.
How “educated” could the “educated class” really be if they “believe in (man-caused) global warming”? Although not a science major, I took quite a bit in college, as well as philosophy. So I guess I’m in the “educated” class. But dang, Brother Brooks, why aren’t they applying what they learned? What ever became of insisting on seeing the proof? You know, the scientific method demands the ability to independently replicate an experiment. Can’t we demand that? Why not insist on hearing a good reason why the world temperatures have been level since 1998 and carbon dioxide levels have been going up? Why not an explanation why temperatures from Russia were ignored in the raw data, which has now been — thrown away????
Dexter, you’re number 0001 in my book!
AZCaveman: Given enough of the latter, who cares about either of the former?
And one more: if the educated glass supports gun control, why is it that there are no facts to support that opinion? Crime goes down when guns are more widely held by the populace. Crime against police does not go up by legitimate holders of concealed weapons permits. All the facts are against the educated class.
I think Brooks may be using the term “educated class” in a kind of pejorative way — maybe his article is slyly ironic. After all, “belief in global warming” (which I assume omits the “catastrophic, man-made” predicate as a matter of editorial convenience) is hardly testament to one’s intellectual sophistication: these days most people see it as a sign of shallow credulity. In the same way, the phrase pragmatic federal leaders with professional expertise is virtually dripping with bitter irony.
So c’mon, give Dave the benefit of the doubt here. The article is a hilarious parody of those who smugly imagine themselves members of “knowing” class.
I lied. Here’s yet one more. So the educated class believes in abortion rights… Exactly what does education teach Mr. Brooks about the value of a human soul? Insane. Brooks does not deserve to be allowed to call himself a conservative. He isn’t, never has been.
National Review says it best again…
I don’t suppose Brooks knows how to logon to the National Review. He is probably too smart to know how to use Algore’s amazing internet…
You’re giving him way too much credit Fru, but nicely said.
True.
Sorry, AZn. A little geek humor. I guess I’m in the ‘educated class-less’.
What firstskirt says is very true, especially in English departments. I have witnessed it and experienced such wrath personally.
On January 5th, 2010 at 1:38 pm, tre said:
On January 5th, 2010 at 1:09 pm, Dexter Alarius said:
There are 10 kinds of people in the world: Those who understand binary, and those who don’t.
What an idiot.
Dexter, you’re number 0001 in my book!
This reminds me of Prince Charles – caught on tape – telling Camilla he’d like to come back in another life as her trousers. Two very “Eeeewwww” moments…
Yes. He parodies himself well.
Granite,
There were 12 of us. We called ourselves “The Dirty Dozen”
As I seem to recall, Obama patterned his presidency after a president that did not have a college degree! Namely, Abraham Lincoln. What do you say to that, Mr. Brooks? Is Obama now considered stupid because he is emulating a non-education person?
On January 5th, 2010 at 1:09 pm, Dexter Alarius said:
I was at 2 Tea Party’s and most of the people I saw were way beyond teen age. There were also angry Democrats and some intellectual participants. Now David must know how God feels.
Ah nice. Brooks education history follows my own. I guess he’s a year younger than I am, and therefore the prez’s age?
I hate academic yardsticks. It is classlessly offensive.
Lord I get sick of these elitist snobs.
Like JT, I used a unique criterium back in the day when I was involved in hiring technicians for the telecom manufacturer I worked for. (I supervised the service guys who worked troubles over the phone, and I trained the installers). I didn’t give a cr@p about their degree. When they came into the interview, I had them do one thing: Tell me how I could get from where I was to their house or apartment and turn on their VCR and TV. If they couldn’t do that in the minutest of detail from memory I did not want them working with/for me.
The child of an Ivy league educated person says “I have monsters under my bed!”
The educated parent explains there are no such things as monsters, makes an appointment for the child to see a behavioral psychologist, installs night lights, etc…
The child of a redneck says “I have monsters under my bed!”
The redneck cuts the legs off of the bed.
By the way…
Where is the evidence that Obama is part of “the educated class”?
Obama doesn’t want anyone to know what his grades were,
nor who paid for his education.
Where is even a single one of his supposed “classmates” from Columbia? If no one remembers attending even a single class with Obama, why should we believe he actually attended classes there?
For all we know, Obama could have flunked out of Occidental College, then moved to New York to associate with Bill Ayers, and Ayers arranged to have fraudulent records created to make it appear that Obama had attended Columbia. Ayers may have used his academic connections to get Obama into Harvard Law, and arranged financing via Dr. Khalid al-Mansour, an advisor to a wealthy Saudi.
I’m convinced there is none. If there was, it would’ve been produced by now.
Yeah, it’ll never replace the good ol’ peter meter!
Exactly.
BTW – wandering between colleges without attending classes but hanging with radicals…no never mind…
President Obama seeks the advice of people like Rashid Khalidi, who is usually foaming at the mouth about the latest Israeli “war crime”. Obama pubicly keeps his distance from Khalidi, but in his heart of hearts, he sees Khalidi as a man of similar greatness. When he is not listening to Khalidi, Obama is listening to his tape recordings of Reverend Wright. Recall that Obama bragged that he brought Wright’s tape recordings with him to Harvard Law School. If Obama is such a giant of an intellectual as Mr. Brooks says he is, then how was Obama so entranced with an American-Israel hater who spews out antiSemitic garbage with each breath? Is a disciple of Reverend Wright truly such an intellectual giant? Obama has a left wing ideology that he gently glosses over with his media helpers like Brian Williams (the guy who actually bowed down in front of Obama’s knees!). Obama is the great intellect who referred to the killer Hassan Nidal as the “isolated gunman”. So why on earth is David Brooks so groveling in his treatment of Obama?
Where, oh where, is our modern-day Samson?!
Fixed it, Spacey.
If any accomplishments that Obama may have, could be produced, they would be shoved down our throats daily by the Ministry of Propaganda (ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, NTY, etc).
I use the term accomplishments loosely.
Let’s review selected parts of Brooks’ latest masterpiece:
Could it be that the “educated class” is not so well educated?
Why, yes, I think you could say that.
The tea party movement, on the other hand, appears to be quite well-educated.
I have seen no evidence that the Obama administration is staffed with pragmatic federal leaders with professional expertise. Does this describe Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Valerie Jarrett, David Axelrod, Rahm Emmanuel or Eric Holder? Don’t make me laugh.
And why should we care? I’m pretty sure there isn’t much that Brooks and I would be a fan of together. Please remind me again why David Brooks is considered “conservative.” Oh, yeah, he’s a NYT conservative. That would put him just slightly to the left of Lenin and Stalin.
Even looking at the picture of this Nancy-boy makes me want to hurl.
“And then my eyes strayed to his crotch and I realized that he must be happy to see me; really, really happy to see me.”
Old MIT mantra on the academic sheepskin-mounting ladder:
Bull Shit
More Shit
Piled Higher (and) Deeper
As for the Lib-Stockholmed Brooks — born in Toronto. Figures. Another of those congenitally moonbat Canucks who come to America and can’t forgive themselves for it.
Faux. Faugh!
Here’s your “pragmatism”, Broke. Raise taxes not because it would actually bring in more revenue (just the opposite, actually), but because it’s “fair”.
By the way, Brooks is the “conservative” analyst on the PBS News Hour, opposite the designated liberal, Mark Shields. His job is to give really weak, vacillating, apologetic defenses of conservatives, while Shields goes full throttle in his attacks on them. As big a farce as they come.
I hate to keep saying this, but Iowahawk’s satire was about William F. Buckley’s kid.
Well, Brooksie, it’s like the redneck in the bar said, “I may not have no ejubygodcation but I ain’t stupid!”
This so called educated class are the dumbest fools of all time.
This idiot is what passes for a conservative columnist at the Toilet Paper of Record. Captures perfectly the elitist snobbery of the “smart set”. I’d dearly love to smack his glasses off his dopey looking face. The educated class knows that he would crawl into the fetal position in the corner of the room if I did.
Truly, who the truck do these people think they are???
Well, when they are that far left, they have to look a long way to the right just to see the middle. And to me, Brooks is something of a squishy moderate. Of course he looks like a right-winger to those at the NYT. Anything further right of Brooks is seen as off-the-edge-of-the earth…the crazy moonbats, in their opinion.
Talk is often really useful. But if the government completely ignores those who are speaking, what other course of action is left?
Hey–Odumbo knows that there are 57 states and the whitey tighty bomber was an isolated nutjob. Can’t get much smarter than that. I worked at a place where my boss told me not to send him any resumes from people with a doctorate degree–they never produce–they just study and pontificate.
I think David Brooks got one too many wedgies and not enough dates when he was a kid. Something he just cant seem to get over. Talk about revenge of the nerd?
And I thought my husband (PHD) and I (Masters degree) were part of the educated class. Maybe if we hadn’t chosen hard sciences such as Computer Science and Engineering we’d be drinking the Kool-aid with Brooks.
Well I guess than all the research and investigation into why GW is flawed by people like Bjorn Lumberg(sp?) and others makes them uneducated also.
I guess, to this cretin, going to a private, liberal arts college, where I received my B.A. in History, and going to a state school where I received my M.A.T. in Social studies makes me less educated than Brooks.
Here’s a newsflash for Brooks: sometimes going to the Ivy League and the highest priced schools doesn’t make one any more inclined to make well-educated decisions. Sometimes, being an intellectual (like Obummer) doesn’t ensure leadership, especially wise leadership.
I’m getting tired of these people linking intellect to the college/university you go to. There’s more to life than just education. It’s something you pursue your entire life. Not something you cling to to distinguish yourself from others and ride into positions you might not even be well-qualified for.
Education can never replace experience. Somebody needs to tell Brooks this.
The Republican Party nominated exactly the kind of moderate candidate in McCain that Brooks claimed was needed to be a “big tent” party, then he voted for Obama, anyway. Even he knows he’s not a conservative. He’s not even a Republican, but he maintains the deception just so the NYT can falsely claim that they value diversity and unbiased reporting. The whole thing is a calculated fraud on the American public.