Letters to the Editor
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swift_goat_pet_for_truth
Is that, while you, and the polls, are probably correct that most Americans want things like a smaller world-wide military presence, the Americans who go to the polls and VOTE a) want something else entirely, or b) do not pay attention to what they are really voting for.
Like in 2006, for example?
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On hope
Even if we didn't have reasons of our own to hope, bebop, I think we'd be able to find enough in your blueberries and barley to carry on a while.
Incidentally, I don't fear the institutions I mentioned in my earlier comment. They've been made by men, and can therefore be unmade. What I do fear are the events which their stewards have set in motion. In their ignorance and bloodymindedness, they may believe that they're invincible; we who know better have a right to fear the consequences of having them at the helm when the rocks finally do appear ahead of us.
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I Need Further Refinement...
I think we should examine a little deeper why Greenwald today:
Brooks' column today -- praising Democrats for ignoring radical anti-war bloggers and instead embracing "Centrism" -- is a perfect showcase for both of these dishonest tactics. His column is devoted to the argument that the Democratic Party hates its blogger and anti-war activist base, is committed to hawkish military policies, and that it is doing the Right Thing in this regard because Most Americans want a hawkish military policy. That is "centrism."
Is not contradicting Greenwald Sunday:
By very stark contrast, most (though certainly not all) Democrats in Congress -- particularly the most influential and longest-serving ones in the Senate like Feinstein -- have contempt for their base and share virtually none of their values.
As Digby said yesterday of Senate Democrats: "it surely seems true that they loathe the Democratic base as much as the Republicans do." Hence, Dianne Feinstein funds Bush's war with no limits while condemning MoveOn. She votes to vest vast new surveillance powers in the President. She defends and vouches for and places blind faith in the whole litany of Bush intelligence officials who have spent the last six years radicalizing this country and breaking the law.
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Gary Owen is right, but not complementary.
Most of us here aren't close to mad enough to actually go to the streets, life is still pretty comfy.
What we need to do is prepare for more stressful circumstances.
At some point there will be plenty of angry people ready to "take to the street," but the trouble with mobs is they are easily misled.
We need to spread these ideas ( like Glenn's ) as widely as possible, inform as many non-KoolAid drinkers as possible about what's going on, so the mob knows better then to attack the wrong people.
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Another dissection of Brooks's techniques...
Kudos to Glenn for dissecting David Brooks's punditry and exposing it for what it truly is... his personal (and political) Rorschach test.
Count me as another one regretting the influx of Times editorialists into this election cycle. I was hoping we could not be subjected to Dowd, too. [sigh] Hopefully, Krugman and Herbert will be able to mitigate the damage.
For another devastating piece on Brooks, check out this article from April 2004:
http://www.phillymag.com/home/articles/booboos_in_paradise/
Boo-Boos in Paradise
Wayne-bred David Brooks is the public intellectual of the moment. But our writer found out he doesn't check his facts.
By Sasha Issenberg
A few years ago, journalist david brooks wrote a celebrated article for the Atlantic Monthly, "One Nation, Slightly Divisible," in which he examined the country's cultural split in the aftermath of the 2000 election, contrasting the red states that went for Bush and the blue ones for Gore. To see the vast nation whose condition he diagnosed, Brooks compared two counties: Maryland's Montgomery (Blue), where he himself lives, and Pennsylvania's Franklin (a Red county in a Blue state). "I went to Franklin County because I wanted to get a sense of how deep the divide really is," Brooks wrote of his leisurely northward drive to see the other America across "the Meatloaf Line; from here on there will be a lot fewer sun-dried-tomato concoctions on restaurant menus and a lot more meatloaf platters." Franklin County was a place where "no blue New York Times delivery bags dot driveways on Sunday mornings ... [where] people don't complain that Woody Allen isn't as funny as he used to be, because they never thought he was funny," he wrote. "In Red America churches are everywhere. In Blue America Thai restaurants are everywhere. In Red America they have QVC, the Pro Bowlers Tour, and hunting. In Blue America we have NPR, Doris Kearns Goodwin, and socially conscious investing."
Brooks, an agile and engaging writer, was doing what he does best, bringing sweeping social movements to life by zeroing in on what Tom Wolfe called "status detail," those telling symbols -- the Weber Grill, the open-toed sandals with advanced polymer soles -- that immediately fix a person in place, time and class. Through his articles, a best-selling book, and now a twice-a-week column in what is arguably journalism's most prized locale, the New York Times op-ed page, Brooks has become a must-read, charming us into seeing events in the news through his worldview.
There's just one problem: Many of his generalizations are false. According to Amazon.com sales data, one of Goodwin's strongest markets has been deep-Red McAllen, Texas. That's probably not, however, QVC country. "I would guess our audience would skew toward Blue areas of the country," says Doug Rose, the network's vice president of merchandising and brand development. "Generally our audience is female suburban baby boomers, and our business skews towards affluent areas." Rose's standard PowerPoint presentation of the QVC brand includes a map of one zip code -- Beverly Hills, 90210 -- covered in little red dots that each represent one QVC customer address, to debunk "the myth that they're all little old ladies in trailer parks eating bonbons all day."
"Everything that people in my neighborhood do without motors, the people in Red America do with motors," Brooks wrote. "When it comes to yard work, they have rider mowers; we have illegal aliens." Actually, six of the top 10 states in terms of illegal-alien population are Red.
"We in the coastal metro Blue areas read more books," Brooks asserted. A 2003 University of Wisconsin-Whitewater study of America's most literate cities doesn't necessarily agree. Among the study's criteria was the presence of bookstores and libraries; 20 of the 30 most literate cities were in Red states.
[snip]
By holding himself to a rings-true standard, Brooks acknowledges that all he does is present his readers with the familiar and ask them to recognize it. Why, then, has his particular brand of stereotype-peddling met with such success? In recent years, American journalism has reacted to the excesses of New Journalism -- narcissism, impressionism, preening subjectivity -- by adopting the trappings of scholarship. Trend pieces, once a bastion of three-examples-and-out superficiality, now strive for the authority of dissertations. Former Times editor Howell Raines famously defended page-one placement for a piece examining Britney Spears's flailing career by describing it as a "sophisticated exegesis of sociological phenomenon." The headline writer's favorite word is "deconstructing." (Last year, the Toronto Star deconstructed a sausage.) Richard Florida, a Carnegie Mellon demographer whose 2002 book The Rise of the Creative Class earned Bobos-like mainstream cachet, nostalgizes an era when readers looked to academia for such insights:
"You had Holly Whyte, who got Jane Jacobs started, Daniel Bell, David Riesman, Galbraith. This is what we're missing; this is a gap," Florida says. "Now you have David Brooks as your sociologist, and Al Franken and Michael Moore as your political scientists. Where is the serious public intellectualism of a previous era? It's the failure of social science to be relevant enough to do it."
[snip]
The entire piece is worth the read.