Brooksie & MoDo

3/3/2009
I love how David Brooks is so dead set on calling himself a moderate (all the while admitting that the moderate/’centrist tendency has been politically feckless and intellectually vapid’) and then denouncing Obama, his economic stimulus and general policies as being all but pinko-commie. He writes about the so-called ‘ideological outrages’ of diluting welfare reform, skilled immigrant inflow and school voucher reduction. He talks about a nation where we’re all in it together, which sounds outstanding, where burdens are shared broadly, rather than inflicted upon a small minority. This is truly brilliant, because he’s talking about the rich and then making them sound like real hard luck cases – “minorities”- like it wasn’t they who put us all in this ginormous global economic mess we’re all now in together. He doesn’t want to rebuild the nation on a foundation of debt, but what ‘alternative vision’ have you, Mr. Brooks? A foundation of gum drops and lollipops?

3/4/2009

Then we have Maureen Dowd (let's call her 'MoDo' shall we?), who seems to often fluctuate between amusingly sensible to mildly (or even wildly) insensible; berating all the President’s men (and some of the women) about the omnibus spending bill being overly stuffed with pork. As a principle, I am opposed to pork – but the pork in this bill is considerably less than wicked spending bills of congress’ past ($7.7 billion of $410 billion vs. $49 billion or so of…). It is unrealistic to presume that one can just shut off the spigot entirely on such long running practices as these – she argues that Obama is trying to end the Iraq war, but he is certainly not attempting to end it right here and now (which is what Maureen is railing for re: pork). What she likewise does not mention, that while some earmarks do seem somewhat wasteful on the surface, many of them will indeed either create or sustain jobs in congressional members’ home states/districts. It is strange that she likens John McCain to King Lear and then makes essentially the same arguments as he! In her attempt to cite Shakespeare, she comes out looking quite the fool herself.