Ruth Marcus commits an act of journalism!

I hate to give Ruth Marcus credit for anything journalistic. But this one actually caught my attention. It's from the PBS Newshour Friday Political Wrap for yesterday, Brooks and Marcus on Trump quitting Iran deal, Gina Haspel grilling.

David "Bobo" Brooks was the the conservative side of the discussion. It was more of a train wreck than usual. Bobo was promoting his new Trump defense that Trump's a thug but we actually need a thug as President. Expect to see the same kind of shifting position from other Never Trumpers as the midterm elections get closer.

This segment included one of the stock, lazy "talking to reglur voters" segments the press loves so much. They talked to some reglur folks in Elkhart, Indiana, including this from Trump fan Jack Cittadine:

We have gone from a 20 percent unemployment rate to a 2 percent unemployment rate. It’s one of the best in the country.

The stock market has done very well. And I think Donald Trump can take some credit for both of those, although perhaps the groundwork was laid earlier, under President Obama.

On the negative side — and I have to say I’m a fierce independent, but on the negative side, I am both embarrassed and ashamed of Donald Trump. I think our standing with the rest of the world, particularly the world leaders, has been diminished. We have a president that we’re talking about who lies frequently.

Bobo, the new MaybeNotQuiteNeverTrumper, was impressed: "And so it is true. If unemployment in Elkhart has gone down from 22, kind of astounding, and downtowns all around the country and town around the country are reviving."

But Marcus did something unusual in these sort of listening'-to-the-reglur-folks stories. She did some basic fact-checking!

... Elkhart is, by the way, the kind of poster child for the resurgence of the manufacturing economy, because they build a lot of recreational vehicles there.

But, at its worst, indeed, the unemployment rate in Elkhart was 20 percent. But guess what it was when Donald Trump took office? It was 3.2 percent. Now it’s 2.2 percent. If you’re going to give credit to a president, the bulk of the credit goes to a different president than Donald Trump.

What? The Real American who gushed about Trump was just pulling stuff out of his rear end?

Amazing what a little elementary fact-checking can clarify!

Bobo Brooks on why we have such fact-free politics these days

We had what surely will be a signature moment in the history of Boboism today (Shields and Brooks on high stakes for debate moderators, a dead heat in the polls PBS Newshour 09/09/2016):

Bobo:

And the final point to be made, just in terms of cognitive science, the idea that when you correct a fact, you erase that fact from people’s memories is the reverse of the truth. When you correct a fact, what you do is you further lodge that fact into people’s minds, and they remember the error.

And we have had all these fact-checking services on TV in the print, three Pinocchios, liar, liar, pants on fire award, and we have not entered a more factual era of American politics. We have entered a less factual era. So, there’s just that blunt fact that it doesn’t work.

Fact-checking is the reason the Republican Party runs on fact-free fantasy. Awesome! Because all this here fact-checkin' don't really mean nothin' nohow.

Bobo's specialty is making ridiculous Republican proposals and slogans sound respectable. Or at least harmlessly boring.

But his explanation today of how fact-free nonsense became common currency in American politics may be a classic moment in Boboism. It's all the fault of journalists doing what they call "fact-checking," you see.

I'm in awe! All these silly hippies grumbling about how we need better "journalism" should just stop their whining, amirite?

If Romney's lost Bobo ...

Years ago before we had viral video, there was a bumpersticker campaign that went viral that said "I Found It". I think it was some kind of religious message, but I'm not even sure about that. I've always thought of it as a failed marketing campaign, because lots of people saw the slogan but almost nobody knew what the product was.

It sparked some satire though, just as viral videos do today. Lucinda did a song: "I think I lost it/Let me know if you come across it". There was also a bumpersticker that said "I lost it". I saw another that said, "I stepped in it."

Someone should give Mitt Romney one of those stickers after the major foot-in-mouth event he experienced Monday when Mother Jones' David Corn published video of Romney letting his attitudes toward the other half hang out while speaking to a group of his fellow plutocrats at a fundraiser this year, SECRET VIDEO: Romney Tells Millionaire Donors What He REALLY Thinks of Obama Voters 09/17/2012. And they're publishing more:

SECRET VIDEO: On Israel, Romney Trashes Two-State Solution 09/18/2012

Romney "47 Percent" Fundraiser Host: Hedge Fund Manager Who Likes Sex Parties 09/17/2012

Dave Gilson, Who Was at Romney's "47 Percent" Fundraiser? 09/18/2012

Maybe Romney should have gone to one of the sex parties instead. The fundis would find a way to ignore it, and it would make him seems less of a stiff to other voters. [groan, bad pun]

Back in the 1960s, when TV news regularly contained actual journalism, CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite showed up in polls as the most trustworthy man in the country. When Cronkite raised major questions on the air about the course of the Vietnam War and the reliability of the Johnson Administration's version of it, Lyndon Johnson commented that if he had lost Cronkite, he'd lost America.

Now, the possibility of David "Bobo" Brooks achieving Cronkite's level of credibility is so small that the probability would qualify such a thing as a "black swan" event. But I wonder if Romney and his handlers might not be thinking today, "If we've lost Bobo..." Because Bobo does specialize in trying to make even the most reckless and irresponsible Republican ideas sound sensible and reasonable and nothing to get worked up about. So it's notable that even Bobo is distancing himself from Romney's indiscreet plutocratic self-revelations published by Corn, as he does in Thurston Howell Romney New York Times 09/17/2012. Naturally, it comes in typical dicey Bobo-speak:

This comment suggests a few things. First, it suggests that he really doesn’t know much about the country he inhabits. Who are these freeloaders? Is it the Iraq war veteran who goes to the V.A.? Is it the student getting a loan to go to college? Is it the retiree on Social Security or Medicare?

It suggests that Romney doesn’t know much about the culture of America. Yes, the entitlement state has expanded, but America remains one of the hardest-working nations on earth. Americans work longer hours than just about anyone else. Americans believe in work more than almost any other people. Ninety-two percent say that hard work is the key to success, according to a 2009 Pew Research Survey.

It says that Romney doesn’t know much about the political culture. Americans haven’t become childlike worshipers of big government. On the contrary, trust in government has declined. The number of people who think government spending promotes social mobility has fallen.

"Americans believe in work more than almost any other people." Say what? He probably means that Americans take less vacation time than western Europeans, which is true. But then, you never know from what corner of the Republican alternative reality Bobo may be pulling stuff.

Bobo has a scoop here, though. He's discovered that there are hardcore rightwingers in the Republican Party! Who knew that such a thing was going on? Lawdy, Miss Mellie, brang me the smellin' salts, ah thank ah'm gonna just faint daid away!

Or, as Bobo puts it, "The Republican Party, and apparently Mitt Romney, too, has shifted over toward a much more hyperindividualistic and atomistic social view - from the Reaganesque language of common citizenship to the libertarian language of makers and takers." Reagan, of course, drew the same kine of lines. He just wasn't enough of a fool to blurt out his sympathy for plutocratic values in as crass a way as Romney does.

The best bobo can do to defend his candidate in this column is, "Personally, I think he’s a kind, decent man who says stupid things because he is pretending to be something he is not — some sort of cartoonish government-hater." Or maybe he says those stupid things because that really the way he thinks. And even Bobo continues directly, "But it scarcely matters." Because voters have to assume that the Romney they see and hear is the President Romney they would be getting if he's elected.

Tags: 2012 election, david brooks, mitt romney

David "Bobo" Brooks and Charlie Pierce go Shakespeare

Charlie Pierce and the imaginary Irish setter Moral Hazard have become the definitive interpreters of David "Bobo" Brooks' works, such as they are.

In Our Mr. Brooks Has a Problem with Boys Esquire Politics Blog 07/06/2012, he renders Bobo's latest column into Shakespearian verse, following the classical-lit posturing of his subject:

Oh, for a muse of tedium
that would ascend the brightest heaven of malarkey...

Can this cockpit hold the vasty fields of France
Or may we cram into our vast spaces for entertaining the very casques that did affright the air at Cleveland Park?

And let us, ciphers to this great account
on your imaginary forces work
And pretendeth that this whole thing doth not reek of the grandest Fail.

After that, Pierce can't manage any additional verses of mockery:

But do I have to go on with this? Either Brooks is stoned to the gills, or the Times gave every editor in its payroll a free trip to Neptune. ... Sucking up to the Plantagenets. Wow. You have to love a courtier pundit who tries to curry favor with a ruling elite that lost its power in 14-goddamn-85.

This is also a nice line of Pierce's: "And, while we're talking about how difficult "social engineering" is, I feel obligated to point out that, in Louisiana, where they've gone all-in on charter schools, children are being taught that evolution is a fake because the Loch Ness monster exists."

Tags: charlie pierce, david brooks

Bobo's Grand Theory of history

If there's anything more sad that watching David "Bobo" Brooks try to talk about economics, it's watching him construct a Grand Theory of history. In this case, American history: The Role of Uncle Sam New York Times 05/28/2012.

In Bobo's Grand Theory, Alexander Hamilton established Social Darwinism and 19th-century style killer capitalism. And we did perfectly fine with it, until the Progressives came in at the turn of the century and mucked it all up.

And the Tide Of History now compels us to return to the 19th century, with a few tweaks here and there. Because, "If the U.S. doesn't modernize its governing institutions, the nation will stagnate. The ghost of Hamilton will be displeased."

Are The Voices who speak to Maureen Dowd now chatting with Bobo, too?

More likely, it's just Bobo straining mightily to put some highbrow varnish on the crackpot nostalgic for the Gilded Age and the robber barons that now dominates the Republican Party.

Bobo shows that he has some dim awareness that even in the early 19th century, there was something known as Jacksonian democracy:

In his engrossing new book, "Our Divided Political Heart," E.J. Dionne, my NPR pundit partner, argues that the Hamiltonian and Jacksonian traditions formed part of a balanced consensus, which has been destroyed by the radical individualists of today’s Republican Party. But that balanced governing philosophy was destroyed gradually over the 20th century, before the Tea Party was even in utero. As government excessively overreached, Republicans became excessively antigovernment.

Bobo on Andrew Jackson? Please, no, no please!!! I'll steal one of my neighbor's chickens and sacrifice it live to the Great God Free Market if I can just be guaranteed I'll never, ever have to read a column of Bobo Brooks talking about Andrew Jackson.

Steve M at No More Mister Nice Blog in There's now, at most, an inch of daylight between David Brooks and Glenn Beck 05/29/2012) points out that this paragraph is a key statement of what Bobo is really talking about:

In each case [here Bobo means basically the entire 20th century], a good impulse was taken to excess. A government that was energetic and limited was turned into one that is omnidirectional and fiscally unsustainable. A government that was trusted and oriented around long-term visions is now distrusted because it tries to pander to the voters’ every momentary desire. A government that devoted its resources toward future innovation and development now devotes its resources to health care for the middle-class elderly. [my emphasis]

Health care for old people! That's what's making the Great God Free Market angry, according to what the ghost of Alexander Hamilton is telling Bobo.

I'm guessing it was actually the ghost of Aaron Burr who appeared to Bobo, but I don't have time to elaborate right now. I have a chicken to sacrifice.

Tags: david brooks

The willfully blind debating the clueless

I should probably go back and look at some of the PBS Newshour's Political Wrap segments to see if they were once notably better than they are now. That's the way I clearly remember it. But maybe I was being too generous back then.

Mark Shields has been the liberal part of this two-commentator discussion team since I guess about the time radio was invented. These days, he practically sleeps through them. But he does wake up occasionally and applies some actual thought to what he's saying. And at least he remembers from the dim past how to draw a coherent contrast between Democrats and Republicans. His syntax is slipping, but you can normally understand what he's saying.

David "Bobo" Brooks has been his verbal sparring partner for the last decade or so. Bobo's specialty in live commentary is to frame even the goofiest Republican ideas as something that any sensible person can understand is cautious and well-thought-out. He has a "tell". Whenever his voice gets notably softer and takes on a careful, deliberative tone, that means he's delivering some particularly ill-founded Republican talking point.

That's Quality TV political commentary on the Political Wrap these days. When Bobo is out, they usually bring in some forgettable dweeb from National Review to take his place. When Sleepy Mark is out, for the last few years his main replacement has been Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus, who for reasons that are completely opaque to me is considered a liberal by contemporary Beltway Village standards.

Alleged Liberal Ruth seems to get worse over time. She was on Friday with Bobo (Brooks, Marcus on Coming Economic 'Chaos,' New Recession Fears, Bain Debate 05/25/2012):



One of their topics was the economic/currency/debt crisis in Europe. Bobo clearly knows next to nothing about the topic. But he's practically a scholar in it compared to Alleged Liberal Ruth. Her syntax also seemed to be having some serious issues. They started off talking about the Congressional Budget Office (CBO). Alleged Liberal Ruth's first contribution:

JUDY WOODRUFF: Congress going to come to its senses?

(LAUGHTER)

RUTH MARCUS: Well, I don't think anybody should ever bet on that.

But David said that Republicans seem chastened. You certainly couldn't tell it from the comments of Speaker Boehner, who seems more than willing to do a replay of the disastrous, from my point of view, economically, and also disastrous politically for Republicans, replay of the debt ceiling showdown last time around, a year ago.

And what's going to happen is, all of this Taxmageddon, as we are calling it, is going -- because of the timing of it, we will probably kick the can down the road from the lame-duck, for maybe six months into the next Congress. And guess what? That is going to coincide with, collide with hitting the debt ceiling yet again.

So the CBO -- I just -- quick thing on the CBO report. CBO used the R-word, which is very, very scary, recession. If all of these things come to pass, they said, the economy would be in recession in the beginning of 2013.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Which is what got everybody's attention.

RUTH MARCUS: Which got everybody's attention, but in some ways, that wasn't really the message that CBO wanted to send, because, yes, that would be a very bad outcome.

But the second thing they said is that the alternative, if you filled that entire fiscal cliff and cushioned it, and you just dug the debt deeper, the debt hole that much deeper, that would also be a terrible outcome, just later.

And so they have been begging in their very quiet-sounding CBO language, please, members of Congress, you need to both avert the fiscal cliff now and come up with a plan that markets can understand that you really have to fill the debt hole later on.

Whether Congress can manage that ...

So if we avert and fill the fiscal cliff, then later you can fill the debt hole, and, you know, the Taxmageddon debt ceiling, but the CBO at least uses polite language and that's nice. Or whatever, Boehner disaster.

Oooo-kay, then!

When they got to the Europe issue, Alleged Liberal Ruth should have said something like: "Honey, I don't have the faintest clue what you're talking about. And I would just embarrass myself if I even attempted to say anything about it."

Instead, she said this:

JUDY WOODRUFF: And, meanwhile, Ruth, you have got in Europe this week, became clearer that there really are serious disagreements on what they going to do to get out of their own debt crisis.

What -- is there a consensus on what effect that could have here?

RUTH MARCUS: Yes. The consensus is bad.

(LAUGHTER)

RUTH MARCUS: And the only question is how bad.

And that really, in a sense, though CBO didn't talk about it in their report, that just adds to the scariness and the height of the cliff, because what happens in Europe doesn't stay in Europe. We know that Europe seems -- the European problem just seems to be like a chronic disease now that we have been living with, and Europe doesn't seem to be getting well.

And as it's not getting well, and you see questions about economic growth in China, all of that has an impact on growth here, or lack of growth.

I have a wild hunch that Alleged Liberal Ruth was very impressed at some point with some presentation she heard on economics that used a lot of cliff metaphors, and that made her happy because she could think about pretty mountains and stuff while she sat there listening. Oh, and China, my, don't they have some nice cliffs in China!

This is Quality TV political commentary in the Age of OxyContin and Boehner debt filled cliff holes.

Maybe PBS should add Talking Tom animation that would repeat what the commentators just said but in a cute, high cartoon voice. That would at least make the segment entertaining.

Tags: david brooks, ruth marcus

Krugman vs. Bobo

It's not much of a contest. Earlier this week, David "Bobo" Brooks explained to the masses why financial buccaneering saved the world starting back during the Presidency of St. Reagan in How Change Happens New York Times 05/21/2012.

Charlie Pierce, lately the leftweb's go-to guy for regular fisking of Bobo's columns, laid it out for us with some assistance from Bobo's Irish setter Moral Hazard in Our Mr. Brooks Goes A'Bain-ing for a Changeling Esquire Politics Blog 05/22/2012.

In BoboLand, here's why financial scamsters are our salvation:

Forty years ago, corporate America was bloated, sluggish and losing ground to competitors in Japan and beyond. But then something astonishing happened. Financiers, private equity firms and bare-knuckled corporate executives initiated a series of reforms and transformations.

The process was brutal and involved streamlining and layoffs. But, at the end of it, American businesses emerged leaner, quicker and more efficient.

And on and on with blah, blah, blah about how anything that makes the rich richer is good no matter what happens to everyone else.

Now, it appears that the New York Times has some policy about their regular columnists criticizing each other directly. So it's always fun to see how Paul Krugman goes about rebutting various egregious nonsense that Bobo puts out there. His latest forays in BoboLand is Egos and Immorality New York Times 05/24/2012:

... let me take a moment to debunk a fairy tale that we’ve been hearing a lot from Wall Street and its reliable defenders — a tale in which the incredible damage runaway finance inflicted on the U.S. economy gets flushed down the memory hole, and financiers instead become the heroes who saved America.

Once upon a time, this fairy tale tells us, America was a land of lazy managers and slacker workers. Productivity languished, and American industry was fading away in the face of foreign competition.

Then square-jawed, tough-minded buyout kings like Mitt Romney and the fictional Gordon Gekko came to the rescue, imposing financial and work discipline. Sure, some people didn’t like it, and, sure, they made a lot of money for themselves along the way. But the result was a great economic revival, whose benefits trickled down to everyone.

You can see why Wall Street likes this story. But none of it — except the bit about the Gekkos and the Romneys making lots of money — is true.

For the alleged productivity surge never actually happened. In fact, overall business productivity in America grew faster in the postwar generation, an era in which banks were tightly regulated and private equity barely existed, than it has since our political system decided that greed was good.

Poor Bobo. Even his imaginary Irish setter knows he's a hack, although one undoubtedly talented at putting Republican talking points in calm, reassuring terms and tones. So you can almost feel sorry for him facing Krugman explaining that, no, Bobo, there was no productivity surge. No leap in international competitiveness. And certainly no trickle-down.

Bobo should stick to worrying about the social habits of Appleby's diners and the sex habits and TV preferences of trailer-park dwellers.

Tags: david brooks, paul krugman

Bobo goes to bat for Rick Santorum, twice in one week

David "Bobo" Brooks has a particular place in the Republican political ecosystem. He speaks like a guy with a college education. And he offers calm, seemingly reasonable justifications for the nastiest characters and the goofiest ideas the Republicans serve up to the public at any given time.

Now, he's a leading member of the punditocracy. So he's obligated to pooh-pooh the significance of minor candidates in a Presidential race. Until the Very Serious People register them as serious candidates or leaders. Since the 2010 election, he's been swooning over Paul Ryan, who is an immensely talented actor who does a very convincing impression of being a soulless android. But Bobo admires him as a courageous leader and serious idea man because he wants to abolish Medicare and published a plan that hardly pretended to add up that would accomplish that goal.

Bobo has a "tell". When he's speaking on the PBS Newshour or some other talking-heads venue, the tell is when he lowers his voice, puts a very earnest-serious look on his face, and start speaking as though he's choosing his words very carefully. Then you know that he's defending some particularly egregious Republican cause and being moderate and non-threatening.

It may be some policy that is impractical and/or destructive, which Bobo will explain is entirely benign. It may be some Republican in good standing who has said something more appalling than the average daily Party output, and Bobo will clarify how it will appeal to the Real Americans. Bobo is a leading expert on Real Americans - white people who vote Republican, in the Boboverse. Because he makes periodic anthopological studies out in The Heartland to discover what simple and charming things are delighting them these days.

Here's Bobo's basic schtick (A New Social Agenda New York Times 01/05/2012):

I’m to Rick Santorum's left on most social issues, like same-sex marriage and abortion. I'm also put off by his Manichaean political rhetoric. He seems to imagine America's problems can best be described as the result of a culture war between the God-fearing conservatives and the narcissistic liberals. [blah, blah, etc.] ...

But having said all that, I'm delighted that Santorum is making a splash in this presidential campaign. He is far closer to developing a new 21st-century philosophy of government than most leaders out there.

Yes, Bobo is practicing how to pump Rick Santorum as a visionary political leader and natural statesman. Rick Santorum, the Christian nationalist who's up to his holier-than-thou eyeballs in Washington's legalized corruption.

Much of the rest of his column reads like an adaptation of a list the Santorum campaign e-mailed him, produced by someone combing through every piece of legislation the former Pennsylvania Senator voted for to find some provision that might make him sound less mean than an angry rattlesnake. Compassionate Conservative 2.0.

Classic Bobo: "Santorum believes Head Start should teach manners to children." Awwww...

Because, you know, blah people's children just don't learn manners at home, as Santorum's fans will be glad to explain to you.

And this is a classic Boboism, putting a fresh, polite face on the segregationist transformation of the Republican Party: "Main Street Republicans like Romney usually beat social conservatives like Santorum because there are just so many more of them in the Republican electorate. But social conservatives and libertarians often provide the ideas that Main Street leaders co-opt."

For reality-based analysis on Rick Santorum, you can check out Will Bunch, Wednesday, The Rick Santorum that America doesn't know Attytood 01/04/2012 and John Baer, Santorum’s strong showing: What does it mean? Philadelphia Daily News 01/03/2012.

Tags: david brooks, santorum

Mr. Brooks investigates the Real Americans

David "Bobo" Brooks is already practicing to explain how Rick Santorum has a down-home ability to speak to those Real Americans Out In The Heartland. In Workers of the World, Unite! 01/02/2012.

The title is a play on Bobo's mind-bend conservatism in claiming, "The Republican Party is the party of the white working class." (my emphasis) Bobo is playing one of his favorite little tricks there. Maybe one of these days I'll spend some effort to unpack this particular Boboism, which relies on a particular definition of "working class" and a head-fake around the fact that the Republican base relies so heavily on Southern whites with more than a residual admiration for racial segregation.

But what Bobo means by "white working class" here is the same thing Sarah Palin means by Real Americans: good Christian white folks who vote Republican. What's bothering these Real Americans? Bobo puts on his anthropology hat and explains. "They sense that the nation has gone astray: marriage is in crisis; the work ethic is eroding; living standards are in danger; the elites have failed; the news media sends out messages that make it harder to raise decent kids."

No jobs? No money? No unemployment insurance? No, what the Real Americans are worried about is the erosion of the work ethic among, uh, you know, those people.

But, Bobo says, sometimes "a candidate will emerge who taps into a working-class vibe — Pat Buchanan, Mike Huckabee or Sarah Palin." Their supporters are the Real Americans, in other words.

And now, Bobo has discovered just before the Iowa caucuses that Rick Santorum is resonating with the Real Americans!

This is Bobo's schtick, making even the wackiest ideas from leading Republicans sound sensible and reassuring. Sure enough, he gets around to saying that Rick "don't-look-at-my-dog-that-way" Santorum, "represents sensibility and a viewpoint that is being suppressed by the political system. Perhaps, in less rigid and ideological form, this working-class experience will someday find a champion."

Although I'm not sure he serves that purpose by including this story, which I never heard before:

Santorum does not have a secular worldview. This is not just a matter of going to church and home-schooling his children. When his baby Gabriel died at childbirth, he and his wife, a neonatal nurse, spent the night in a hospital bed with the body and then took it home — praying over it and welcoming it, with their other kids, into the family. This story tends to be deeply creepy to many secular people but inspiring to many of the more devout.

I can't say I've ever heard of this custom ...

But if Bobo tells us it speaks to Real Americans, he must be right. Because he ventures out to an Applebee's every couple of years and does current research on them.

Tags: david brooks, santorum

September 11 retrospective: Shields and Brooks find something meaningful to say about 9/11

I'll forgo my usual introductory carping about the conventionality of Sleepy Mark Shields and David "Bobo" Brooks. It's still there in their 09/09/2011 PBS Newshour appearance, Shields, Brooks on Obama's Jobs Speech, Perry's Debate Debut. Okay, I'll carp a bit. Sleep Mark doesn't seem to have noticed that President Obama has proposed cutting Social Security and Medicare benefits earlier this year, proposed cutting Medicare again in his Thursday jobs speech and is floating benefit cuts for Social Security again. But I was struck by their comments on the 9/11 anniversary.



Bobo surprised me again this week by saying something I wonder if he really intended to say:

I would just emphasize some of the positive things that have happened since 9/11 because of U.S. actions. Saddam is out. Gadhafi is out, not all because of U.S. actions. Taliban is out. Mubarak is out. There has been a change in the world. Al-Qaida has been destroyed. We haven't been attacked again. And so I would say it's at least a mixed blessing and that, after 9/11, the Middle East is in a period of turmoil, could turn out bad, could turn out good. [my emphasis]

Say what? "Al-Qaida has been destroyed." Say what?!? The massive terrible Terrorist Menace that we have to spend half the military budgets of the world to fight doesn't exist anymore? He's right, of course. There's little if anything left of Bin Laden original Al Qa'ida group, at least from what we can tell from the confused and often deeply self-interested news we get on the subject.

Shields has always been decent on the Iraq War, even as most of his political analysis has slid into mind-numbing conventional wisdom, albeit with a consistent Democratic Establishment twist. He challenged Bobo's otherwise bland Profound Reflection on 9/11 this way:

I think that to use 9/11 as a justification for going to war against Saddam Hussein is indefensible. It was indefensible then is indefensible against -- war on Iraq and a war of occupation. The United States now has two wars of occupation 10 years later.

I think Afghanistan, you could certainly make the case, after the attack of 9/11, that that was necessary and required. There was a sense of national unity and solidarity and compassion that existed in this country after 9/11, which is gone. It's no longer, no longer with us.

The United States' standing in the world, that sense of solidarity with the United States and support for the United States after the terrible events of 9/11 has been allowed to go away. I agree with David about the Arab spring. And I think it is encouraging, and I -- but I don't think that going to Iraq is an instrument of it.

Tags: 9/11,, david brooks, iraq war, mark shields

A few moments of actual news analysis from Mark Shields and David Brooks

The PBS Newshour for 08/26/2011 had the A Team - such as it is - on hand for the weekly Political Wrap segment, Sleepy Mark Shields and David "Bobo" Brooks: Shields and Brooks on GOP's Zeitgeist, Whether Obama Gets Credit for Libya. The non-dynamic duo actually had some notable things to say about the Libya War in the first couple of minutes.



Seemingly cutting-edge reporting is not something we usually associate with Bobo. And I don't want to give him too much credit. But my eyebrows did pop up when I heard Bobo say this:

JIM LEHRER: David, does President Obama deserve any praise or credit for what happened in Libya?

DAVID BROOKS: I think he does, and a lot more than he's getting, actually.

You have to remember, when the -- Gadhafi was marching on the rebels and threatening to massacre them, a lot of people in this country wanted to do nothing. A lot of people in Europe who were more upset about it just wanted to have sort of a no-fly zone.

And Obama has pushed them more aggressively than they wanted to go, so it wasn't just a no-fly zone. Were -- we actually ended up helping the rebels. We ended up helping the goal of regime change. And people have criticized whether it is was slow enough or fast enough, whether it was more aggressive or not.

But I think, more than anybody outside the country, I think Obama does deserve a lot of credit for showing that you can do an intervention reasonably well, achieve at least the first step of your objective, and do some large good for that country and potentially the region. [my emphasis]

What Bobo says here is that not only did NATO go beyond the no-fly zone which was the only military action in Libya authorized by the UN Security Council, but it was President Obama who pushed the NATO allies to do that.

Bobo doesn't mention that little business about Congress not authorizing the President to go to war. But I know that's so, like, 1940s to even mention. Still, it bothers some of us who like parts of Article 1 of the Constitution.

And Sleepy Mark, who I also don't want to give too much credit, is actually often decent on military issues. And he managed to mention something about the scope of the NATO intervention:

JIM LEHRER: Yes. Why? Why is he not getting any credit?

MARK SHIELDS: Well, I think because, when the economy is bad, the economy is the only issue. I really do. I think American opinion or interest in Libya has been episodic at best.

There was a lot at the beginning. But the people who most strenuously supported intervention now refuse to -- mostly Republicans -- refuse to give the president, the prime intervener, any credit. And most of the people who opposed the intervention were Democrats.

So they're reluctant to -- seem to be reluctant to crow, although they do acknowledge the president's role. And it is a case of NATO working. The stalemate that was -- loomed is over. A despot has been removed -- 17,000 sorties were flown. You know, it's a...

JIM LEHRER: Seventeen thousand sorties, that's a lot of hardware.

MARK SHIELDS: Seventeen thousand. That's a lot. It sure is. It sure is. [my emphasis]

A sortie in this context is an aircraft combat flight. Sleepy Mark didn't get into the reports suggesting that US Special Forces and/or CIA were operating on the ground in Libya. Also without Congressional authorization. But then, that's not so unusual these days, as Nick Turse explains in A Secret War in 120 Countries: The Pentagon's New Power Elite TomDispatch 08/03/2011. Personally, if I heard about a foreign military running its own hostile operations in the United States, it would irritate me. I would probably think of it as an act of war. Something that might make a lot of Americans resent the foreign country running hostile military operations on our soil. I guess that's another way I'm just sort of old-fashioned. But I digress.

The rest of the segment is pretty much standard, mostly pointless political chatter about the Presidential race. With Bobo, as he often does, rehashing the content of his latest New York Times column. In this case, President Rick Perry? 08/25/2011, in which Bobo warns that Perry is another warmongering Texan backed by demon-fighting Pentecostalist fanatics explains that Perry is a Good Ole Boy with a charmingly distinctive style.

Still, you have to give the Political Wrap Twins credit for jarring their viewers' brains for a few seconds.

This video extra, though, shows that such moments of lucidity are likely as not entirely accidental. Sleepy Mark and Bobo give a brief repeat of their Political Wrap segment, then chatter about sports for a few minutes.



They have to still fake being serious analysts for the PBS audience, an especially hard pull for Bobo. But they see their business as infotainment.

Tags: david brooks, libya war, mark shields

Krugman takes on his Times colleague Bobo and Ruth Marcus

New York Times columnists aren't supposed to directly criticize each other in their columns. But Krugman seems to be pushing the envelope on that matter with David "Bobo" Brooks in his column No, We Can't? Or Won't? 07/10/2011, which should be read together with his blog post The Long and the Short of It 07/10/2011.

The Bobo commentary in question is from the PBS Newshour Political Wrap segment of 07/08/2011, in which the insufferable Ruth Marcus substituted for Sleepy Mark Shields, who was presumably taking an extended nap that day. I get grumpy about the Political Wrap, because it preserves the tone of Serious Commentary but is often little more than a clown show. Bobo delivers his version of that day's Republican Party talking points in a calm and soothing tone. Shields at least snaps awake occasionally and says something perceptive. The main effect of having Marcus on with Bobo is that she makes him sound like a profound intellectual. If Marcus has ever offered any perceptive political observation or analysis, it's not one that I ever recall encountering.

Here's the video:



Bobo offers his deep thoughts on the economic situation:

And so one of the lessons I take away is, we don't know much about the economy. And the second lesson I take away...

JIM LEHRER: Nobody knows very much.

DAVID BROOKS: Yes. Nobody knows very much.

DAVID BROOKS: And I think most economists would concede that.

JIM LEHRER: Yes.

DAVID BROOKS: And the second thing I take away is that we're just not really good, the government is not really good at manipulating quarter-to-quarter growth.

The government can create the terms for long-range growth with human capital policies and good structures and good tax -- but boosting the economy from quarter to quarter, month to month, we just -- especially with fiscal policy, just don't have that within our power.

Anyone who has been listening to actual economists was probably surprised to learn that most of them think they are as clueless as Bobo pretends to be. I get the impression that Lehrer is occasionally poking fun at Bobo like when he summarized his comment as, "Nobody knows very much."

Fortunately, Ruth Marcus is there to show that some people know even less than Bobo:

JIM LEHRER: All right.

Ruth, the president -- one of the things the president said today was that maybe one of the reasons for the fact that private business has not been hiring is that they are all worried about the debt limit vote. Do you buy that?

RUTH MARCUS: No, but I -- any -- any argument that can get to an agreement on the debt limit, I give some tolerance to.

One of the things that's fascinating about the job numbers is that how you react to them and how you understand them within the context of the debt limit depends on what your preexisting conceptions are, so that Republicans saw the terrible job numbers and -- which are terrible -- and said, well, this just shows that the last thing on earth that we can do is raise taxes and squelch the prospect of job creation.

And Democrats saw it and said, this shows that we need to make sure that, whatever we do in the short-term, it doesn't -- you know, we can't cut spending and, therefore, cut growth, and we need to think about further stimulative things.

So, each side is going to take these numbers and use it to just make the same arguments that they would have made absent those numbers.

Why doesn't she just answer "present" and spare us the nails-on-the-blackboard moments of hearing her pretend to have something to say?

Anyway, Krugman was perhaps more charitable in the way he put it, but he rips them both in his blog post:

A number of people have been telling me about David Brooks and Ruth Marcus agreeing that there’s not much government can do about short-run economic performance, that we need to focus on long-run solutions. It’s a common sentiment inside the Beltway.

If you want to split hairs, Marcus didn't explicitly agree with him in that portion I just quoted; she only babbled incoherently and sounded like she was agreeing. But don't miss the later portion where she gushes about the Big Deal - the one that seriously cuts Social Security and Medicare benefits and begins the phaseout of both programs - saying, "And there is the big deal. The big deal is what gets David and me actually really revved up and excited."

Krugman continues:

And it's also utterly, utterly backwards. Changing the economy's long-run growth rate is hard. We’ve had almost 25 years of "new growth theory" research, with every possible regression run, looking for the keys to faster growth; my sense is that we’ve basically come up dry.

Meanwhile, policy can have huge short-run effects. Monetary policy for sure, in normal times. In a liquidity trap, that's harder — but fiscal policy does indeed work, if tried.

In the column, he discreetly avoid naming Bobo and Marcus. But he writes:

Yet a destructive passivity has overtaken our discourse. Turn on your TV and you'll see some self-satisfied pundit declaring that nothing much can be done about the economy's short-run problems (reminder: this "short run" is now in its fourth year), that we should focus on the long run instead.

And he explains, "Our failure to create jobs is a choice, not a necessity — a choice rationalized by an ever-shifting set of excuses." And goes on to deconstruct some of the favorite excuses.

In the blog post, he writes, "Politically, stimulus turns out to be hard to do. But commentators who spread fatalism are part of the problem." In the column he concludes with:

Listening to what supposedly serious people say about the economy, you'd think the problem was "no, we can't." But the reality is "no, we won't." And every pundit who reinforces that destructive passivity is part of the problem.

They say Krugman is shrill.

Tags: david brooks, paul krugman, ruth marcus

Bobo grumbles about Republicans - and says Democrats are ready to embrace fanaticism!

David "Bobo" Brooks manages to get favorable attention because he occasionally says things that sound sensible. The problem is they typically come immersed in praise from whatever policies the real existing Republican Party are pushing at the moment.

In The Mother of All No-Brainers New York Times 07/04/2011, he has one of those moments:

But we can have no confidence that the Republicans will seize this opportunity. That’s because the Republican Party may no longer be a normal party. Over the past few years, it has been infected by a faction that is more of a psychological protest than a practical, governing alternative.

Sounds like he's recognizing that the Reps are acting loony and irresponsible, right? Especially when he follows it up by saying, "The members of this movement do not accept the logic of compromise, no matter how sweet the terms." He sounds especially heretical when he says, "The members of this movement have no sense of moral decency."

But, as usual, there's less to Bobo's seeming criticism of the Republican Party than one might think from those quotes. He's basically crowing over how the Obama Administration is letting the Republicans slap them around, in pursuit of that postpartisan harmony that always seems to be moving farther and farther into the distant horizon:

Republican leaders have also proved to be effective negotiators. They have been tough and inflexible and forced the Democrats to come to them. The Democrats have agreed to tie budget cuts to the debt ceiling bill. They have agreed not to raise tax rates. They have agreed to a roughly 3-to-1 rate of spending cuts to revenue increases, an astonishing concession.

Moreover, many important Democrats are open to a truly large budget deal. President Obama has a strong incentive to reach a deal so he can campaign in 2012 as a moderate. The Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, has talked about supporting a debt reduction measure of $3 trillion or even $4 trillion if the Republicans meet him part way. There are Democrats in the White House and elsewhere who would be willing to accept Medicare cuts if the Republicans would be willing to increase revenues.

Why should the Republicans compromise when the Democrats are cheerfully agreeing to enact cuts that will slow an already weak economy and damage the interest of the Democratic Party's core constituencies? That way, the Republicans get some of the cuts they want, then they can campaign against the Democrats for making the cuts and because the economy is getting worse. They are right to think that's an awesome prospect. Bobo's right that it isn't a responsible attitude in a larger sense. But how is today's Republican Party more of a wrecker party than it has been for the last two decades? Because today more of their activists like to dress up in colonial-era costumes?

Here's the downright laughable part of Bobo's little analysis:

Over the past week, Democrats have stopped making concessions. They are coming to the conclusion that if the Republicans are fanatics then they better be fanatics, too.

We've got Democratic elder statesman Bill Clinton out there at the Aspen Institute get-together (Aspen Ideas Festival) telling Obama to hang tough in these negotiations - by agreeing to make a bunch of cuts without the Republicans agreeing to anything. Oh, and Bill thinks corporate tax rates are too high! (Alexander Eichler, Bill Clinton: Lower The Corporate Tax Rate For Debt-Ceiling Deal Huffington Post 07/05/2011) The latter is a current Republican ploy: eliminate "loopholes" in exchange for lower tax rates; the loopholes can then be quietly re-established in following years.

And the Obama Administration is offering cuts to Medicare and even bigger cuts to Medicaid, to show that liberals are willing to deny health care to poor people, too (Robert Pear, Administration Offers Health Care Cuts as Part of Budget Negotiations New York Times 07/04/2011).

Yeah, those Dems are embracing fanaticism, aren't they? Shoot, before you know it they'll be putting up red hammer-and-sickle flags at the National Cathedral!

It's never been a question whether the Republicans will raise the debt ceiling. The Administration's decision to bargain with the Reps over it was a conscious decision to enact foolish cuts in the middle of a protracted economic slump in line with the Herbert Hoover economics the elites of both parties embrace today. The real default danger is that now that they have seen how badly the Obama Administration can be played, the Reps will push their brinkmanship too far and some of the financial speculators will really start freaking out and do some actual damage to the financial system. Coupled with repercussions from the Greek debt crisis, which could go south any time, it could cost some of the Republicans' patrons big bucks.

By the way, it's this prospect Bobo is addressing when he says, "The members of this movement have no sense of moral decency." Search and see if you can find any place Bobo made such a direct statement of condemnation of the Cheney-Bush torture program.

Bobo's column gives some ideological cover to the few Republicans in the House who will eventually have to vote for the debt ceiling adjustment. And it lets him score a few "sensible conservative" points. Still, this is the guy who gushed over the Ryan Plan as marvelous example of Republican seriousness and adult behavior. That would be the crackpot Ryan plan that doesn't hold together under even modest scrutiny. What Bobo says of Tea Party economics is also true of the Ryan Plan he greeted with such enthusiasm: "The members of this movement have no economic theory worthy of the name."

And when Michele Bachmann wins the Republican nomination, Bobo will be there on the PBS Newshour telling us with his studied calm, contemplative tone, explaining how she has matured as a candidate and has skillfully appealed to the Tea Party/Christian Right constituency while rejecting some of the more foolish ideas of those un-serious Reps he's discussing in his column.

Tags: david brooks

Glenn Greenwald "fisks" the Shields and Brooks Clown Show on the national surveillance state

I often post the video of the PBS Newshour Political Wrap segment from Fridays because it provides a good glimpse of the conservative and liberal version of Beltway Village conventional wisdom of the moment. Every now and then, Mark Shields will suddenly aware from the semi-somnolent condition of torpor in which he usually functions in this segment and say something actually insightful.

I didn't catch any of that happening on the 05/27/2011 edition:



Glenn Greenwald in Establishment thought and the War on Terror Salon 05/27/2011 looks at the happy acceptance of the renewal of the PATRIOT Act substantially unchanged by both conservative David "Bobo" Brooks and Sleepy Mark. His comment on Bobo's endorsement of the surveillance state:

Our Leaders know secret things that we don't that make them know better [according to Bobo], and justify their complete abandonment of what they promise when campaigning (and as I've said many times, if that's really what happened -- if Obama got into office and learned Secret Things that showed him that his criticisms of Bush/Cheney Terrorism policies were misguided -- then don't he and his defenders owe the GOP a serious apology for the inaccurate harsh criticisms they spewed all those years?).

His comment on Sleepy Mark's endorsement of the surveillance state:

Now that we killed bin Laden [according to Sleepy Mark], we need civil-liberties-eroding measures like the Patriot Act more than ever. The notion that the death of bin Laden would trigger a winding down in the War on Terror -- as though bin Laden was the cause of those policies rather than pretext for them -- will prove to be one of the more absurd notions advanced on such matters. [emphasis in original]

Tags: david brooks, glenn greenwald, mark shields, patriot act

The legendary May 1, 2003 Mission Accomplished speech

Out of curiosity, I went back to check the PBS Newshour commentary from Sleepy Mark Shields and David "Bobo" Brooks on May 2, 2003, where they gave their considered evaluation of Bush's Mission Accomplished speech the day before. I expected to hear Bobo praising the speech and Shields, who seemed to be more often fully conscious in those days than now, to be more critical. After listening to their commentary, I'm struck by what a measure of the depth of both their judgments it represented.

Today, of course, the Mission Accomplished speech is a subject of ridicule, generally regarded as one of the silliest and most ill-advised Presidential stunts ever. Fortunately, viewers of the Quality TV offered by the PBS Newshour were treated to the sober judgments of Bobo and Sleepy Mark, who could obviously see beyond the superficial judgments of the moment:

The president's victory speech

JIM LEHRER: All right. What did you think of the president's victory speech last night?

DAVID BROOKS: It was actually an interesting aesthetic debate over whether him flying into the boat was gimmicky and demeaning, which is what mature people thought or gimmicky and cool, which is what I thought. And so there is sort of an aesthetic judgment there. To me, the important things were the fact that he recognized these sailors who have been away from their families for ten months, some of them missing ... 150 missing the birth of their children. To me when this whole war proceeds into history, this cultural moment will be defined by those sailors and soldiers and the young people who are looking at this war will have their world view shaped by what they see of those people. And it will be totally different the way the Vietnam era saw the world. That will be an interesting thing.

The other substantive thing Bush said, he called this action in Iraq a battle. He said it was part of a longer war and you really got a sense of his mentality. Afghanistan was part of it. The al-Qaida fight was part of it. But we now got a lot more parts to go. And he said significantly the tide is turning. The tide... but you get the sense that he doesn't feel that something is over. He is in the middle of something Iran, Iraq, Syria. It is all not militarily but it's part of a life-long process for him.

JIM LEHRER: How do you feel about it?

MARK SHIELDS: Jim, I thought it was just in view of presidential presentation, it was spectacular. I mean, it was visually arresting. The president did the right thing. He struck the right note by not taking a victory lap himself, but offering a victory salute to the sailors, who, as David pointed, to the point of exhaustion. I mean these are people that have been out there ten months; 150 children have been born while they were at sea off this crew alone.

JIM LEHRER: No carrier has been out as long as this one.

MARK SHIELDS: No carrier has been out this long. And it was a symbolism that was heavy. The Abraham Lincoln; that did not go unnoticed. The fact that it was the only carrier that had been in both Afghanistan and Iraq -- but, you know, will it be a success? I thought of other great presidential moments. I thought of Jack Kennedy at Berlin in 1963. Ronald Reagan at Berlin in 1987 and Normandy....

JIM LEHRER: Mr. Gorbachev, bring down this wall.

MARK SHIELDS: One thing missing. I talked to professor Robert Schmuhl today, who's the author of "Stagecraft" and "Statecraft," and sort of an expert on this, and he pointed out two things to me. One, 9:00 Thursday night is the most viewed television hour of the entire week, so it was very shrewd scheduling on the part of the White House; they had their maximum audience then. But the other thing was there was not a memorable line that came from the speech. There wasn't "Ich bin ein Berliner". There was not a "tear down that wall." And I think we'll see this footage over and over again, probably with a voiceover of this is the president who is comfortable with his troops.

JIM LEHRER: Rather than hearing his words --

Assessing the criticisms of the speech

DAVID BROOKS: One of the nice things he did was talk about the action as the activation of America's true nation, not a Republican thing, not a Democratic thing. He talked about FDR's four freedoms, he talked about the Truman Doctrine; the Reagan Cold War policies. This -- he cast this as part of a long-term American project advancing the tide of democracy and on the Lincoln made researches to the Gettysburg Address as part of the founding of that.

JIM LEHRER: Some of the punditry suggested that the president and his handlers used these sailors and that aircraft carrier and all of the circumstances, props for his presidential reelection campaign -- cheap shot?

DAVID BROOKS: Not entirely. I went home last night in a terrible mood because I thought a lot of the pundits had ignored the sailors, had treated them as they were bunting in a big campaign event. Whereas the president paid tribute to the sailors. I wrote this up on a spasm of anger on the magazine's Web site and I got a lot of thoughtful commentaries -- well a minority of thoughtful commentaries -- some of which said the president started the politicization of this with the gimmick of flying in and treating it as a campaign prop. That's not an illegitimate shot.

It was -- some people who support the war believe he cheapened it in by flying in, by not delivering it from the Oval Office, by landing in military uniform, but I do think he at least paid tribute to those people unlike the pundits.

MARK SHIELDS: The most recurring criticism I heard of the president was the uniform, that you recall during the 2000 campaign, questions he was missing from the meetings in Alabama when he went to work on a political campaign there, didn't show up for reserve meetings. There was a question just exactly what his commitment was to the Texas Air National Guard, especially in the very important Battle of Amarillo. And so that was raised by some critic. I have flown in on to the Abraham Lincoln, I've spent a night on the Abraham Lincoln.

JIM LEHRER: I didn't remember watching you doing it live.

MARK SHIELDS: I didn't have the cameras. One shrewd thing the president did do when he got off in his flight suit was he had the helmet off, you know, the helmet. Because when you leave the helmet on, Condi Rice left the helmet on for the picture and nobody.... I don't care who it is --

JIM LEHRER: Looks good in a helmet?

MARK SHIELDS: Chuck Yeager doesn't look good. John Glenn didn't look good. I mean, it just dwarfs the person, so he was smart enough to do that. But sure, it is a legitimate question, but I don't think there is any question overall that last night was a smashing success politically for the president.

Looking ahead to the 2004 election

JIM LEHRER: And the polls, there is a new poll today, Washington Post/ABC Poll that shows the president enormously popular with the public, enormous confidence the public has in his ability to handle foreign affairs but not so much with domestic affairs. Why don't the two carry over?

MARK SHIELDS: Well, there are a number of things. The president said he wanted to be uniter not a divider when he ran. That hasn't worked out. It's his fault whether he has been a divisive figure as Democrats were charged or whether in fact the Democrats have been polarized. The president never got the boost out of this war that his father got for his leadership, in large part because his father did not have that same level of antipathy and opposition from the Democrats. And the reality is, Jim, if you're Karl Rove going into 2004, you want it to be about George W. Bush commander in chief on the deck of the Abraham Lincoln. You don't want to be about 6 percent unemployment today.

JIM LEHRER: Sure. But the Democrats, who are now the nine who want to take President Bush's job, are going to have a debate this weekend in South Carolina, are going to be talking about domestic things, are they not?

DAVID BROOKS: Right. And they'll have an advantage. They start way behind; 69 percent of the registered Democrats can't name one of the people running for the nomination. So they're just beginning.

JIM LEHRER: Now that is really being behind --

DAVID BROOKS: 9 percent is the John Kerry, they can name John Kerry tied with Al Gore, the number of people who still think Al Gore is running. So they're just starting. The advantage they have is that there have been two George Bushs. There has been the foreign policy Bush who has been a progressive, bold, very moralistic person -- somewhat taking Democratic rhetoric of human rights and liberation of peoples, using it for his own purposes and to me, reducing the Democrats to seeming somewhat churlish and conservative; but on the domestic side, the moral progressive, bold vision just hasn't carried over. The Republican domestic policy, the White House domestic policy is the same basic Republican orthodox policy that you had five years ago or ten years ago. There hasn't been sort of a new post-9/11 George Bush on domestic policy. To me, that's why he is still vulnerable [my emphasis]

Tags: david brooks, iraq war, george w bush, mark shields

Beltway blather about public debt

David "Bobo" Brooks and Sleepy Mark Shields hold forth here about the alleged horrors of public debt, with the unstated implications that people other than billionaires and star TV pundits will have to suffer in order to right this scary, scary debt problem. The liberal Sleepy Mark reflects of the great foresight of, uh, Ross Perot on debt:



Bobo thinks we should go to war in Libya. He doesn't mention any concerns about boosting the debt in connection with yet another neocon war wetdream. Sleepy Mark manages to state fairly coherently why that would be a seriously-to-disastrously bad idea. Bobo and his neocon friends never tire of advocating wars for other people for other people to kill and die in. Bobo is here spinning a boys-with-toys fantasy and making a quick-and-easy strike in Libya, which in neocon fantasy-world would then magically create democracy.

But this bipartisan consensus among the punditocracy and even, sad to say, in Congress and the White House that it's a dandy idea to slash domestic public outlays in the early stages of a fragile and slow-moving recovery is just remarkable for its disconnect with the practical needs of the moment.

Tags: david brooks, mark shields

Which side is David "Bobo" Brooks on?

On the side of the bosses and the reactionaries, as he always is.

The Wisconsin union fight has become a real "Which side are you on?" moment. Sleepy Mark Shields can be awfully weak as a political analyst. But he's at least on the democratic side of this issue. Bobo is doing his usual schtick, in this case promoting the most reactionary, anti-union position with a calm voice to make it "reasonable" by the degraded, completely unreasonable standards of the Beltway Village. Bobo sometimes has reasonable things to say. This isn't one of them. This is the PBS Newshour Political Wrap of 02/25/2011:



This PBS Newshour clip from the same day has a mediocre this-side-says-the-other-side-says chat about reactionary union-busting. But the first part of this clip shows Democratic members of the Wisconsin lower house dressed in union solidarity shirts chanting "Shame, shame" at the Republicans who had just voted to deny the basic right of union organizing to Wisconsin public employees. To hell with the Beltway Village version of "civility", whether it's the Bobo version or the Jon Stewart version. This is how representatives who get elected with the votes of working people should be acting:



Tags: david brooks, labor movement, mark shields

The crippled debate over phasing out Social Security among our political and media elite

Sleepy Mark Shields managed to recover a bit on the PBS Newshour Political Wrap of 02/11/2011 from what he did on the previous week's segment. Or rather, from what he didn't do. He and moderator Jim Lehrer let David "Bobo" Brooks get away with a typical anti-Social Security whopper about how cutting Social Security is vital to be Serious about cutting the federal deficit. This is the more recent segment. Social Security comes up in this one just after the 6:30 mark.



Here was Bobo's take on Social Security from the 02/04/2011 segment:

DAVID BROOKS: Eric Cantor has told me, he's told a million people, we are not shutting down the government.

And they are going to walk into the debt-ceiling fight knowing they are going to compromise. They will compromise. My problem is, which Mark just referenced, what are we going to cut? Because neither party has the guts to cut Medicare and Social Security and defense -- well, maybe defense, but not the big entitlements.

We're going to cut all the little things that, one, don't make any difference to the deficit, and do actually -- programs that actually work. So, early childhood education will probably get a whack. Funding for the sainted Corporation for Public Broadcasting will probably get a whack.

And all these things, National Science Foundation...

MARK SHIELDS: National Institute of Health.

DAVID BROOKS: National Institutes for Health. These are great programs that probably have bipartisan support, most of them. They are going to get a whack, because we don't have the guts to tackle the things that actually would make a difference to the deficit. [my emphasis]

Here's how Lehrer and Sleep Mark responded (or not) to Bobo's Social Security hooey:

JIM LEHRER: Do you agree with that?
MARK SHIELDS: I do. I do. I think Democrats are willing to take on defense. But there is no question that they are circling, and it's Alphonse and Gaston: You go first on the entitlements.
And that's really it.

But I do feel a sense that there is kind of a revitalization of the Simpson-Bowles, I mean, that all of a sudden, people are saying, well, maybe that wasn't the answer, but damn it, they did at least confront and engage it.

DAVID BROOKS: And there's a movement on Capitol Hill led by Mark Warner of -- and Saxby Chambliss, Democrat and Republican, to get some senators and say, let's get serious about this. We are going to have some tax increases. We're going to have some entitlement cuts.

And, of course, both are getting some pressure from their own party. But there is some building momentum. And I hope all the people who want to save great programs, like early childhood education and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, don't just plead, oh, don't cut me, don't cut me, actually say, cut that. We're going to get together, and we're going to say, you cut entitlements and save that, because, if you don't tackle the entitlements issue, all these good programs are going to get the shaft.

JIM LEHRER: OK.

Mark's sleepy reference to "Simpson-Bowles" is, of course, the Catfood Commission, where everyone could agree on cutting Social Security but not enough on everything else to put out an official report.

I actually think that the Feb. 4 version was more reflective of their actual attitudes. Probably the single biggest disconnect right now between the general public, on the one hand, and our political and media elites is over Social Security. There is a stunningly broad consensus among the official Serious People that Grandma should be eating catfood and that obsolete New Deal Social Security program has to go. On Feb. 4, Mark was groggy enough to totally agree with Bobo's Catfood Commission position.

They evidently were embarrassed enough by the criticism they got, including in the comments to the website on the Feb. 4 segment, to go through the motions of doing some actual reporting on the subject on Feb. 11. This was actually kind of a do-over of that part of the previous week's discussion:

DAVID BROOKS: Yes. I mean, the leadership and people like Paul Ryan are plenty conservative, and they want to scale back government, but they say cutting in the middle of a year just is problematic.

And a lot of the freshman said, we are going to cut $85 billion, or we're going to cut $100 billion, or whatever it is going to be. We're going to do some more serious cuts.

My big concern is that they are really unwilling to take on the stuff that seriously is contributing to the debt, which is Medicare, Social Security -- especially Medicare. And they are cutting all the stuff actually that people kind of like and that they -- and they're -- so they are going to end up cutting kind of effective programs that will have no long-term fiscal benefit.

And this is really the challenge the Republicans face. Are they going to cut all the stuff that is popular, and not solve the debt, which they talk about? And, right now, they are heading down that direction.

JIM LEHRER: Do you see a serious division here?

MARK SHIELDS: I do. Just -- I'm glad David made the point. I mean, Social Security is self-financing. I mean, it is not -- I mean, it -- there is a -- there is a funding problem with the baby boomers, no question about it.

But that -- when we talk about entitlements, I mean, the reality is that it is solvent. And, in fact, it's bankrolled the federal government, if you look at the borrowing from Social Security. [my emphasis]

Tags: david brooks, mark shields, social security

Daffy-ness is a requirement ...

... to be a star pundit. Like David "Bobo" Brooks. In Mr. Hamilton and Mr. Burke New York Times 01/27/2011, he's caught the Maureen Dowd disease and is typing up what hashing over some weird gender-role obsession. The one Bobo hears claim to be Edmund Burke and Alexander Hamilton.

But The Voices are clearly scamming poor Bobo. The Hamilton Voice expresses sputtering outrage over federal debt. The real Hamilton favored federal debt. It was the Jefferson Administration and his Treasury Secretary Albert Gallatin who first put the United States on an internationally credit-worthy basis by getting the debt under control. Deficits and debt were a whole different issue for the new country in the time of Hamilton and Jefferson than they are today, when the dollar is the world reserve currency in a floating exchange-rate system.

It's inevitable that history and current politics overlap. (Though it doesn't have to be psychotic ways.) One of the weirder symbolic twists in American history converted into political symbols happened with Hamilton. At some point - I've never sorted out just when - the use of "positive government" to protect the rights and social conditions of ordinary workers and farmers became known as the "Hamiltonian" approach of affirmative government. The Calvin Coolidge approach - "the business of America is business" - which insists on small government when it comes to restraining the power of predatory businesses and corporations, become known as "Jeffersonian" limited government. The New Deal, in this imagery, was the triumph of "Hamiltonian" government.

Politics is politics, and all that. I guess it worked as political symbols for somebody at some time.

But as a reading of the actual history of Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson, this is just cracked. Hamilton was a real American patriot and a personally decent guy. When the traitor Aaron Burr killed him in a duel, it was definitely the better man who perished.

But despite his support for the Constitution - which Jefferson also supported, contrary to some popular mythology - Hamilton was basically a monarchist. He didn't believe in popular self-government. He thought that government should primarily serve the class interests of the wealthy and was particularly interested in promoting manufacturing. He also believed that for the Constitutional system to work, it would require the Executive Branch to control the Legislative Branch by corruption. As his adversary Jefferson put it, Hamilton was personally scrupulously honest, but he also favored corruption as a way to control Congress.

The famous political battle between Jefferson and Hamilton over setting up the Bank of the United States, which the Washington Administration eventually did, was not primarily an argument on how best to manage the national currency or something like that. We didn't even have a single national currency until the Lincoln Administration. It was an argument over the nature of the democratic political system. Hamilton viewed the Bank as the main tool by which to corrupt Congress. And, in practice, it actually functioned that way. Andrew Jackson wasn't blowing smoke when he campaigned against the Bank of the United States as an anti-democratic tool wielded by the wealthy against the vast majority of the population.

Bobo's take on history - "Bobo-istory?" - is pretty sad. But it is interesting how he tries to position Obama in that debate between The Voices playing the classic English conservative (within the broader classical liberal tradition) Edmund Burke and Alexander Hamilton. I guess we should give Bobo credit, though, for not using the Hamilton-as-New-Dealer image. Instead he makes him into a Tea Partier, though, which is actually weirder. Burke, on the other hand, thinks Obama's the stuff:

... his State of the Union address demonstrated an admirable sense of moderation and continuity. His competitiveness initiatives build intelligently on the ones Bill Clinton spoke of in 1996 and the ones George W. Bush mentioned in 2006. They also demonstrate an exquisite realism.

I actually don't know quite what to make of Bobo's momentary slide in schizophrenia. My best guess is that the two Voices represent the range of what Bobo considers respectable political opinion.

One thing about the original Edmund Burke. We don't know exactly where he's buried. We know the cemetery, but not the actual gravesite. That's because shortly before his death in 1797, he gave instructions that his grave not be marked. His reasoning was that there could be a French-style Revolution in Britain at any moment. And that if the British Jacobins knew where he was buried they would dig up his corpse and, I don't know, do something with it.

I'm not sure whether the revolution fear or the grave-robbing fear was more over-wrought. But it kind of puts into perspective what it means to have the Voice Of Burke calls you a realist.

Tags: david brooks

Bobo and Honest Abe

Bobo Brooks, The Populist Addiction New York Times 01/25/10:

In fact, this country was built by anti-populists. It was built by people like Alexander Hamilton and Abraham Lincoln who rejected the idea that the national economy is fundamentally divided along class lines.

Abraham Lincoln, Annual Message to Congress 12/03/1861:

Labor is prior to and independent of capital. Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.

Tags: abraham lincoln, david brooks