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Tuesday, July 5, 2011

Mr. Brooks, have you then no decency, sir?

  The right wing is agog today with the absolutely appalling column by David Brooks, the plantation NY TImes conservative, and his attack on the tea party's desire to quit the astronomical spending the Democrats and RINOs have indulged in recent years. 
  Brooks calls names to tea partiers, and suggests that they have no "moral decency" because they are unwilling to accept raising the debt ceiling.
  Brooks does not seem to understand that it never stops. 
  There's never enough for the big spenders of our money. 
  They're never satiated. 
  They always have new programs, new studies, new experiments, new tests, new everything, including new jets for themselves. 
  If we give them an inch, they demand a yard.
  Richard Epstein dissects the single instance of Obama's ridicule of corporate jet tax writeoffs, without acknowledging Obama's own luxury demands.
Recent estimates of the direct cost of flying Air Force One range from about $60,000 per hour on the low side to $181,000 per hour on the high side. None of these figures include the extensive advance planning and immense support services needed to coordinate activity on the ground, both in the United States and overseas. The presidential salary of $400,000 per year would be wiped out many times over if he had to pay, say, 10 percent of the jet’s direct costs.
 
Just think of the number of college scholarships and food inspection programs this nation could fund if it had the moral courage to make the president fly first-class commercial on international long hauls, take Amtrak for shorter trips, and use Skype for critical one-on-one negotiations. If the president could make this sacrifice for the nation, why can’t spoiled bank executives and industrial tycoons adopt similar cost saving measures?
   This elite criticism of the private sector is replicated over and over in Brooks's world, while Al Gore and the harbingers of doom jet themselves around the planet warning about jet carbon output and your lousy 4 bedroom houses, only to return to one of their mansions. In Gore's case, one of four:

  Obama's proposal to force Republican cuts to Medicare to achieve "balance" is a ridiculous attempt to paint conservatives as vicious, uncaring and selfish money mongers. Rather than cut the ACORN programs in the budget, it's more convenient to set up Republicans as the meanies who stole bread from the needy.
  It seems beyond Mr. Brooks's reach to understand that tea partiers are concerned about the future of Medicare and its ilk, and all the people who will be without any resources if these systems go under because of mismanagement and profligate spending.
  Brooks, who surely fancies himself one of the "intellectuals" and "scholars" he so admires and trusts, falls into the trap of placing himself above the commoner, the simple men and women like you and me with the low sloping foreheads (Lawsamercy, Did I really just write that?) who cannot understand real knowledge when they are confronted with it as presented by the intellectuals and scholars. 
  But let's actually let our eyes stroke the words of the anointed one at The NY Times:
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.
The members of this movement do not accept the logic of compromise, no matter how sweet the terms. If you ask them to raise taxes by an inch in order to cut government by a foot, they will say no. If you ask them to raise taxes by an inch to cut government by a yard, they will still say no.
The members of this movement do not accept the legitimacy of scholars and intellectual authorities.
  Brooks repeats the word normal several times, in reference to the Republicans. This is a way of infecting those who wish to curb spending with the media bacteria of idiocy.
  Brooks can't seem to understand that these are hard times for Americans who don't make the kind of money he does, that this terrible spending and waste eventually affects all Americans, even those who don't pay much or anything in taxes.
  Brooks, who hobnobs with political vampires and has the difficult occupation of lifting ten fingers to type a few silly words for a dead tree publication run by a few effete boors, can't seem to understand that people who spend their days working at real jobs  might want a little more control over their lives.
  And this "protest," as you call it, is more than psychological, though we haven't waged it before. It is about political and practical governance. It's also about patriotism and dark spiritual warfare.
  This you should know.
  The low sloping foreheads might want to keep the fruits of their labors.
  Perhaps Brooks doesn't understand that money represents time, for those of us who really work.
  Time represents our lives.
  When you steal our money for your ridiculously spendthrift and corrupt purposes, you steal our lives.
  And, that, sir, is something to which you have no right.
  So stay with your pansy, lily livered friends. Write your nonsensical, offensive columns about how naughty people are who disagree with you.
  Go to your parties; lift your little finger as you sip your fine aged wine.
  Swoon over the ministrations of The One's flirtation with you: effuse giddily about the right people and the right schools and the deep knowledge your "clean favoured and imperially slim" idol has about political philosophy, deeper than your own, a fact that you seem all too eager to pronounce to the world. Your sympathies lie with him, after all.
  You do that while we, the people of the pavement, work and wait for the light.
  Because that light sure ain't comin' from you, bud.
  You just ain't that bright.
  And we're just not that into you.

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