Conservative David Brooks supports Obama’s education reform effort
David Brooks
When Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan came to office, they created a $4.3 billion Race to the Top fund. The idea was to use money to leverage change. The administration would put a pile of federal money on the table and award it to a few states that most aggressively embraced reform.
Read Brooks’ column “The Quiet Revolution“
David Brooks
Now that William Safire has succumbed, the only reasonable conservative worth listening to is David Brooks. Brooks takes on Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck and Bill O’Reilly in his column today.
What I take away from Brooks’ column is that he thinks these “men” are merely entertainers creating the illusion of real political power while the Republican party pees its pants every time one of these shock-jocks takes a poke at the party.
He’s undoubtedly correct.
As for Beck, I’m trying to get through his book “Common Sense.” It’s a difficult book to read. It’s full of sentences in all-caps and exclamation points. When you can’t write very well, you have to use these tricks to create the feeling that you’re outraged. Beck should look up how to use active verbs and descriptive nouns, but I digress. What also makes it a hard book to read is that I’m also reading Hemingway, so when I have to choose which book to read, Beck tends to lose.
But kudos to Brooks for standing up against Limbaugh, Hannity, Beck and O’Reilly. They all do a disservice to the political discourse in this nation and should not be given even the illusion of any real political power. They’re entertainers.
Glenn Beck’s Common Sense on Amazon
Al Franken’s Rush Limbaugh is a Big Fat Idiot on Amazon
Bill O’Reilly books on Amazon
Sean Hannity’s book Deliver Us from Evil: Defeating Terrorism, Despotism, and Liberalism on Amazon
David Brooks
David Brooks wrote today: We have tried to fight the Afghan war the easy way, and it hasn’t worked. Switching now to the McChrystal strategy is a difficult choice, and President Obama is right to take his time. But Obama was also right a few months ago when he declared, “This will not be quick, nor easy. But we must never forget: This is not a war of choice. This is a war of necessity. … This is fundamental to the defense of our people.”
Deconstructing Brooks: No, It’s Not About Race
David Brooks wrote today about race. He said that the 9.12 tea bagger protesters actually mingled with a group of African Americans who happened to be in the nation’s capitol celebrating their culture. For Brooks that anecdotal story of white folks and black folks hanging out is proof that race isn’t an issue.
“These two groups were from opposite ends of the political and cultural spectrum. They’d both been energized by eloquent speakers. Yet I couldn’t discern any tension between them. It was just different groups of people milling about like at any park or sports arena.”
Wow, so you’re saying that black people can wax eloquent too, just like whites, even though blacks come from a polar opposite of whites in terms of politics and culture. Yeah there’s no way an African American could have to deal with anything remotely similar to whites – total opposites – like black and white.
But you see these people didn’t start beating each other, so to Brooks racism isn’t an issue any more around here.
“There are other, equally important strains in American history that are far more germane to the current conflicts.”
Yep, nothing to see here, no racists. Nope. None. Immigration!
The real problem is those damn militant progressives trying to drop the hammer on the working man like they always do.
“And it has always had the same morality, which the historian Michael Kazin has called producerism. The idea is that free labor is the essence of Americanism. Hard-working ordinary people, who create wealth in material ways, are the moral backbone of the country. In this free, capitalist nation, people should be held responsible for their own output. Money should not be redistributed to those who do not work, and it should not be sucked off by condescending, manipulative elites.”
Yeah those left-wing fascists are ruining this great nation. It’s not those right-wing-pro-business-overt-capitalists who’ve been running the country since at least the eighteenth century. It’s those damn liberals and their filthy welfare, and their all like totally militant about it too. First it’s Social Security, then it’s Civil Rights and Medicare and now they those militant fascists want to provide health care to everyone – even blacks.
“Barack Obama leads a government of the highly educated. His movement includes urban politicians, academics, Hollywood donors and information-age professionals. In his first few months, he has fused federal power with Wall Street, the auto industry, the health care industries and the energy sector.”
Yeah Obama screwed up the economy back in 2007, became President in 2009, then maniacally instituted a federal takeover of all industry. Total commie bastard move.
“Given all of this, it was guaranteed that he would spark a populist backlash, regardless of his skin color. And it was guaranteed that this backlash would be ill mannered, conspiratorial and over the top — since these movements always are, whether they were led by Huey Long, Father Coughlin or anybody else.”
See, it’s always been this way. Well, of course, most of the stuff blamed on Obama actually started during the eight years George W. Bush ran the nation and none of these particular “progressives” gave a crap, but hey it has nothing to do with skin color, it’s just that Obama really pisses off a lot of people for no apparent reason. It’s not that he’s black though, because the tea baggers would have been protesting Bush’s expansion of the federal government, rising health care costs and sinking wages, but there just needed to be some match to ignite the fire in their bellies. What’s different? Hmmmm
“What we’re seeing is the latest iteration of that populist tendency and the militant progressive reaction to it. We now have a populist news media that exaggerates the importance of the Van Jones and Acorn stories to prove the elites are decadent and un-American, and we have a progressive news media that exaggerates stories like the Joe Wilson shout and the opposition to the Obama schools speech to show that small-town folks are dumb wackos.”
Wait, so the news media is populist and the tea baggers are progressive? I’m confused, I thought the news media were liberals and the tea baggers were conservatives, now they’re “militant progressives.”
“‘One could argue that this country is on the verge of a crisis of legitimacy,’ the economic blogger Arnold Kling writes. ‘The progressive elite is starting to dismiss rural white America as illegitimate, and vice versa.’”
I’m sorry but to refer to progressives as “elite” is too funny. Now sure there are progressives who are part of the elite, but real progressives and liberals are not part of the elite. Not if you define the elite as people who have all the real power in the nation, they certainly aren’t progressives. All throughout history the Establishment has violently crushed any and all leftist outbursts.
Now it’s true, as Brooks points out in his column, that during Andrew Jackson’s tenure as president, there was a strong push for more democratic control of government, but a) Jackson didn’t create that desire b) most people in the US couldn’t vote – so to overstate this fervor for democracy ignores the fact that blacks, Native Americans, women and anyone else that didn’t own land couldn’t vote.
But for Brooks these African Americans who mingled with these so-called progressives on 9.12 without murdering them is proof that race isn’t an issue. Nothing to see here.
“It’s not race. It’s another type of conflict, equally deep and old.”
I got your deep and old – right here.
We ain’t humble
In his column today David Brooks made a feeble attempt to convince readers that the US was once a humble nation. Unfortunately, our history does not back up his claim.
Brooks took a tiny sliver of American history and tried to paint the entire nation, and our past, with one heavy humble brush. Evidently he recently listened to an old radio program called “Command Performance” broadcast on the day World War II ended. The performers, rather than high-fiving each other over the victory, expressed humility in the face success.
But to suggest that we were once a humble nation is just ludicrous. At the time of the radio broadcast, millions of African Americans were living under the rule of the Jim Crow South. Before that they were slaves. And who should forget the genocide of the Native Americans who stood in our way to prosperity. And let’s not fail to remember Manifest Destiny which resulted in the stealing of about 40 percent of Mexico to make way for Texas, California, New Mexico, Arizona and Nevada.
No sir, this is not a nation known for its humility. We have, or at least our government, always pushed for an overtly aggressive oppression of anything that stood in our way. You can agree with it, or disagree with it, but you can’t deny our history. It’s all right there for everyone to see.
David Brooks coins the phrase “The Dime Standard”
On Wednesday night, Barack Obama delivered the finest speech of his presidency. The exposition of his health care views was clear and lively. The invocation of Teddy Kennedy was moving and effective. The rumination at the end about the American character and the role of government was the clearest summary of Obama’s political philosophy that he has yet given us.
I like David Brooks. He’s a conservative but not an ideologue. He’s a critical thinker. While I certainly don’t agree with everything he’s ever written, in today’s column about health care, “Let’s Get Fundamental,” he nailed it.
If I had a magic hour with the president, I’d tell him this is his ninth-inning chance. He can stay on the current path. He might be able to pass some incremental bill that extends coverage. But he won’t have tackled the fundamental problems that first drove him to this issue. He won’t have cut health care inflation. He won’t have prevented a voracious system from bankrupting the nation, defunding the schools, pushing down wages and impoverishing the young.
Brooks effectively argued that Obama has screwed up by trying to placate everyone – citizens and the health care industry. “Several months ago, President Obama made a promise: People with health insurance would be able to keep exactly what they have.”
His promise didn’t pacify those with health insurance and the industry hasn’t held back on blowing the current reform legislation to pieces.
Instead of true reform we got a series of bills that essentially cement the present system in place. The proposals do not fundamentally challenge the fee-for-service system. They don’t make Americans more accountable for their own health care spending. They don’t reduce costs. They just add more people into the mess we’ve got.
Obama needs to listen to Brooks.
This is not the time to get incremental. It’s the time to get fundamental. Reform the incentives. Make consumers accountable for spending. Make price information transparent. Reward health care, not health services. Do what you set out to do. Bring change.
