Our Mr. fucking Brooks

In a reverse meritocracy like the latter day United States, a nation of right wing hacks and other assorted and sundry intellectually astigmatic spastics and assclowns, one would be hard-pressed to find a more myopic pea brain than David fucking Brooks. His last road apple dropped on the disinformation superhighway, one in which he claimed the 1% were more culturally refined than we (ugh) working class proles because they work while their impeccably groomed children were taking piano lessons, was more than your prehistoric political porcine could possibly bear in an election year. His latest one in today's NY Times, The Capitalism Debate, betrays once again Brooks' reputation for partisan tomfoolery and selective myopia and yours truly cannot remain silent.

I say, "selective myopia" because Brooks, in an unusually straightforward article that puts away the smoking jacket and dispenses with the brandy and cigars in the richly paneled Masterpiece Theater den, gets Obama dead to rights when he says,

Over the years of his presidency, Obama has not been a critic of globalization. There’s no real evidence that, when he’s off the campaign trail, he has any problem with outsourcing and offshoring. He has lavishly praised people like Steve Jobs who were prominent practitioners. He has hired people like Jeffrey Immelt, the chief executive of General Electric, whose company embodies the upsides of globalization. His economic advisers have generally touted the benefits of globalization even as they worked to help those who are hurt by its downsides.

Unfortunately, the 20/20 vision then immediately degenerates into Mr. Magoo territory when he gives Romney a free pass by then saying,

Romney is going to have to define a vision of modern capitalism. He’s going to have to separate his vision from the scandals and excesses we’ve seen over the last few years. He needs to define the kind of capitalist he is and why the country needs his virtues.

Let’s face it, he’s not a heroic entrepreneur. He’s an efficiency expert. It has been the business of his life to take companies that were mediocre and sclerotic and try to make them efficient and dynamic. It has been his job to be the corporate version of a personal trainer: take people who are puffy and self-indulgent and whip them into shape.

That’s his selling point: rigor and productivity.

I suppose this shouldn't surprise anyone who's similarly come to the realization that all throughout his "writing" career going back beyond when he worked for the Weekly Standard, our Mr. Brooks has been carefully cultivating a reputation of being Wall Street's resident cock-gobbling apologist and standard-bearer for the Overtonian Age of Centrism and Moral Equivalence.

Heavens to Betsy he should display that same Joe Louis pinpoint accuracy that took stinging jabs and body shots to Obama to a fellow right wing sociopath like Romney.

It's hard to see where and how "rigor and productivity" should be synonyms for a man who'd outsourced, as far as we know, over 100,000 jobs overseas, saddled acquired companies with massive debt, made those same companies file for bankruptcy then lay off in some cases over 1000 workers at a time as they were kicked out of their workplaces under the watchful eyes of armed guards.

To Mr. fucking Brooks, Mitt Romney is nothing more or less than the Dutch Uncle of Capitalism, "the corporate version of a personal trainer: take people who are puffy and self-indulgent and whip them into shape." Only to a spooge-hungry lick-jism like David Brooks could American jobs and benefits qualify as "puff(iness) and self-indulgen(ce)."

Only companies that "were mediocre and sclerotic" would have the audacity to bring jobs into an American community when they could be translated to millions by simply being offshored or outsourced or however Romney defines the Nanking-class raping of the American workforce to China, India or Mexico where the cheap labor is as good as finding lumps of gold in the streets.

Well, the fact is, Mr. fucking Brooks, the companies that Bain Capital (which Brooks was careful to mention exactly once) took over weren't all "mediocre and sclerotic". Many of them, such as Ampad, were doing fine until Romney and his vulture squadron descended on them like carrion and immediately began to load the company with debt through obscenely bloated management fees until the company finally had to file for bankruptcy and close its doors.

And Brooks is also eliding with all the adroitness of a one-legged cowboy trying to sidestep turds in a cow pasture that Romney just happened to make a personal fortune of a quarter billion dollars on peoples' pain, misery and the bad fortune of having their former employers open the door to Bain fucking Capital.

But all Mitt has to do in David fucking Brooks' funhouse mirror world is simply to tell people who've been living in a capitalist society what latter-day capitalism means. that if it's all explained to us by Uncle Mitt, then we'll look at our millions upon millions of outsourced jobs and millions upon millions of homes that have been repossessed in a more kindly and gentler way and we'll all come to realize that risky speculation with other peoples' money and rate-rigging is really just a genial way of doing business and that Occupy Wall Street really had them all wrong, those judgmental little hooligans.

He’s going to have to separate his vision from the scandals and excesses we’ve seen over the last few years. He needs to define the kind of capitalist he is and why the country needs his virtues.

Yes, Constant Reader, he actually said "virtues." Those dubious virtues include, among other things that Mr. David fucking Brooks refused to mention, owning companies such as Stericycle that go against the agenda of the right wing evangelical nut jobs Romney's been trying to court since 2007, refusing to release more than one year of his income taxes (while providing 23 to the McCain campaign that eventually went to a mouth-breather they obviously didn't vet as well as Romney) and even lying about when he actually left the company (his tenure at Bain has now been all but established as having lasted until at least 2002, the year he took control of the Olympics).

Only to a political mole like David fucking Brooks can these instances of Romney's inherent sliminess be considered "virtues" while Obama's own crony politics and rewarding big donors with sinecures is done only in the president's adopted home city of Chicago, the same city that hosted Milton Friedman and, by extension, David fucking Brooks, the economic policy that has all but doomed this country to neverending indentured servitude.