What David Brooks is really saying

h/t brendan calling

Too funny..................

Collins Brooks: Married to the Mob

A funny exchange.

Brooks is obviously wrestling with his insecurities around smart pretty women....

David Brooks: Newsflash, Obama is a Politician

When did we lose sight of Obama's profession? I am a huge Obama fan, but he is just a man, who has the right to change his mind.

He would be insane to embrace public financing. What changed? We changed. We became part of the process. WE got out volunteered AND sent money.

Like or not, Obama will need the money to counter the 527's. The Clintons and the Republicans have underestimated, the skinny black kid with the big ears.

The public campaign finance issue, is a non-issue.

Debt: The Great Seduction

David Brooks' article is timely. While we spend an inordinate amount of time on sex, we as a culture fail miserably discussing the subject of money.

Maybe because I grew up in a blue collar environment, money was a dirty subject. It was impolite to discuss money. The good news is that we were taught the importance of saving and not wasting money. It was evident to me that my parents did what they could to stretch a dollar but you could feel the anxiety and tension surrounding that activity.

With parental guidance, I to picked up a high school class that taught me how to manage a household budget. It was a semester long class but one of the more invaluable courses I ever took. We started out with an annual income, fixed monthly costs and were faced with possible purchases brought on my needs or wants. Physically writing out checks and balancing our checkbooks were incorporated in the course study.

As far as credit cards, it did not take the credit card companies long to figure out they could make more money off of the fees and interest rates. What exactly triggers those fees? These folks aren't predatory lenders?

More of my staff seek help from the EAP for credit counseling than other stress related issues.

Greedy bankers, uninformed homeowners are a recipe for the mess that we are in. No money down! Flip that house!Everyone wants to be Donald Trump. People forget that he had to be bailed out of bankruptcy.

What happened to buying a home?

Learning how to create a budget, manage finances and the perils of credit cards should be mandatory courses of study.

But if our government can't restrain itself, what can you expect from your citizenry?

David Brooks: Punk in the school yard

Brooks' column brings to mind the little Punk in the school yard. She is usually the little person with the biggest mouth. The target of her terror, the gentle giant. Now the gentle giant is in a lose lose situation. If he responds then he is being a bully. By ignoring her then he is wuss... What a nightmare.

My parents taught us it takes more courage to walk away from the little punk than to engage her..... Easier said than done.

Recess for the Democrats seems forever. Indiana PLEASE ring the bell.

Road to Cluster

Bush as he has done his entire life, has created messes for people smarter than he to clean up. Unfortunately, quite a few bright people have not provided sane HazMat policy for Iraq.

The chess pieces are young and not so young people who joined the military. It is those citizens who are on their second and third tour of duty. It is emotionally and physically impossible to expect more from these heroes.

The generals concede that they don't know what a win looks like. If you can't define a win how can define a loss.
Lee handed his sword to Grant. From whom do we received a sword?

On the six anniversary of 9/11 we have to ask, are we as a nation better off now than we were six years ago?

We must get Bush out of office before he starts world war III.

American Dream Defined

"The trucker I met Saturday in Virginia not only believed in the American Dream, he believed he had achieved it. He owned his own truck. He owned a nice house in Texas on a lake near the Louisiana border. His brother owned five trucks.

He probably drew certain conclusions from the way I dress and talk. But if he was at all curious about what I did, he didn’t show it, or didn’t want to veer off into topics where he wasn’t in control. Instead, he talked about the things any guy would want to put at the center of his life: highways, engines, hauling, dogs and food."

Hooray for the Trucker. How many folks get to do the job they actual like, let alone love? This gentlemen defined his rendition of the American Dream and is living it everyday.

Good for him.

Will the real Mitt Romney stand up?

"In interviews, Romney talks easily about books by Fareed Zakaria and Rory Stewart, but in public his frame of cultural reference is mostly limited to songs like “Whistle While You Work.” (Why do the Democratic candidates pretend to be smarter than they really are, while the Republicans pretend to be dumber?)

He is also the world’s worst culture warrior. George H. W. Bush’s son could resent the coastal cultural elites, but George Romney’s son just can’t. He’s a 1950s consensus man — he asked his grandkids to call him Ike, after his hero — who is play-acting at being Pat Buchanan. He’s unable to do anger. I asked him recently who he hated, and he dodged the question.

Finally, Romney’s real passions seem sparked by issues he rarely gets to talk about. When I asked him why the G.O.P. is in such bad straits, he said it’s because the party had ceded issues like the environment, education and health care to the Democrats.

Somehow the Romney campaign seems less like an authentic conservative campaign than an outsider’s view of what a conservative campaign should be. It oversimplifies everything, and underexploits the G.O.P.’s vestigial longing for efficient administration. I suspect the Romney campaign would do even better if it let the real Mitt Romney out to play."

Summertime Blues

"In the late 19th century, parents sometimes named their kids after prestigious jobs, like King, Lawyer, Author and Admiral. Now, children are more likely to bear the names of obsolete proletarian professions, Cooper, Carter, Tyler and Mason.

Wattenberg uses her blog to raise vital questions, such as should you give your child an unusual name that is Googleable, or a conventional one that is harder to track? But what’s most striking is the sheer variability of the trends she describes.

Naming fashion doesn’t just move a little. It swings back and forth. People who haven’t spent a nanosecond thinking about the letter K get swept up in a social contagion and suddenly they’ve got a Keisha and a Kody. They may think they’re making an individual statement, but in fact their choices are shaped by the networks around them.

Furthermore, if you just looked at names, you would conclude that American culture once had a definable core — signified by all those Anglo names like Mary, Robert, John and William. But over the past few decades, that Anglo core is harder to find. In the world of niche naming, there is no clearly identifiable mainstream.

For the past few decades, the White House has been occupied by George, William, George, Ronald, James and Richard. Those pillars are crumbling. Pluralism is here."


Its August, those who can are on holiday. Based on this column, Brooks is phoning it in.

Obama v Edwards Policies for the Poor

"If I had to choose between the two, I guess I’d go with the Obama plan. I’d lean that way because Obama seems to have a more developed view of social capital. Edwards offers vouchers, job training and vows to create a million temporary public-sector jobs. Obama agrees, but takes fuller advantage of home visits, parental counseling, mentoring programs and other relationship-building efforts.

The Obama policy provides more face-to-face contact with people who can offer praise or disapproval. Rising out of poverty is difficult — even when there are jobs and good schools. It’s hard to focus on a distant degree or home purchase. But human beings have a strong desire for approval and can accomplish a lot with daily doses of praise and censure. Standards of behavior are contagious that way.

A neighborhood is a moral ecosystem, and Obama, the former community organizer, seems to have a better feel for that. It’s not only policies we’re looking for in selecting a leader, it’s a sense of how the world works. Obama’s plan isn’t a sure-fire cure for poverty, but it does reveal an awareness of the supple forces that can’t be measured and seen."


Someone from the mainstream media is focusing on a REAL issue. It's about time.

Brooks' Uphill Struggle

While not a fan of Senator Clinton, it brings me joy knowing her lead in the polls continues to surprise "beltway insiders."

Economic Reality According to Brooks

"If you’ve paid attention to the presidential campaign, you’ve heard the neopopulist story line. C.E.O.’s are seeing their incomes skyrocket while the middle class gets squeezed. The tides of globalization work against average Americans while most of the benefits go to the top 1 percent.


This story is not entirely wrong, but it is incredibly simple-minded."

I believe Brooks' interpretation of the facts is a tad simple-minded. Ask the person with a college degree and the accompanying debt their his or her version of the global economy.

David Brooks will leave the bar solo

The historical rules that Mr. Brooks speaks of involved women who were not expected to be in a position to take care of themselves emotionally & financially. So they would not become old maids, women were married off early, if they actually graduated high school.

Many women who went to college did so for the express purpose of finding a husband. I would love to see a survey of women who put up with crap because they were not capable of supporting themselves. Worse, were the women who did all of the things society ( I would love to meet these faceless rule makers.) expected of them only to be traded in for a younger, thinner, more interesting version. Of course this behavior is just dandy. You really don't think the children that hailed from this mess weren't affected?

So when women get into and stay in relationships because they want to be, not because they are bogged down by financial chains this makes them angry?

Mr. Brooks with this attitude, after a night out, you would go home to the comfort of your hand.

End of Integration

How can you end what never began?

Brooks: Farce over? I don't think so

Last time I checked lying to the Feds is a crime. 30 months a harsh sentence? Ask the kid in Atlanta, facing 10 years for having consensual sex with one of his peers what's harsh.

In Mr. Brooks little world, I guess someone who looks like him gets nailed for a crime, it is a little harsh.

The only farce is Shrub's presidency. Even the 26% of the population who still support him, don't recall elected Cheney as the POTUS.

Brooks: New World Order

"In the future, Kagan concludes, the U.S. is going to have to stabilize regional conflicts and gradually push back against the autocratic tide. The U.S. will also remain the most ardent champion of liberty in the face of Islamist anti-modernism. American predominance is not a danger. It’s the only thing standing between us and regression to a more dangerous world.

For what it’s worth, I’d say Ikenberry underestimates the power of nationalism. There’s little evidence that different nations with their contradictory moral cultures can really cooperate, except in utter crisis. But I’d also say Kagan underplays postnational threats. More than in the 19th century, security threats come in the form of global guerrillas, loose nukes and disintegrating nations.

Instead, we’re trapped in a hybrid world, in which many problems are postnational but the social structures are unavoidably national. The interesting bright spot is that both Ikenberry and Kagan believe in a Concert of Democracies, an emerging body where countries that do share values can rebut autocracy and consolidate their common success.

It’s a start."

Brooks: Next Cultural War?

"As the sociologist Manuel Castells generalized, “Elites are cosmopolitan, people are local.” People with university values favor intermingling. People with neighborhood values favor assimilation.

What’s made the clashes so poisonous is that many members of the educated class don’t even recognize that they are facing a rival philosophy. Many of them assume that anybody who disagrees with them on immigration and such must be driven by racism, insecurity or some primitive atavism. This smug attitude sends members of the communal, nationalistic side into fits of alienation and prickly defensiveness. It’s what makes many of them, in turn, so unpleasant.

The bottom line is that the immigration debate is part of a newer culture war that has succeeded the familiar and fading culture war. This longer culture war is not within the educated class. It’s not the ’60s versus the ’80s. It’s — to mimic Mark Lilla — between the people who have absorbed both the ’60s and the ’80s, and everyone else.

It’s between open, individualistic cosmopolitans and rooted nationalists. It’s between those who ride the tides of the cultural mainstream and those so driven by marginalization that they’re destroying the best compromise they will get."

David Brooks: Iraq ethnically cleansed save place

"This is now a success story: an ethnically cleansed safe place. Instead of a sort of managed soft partition that at least has a shot of transferring power to the best local people, we’re now getting machine-gun partition that transfers power to the most violent people. For Iraqis, the thug who rules your local gas station rules your life."

Brooks: Back to Basics

I really thought that Thompson would wait to the fall to jump in the fray. If Thompson campaigns on the "Back to Basics" theme, I sure will hear a feel good theme "Its morning in America."

All fluff but no substance. But the Republican base on the percentage of the population that still thinks Bush was right will rally around Thompson. God help us.

Brooks: Gore returns as Spock

I really need to read Gore's book for my own interpretation.