A little-known provision of David Brooks’s contract with the New York Times allows him to take one day a year off from comforting the comfortable to write the sort of stuff Bobos in Paradise shows he is/was capable of.
Brooks seems to have decided that today was the day.
Thoreau once said:
Among human beings, the judge whose words seal the fate of a man furthest into eternity is not he who merely pronounces the verdict of the law, but he, whoever he may be, who, from a love of truth, and unprejudiced by any custom or enactment of men, utters a true opinion or sentence concerning him. He it is that sentences him.
By that standard, Brooks gave Romney a triple Life Without Parole:
Romney was a precocious and gifted child. He uttered his first words (“I like to fire peopleâ€) at age 14 months, made his first gaffe at 15 months and purchased his first nursery school at 24 months. The school, highly leveraged, went under, but Romney made 24 million Jujubes on the deal.
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After streamlining his wife’s pregnancies down to six months each, Mitt helped Ann raise five perfect sons — Bip, Chip, Rip, Skip and Dip — who married identically tanned wives.
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If elected, he promises to bring all Americans together and make them feel inferior.
You needn’t read the whole thing, unless you happen to need a good, long, nasty laugh at the expense of a man who hasn’t been laughed at nearly enough in his overprivileged life.
I can’t believe that David Brooks wrote this. Literally, I can not believe it.
Is Woody Allen ghost writing for Brooks these days?
It was a hack. Probably by Anonymous.
I wonder whether this is the set-up for the even nastier Life of Obama that I am sure Brooks is itching to write.
My take is that Brooks is making fun of Romney’s critics by twisting some of their criticisms into absurdities. I think the comfortable will somehow find that very comforting. So he still has a chance to exercise that day-off option.
I’m with you. A friend asked me what mitt had done to piss off Bobo. I replied that this was just another deep wet kiss from Bobo in the kneeling position; if you think this hurts RMoney, you’ve got to be kidding yourself. This is the most human that the Rombot has ever seemed to be, and the few uncommitted voters are going to go away from having read it thinking that anyone who gets a ribbing like that is probably an ok guy after all.
+1 (Tim). That’s exactly how I read it. It just rings too phony to be real, biting, satire…
Alternate explanation (though likely too early): he’s decided that Romney’s going to lose.
It takes a LOT to get me to read a Brooks column. I can’t think of another writer who I find more intellectually dishonest. That said, “He developed a lifelong concern for the second homeless”, “After his mission, he attended Harvard, studying business, law, classics and philosophy, though intellectually his first love was always tax avoidance”, and “He barely won the 2012 Republican primaries after a grueling nine-month campaign, running unopposed” are absolutely inspired. Thank you for persuading me to read this one.
The article got exactly 666 comments. Not sure what that means, really.
Heh. It IS 666 comments on Brook’s NYT piece. I took a screen shot just now at 2:42 am, Aug. 29.
And Ronald Reagan’s middle name was Wilson, each name consisting of 6 lettters: 666.