Babbling Brooks

David Brooks pleasures himself with his brain the way others... well, you know. His latest mea cogito announces its brilliance by coming up with an explanation for Obama's competitiveness in polls despite the foul mood of the country: it's about his modern manliness. How Brooksian.

I’d say that Obama is a slight underdog this year: the scuffling economy will grind away at voters. But his leadership style is keeping him afloat. He has defined a version of manliness that is postboomer in policy but preboomer in manners and reticence.

Really?

Well, sure, no one likes Mitt Romney very much; nor should they. But what the candidates are saying isn't important? C'mon, David, get your hand out of your skull. You'll get hair on your palm and go blind.

This election is totally about policy (or ought to be, in a world where propagandizing "news" media and billionaires' money weren't so pervasive): the reality of R policy vs their lies about it. It'll turn on message: whether Ds can lift the fog of R deception and get voters to make a positive choice between two diametrically different propositions. I'll keep saying it until someone listens: a vote for The Rominee is a vote against funding everything we need: education, environmental protection, banking regulation, infrastructure, health care, safety nets, research, in order to increase funding for defense and decrease taxes on the Mittful. It's true. It's a damn clear choice, and it's hard to believe that manners, of all things, are dispositive. What is dispositive is the ability of the right to deceive and distract, and their success in endumbing the electorate.

That's why it's close: if the election were about the actual choice, it's hard to believe Obama wouldn't be ahead everywhere, by a lot. The so-called reasonable voices on the right, like our Mr Brooks, refuse to argue the inarguable merits of R budgets, preferring to wander into the pseudointellectual brambles of rationalization. And their loudest and most listened-to voices keep collective eyes off the unbalanced ball, riling the base with falsity, convincing them of what is not, in order to get what they want for themselves at the expense of everyone else.

Manliness??? Riiiiight...