David Brooks, the conservative New York Times columnist who speaks for the little guy who eats at the Applebee's salad bar, has figured out (1/29/10) what Barack Obama ought to do:

Force the country to accept common sacrifice.  This is the issue that unlocks everything else.... Establish your credibility and offer to raise taxes on the lower 98 percent.

At a time of 10 percent unemployment,  when the median wage for male workers is lower than it was in 1974, Brooks has a solution: Let them not eat so much cake.

Amy Wilentz has a strong critique of the media in her column in the new issue of the Nation (2/8/10).  Starting with the New York Times' David Brooks (1/15/10; see FAIR Blog, 1/15/10), she demolishes his facile comparison of Haiti and Barbados ("Why is Haiti so poor? Well, it has a history of oppression, slavery and colonialism. But so does Barbados, and Barbados is doing pretty well") and then moves on:

Brooks goes on to discuss the Haitian family, seemingly basing his argument on a book by Lawrence Harrison, a conservative cultural critic who also knows nothing about Haiti. "Child-rearing practices" in Haiti, Brooks writes, "often involve neglect in the early years and harsh retribution when kids hit 9 or 10." I don't know where this assertion comes from, but it reminds me of nothing so much as Daniel Patrick Moynihan's controversial and misguided report on the black family in the 1960s. I've never seen either of these child-rearing practices in my two decades of living in and covering Haiti. In fact, I see more parents carrying small children around in Haiti's markets than I do at the farmers' markets in Los Angeles. You can't write these kinds of things about people whose culture and nation you respect. Nor would an editor permit you to say such things blithely about people who are considered our equals or are able to respond in equally august publications. Right now, the Haitians cannot--they're too busy getting water for their neglected children.

Wilentz then turns to the Washington Post's Anne Applebaum (1/18/10):

She opens her piece (as she so often does) by telling us about herself; her reactions are important to her: "For the past several days, I have found myself unable to look at the photographs from Haiti. I have also found that when I start an article datelined Port-au-Prince, I have to force myself to read to the end." Although she doesn't like to read about it, she knows what's at the heart of her reluctance: "I have no illusions about anyone's ability to help, for this...is a man-made disaster first and foremost, and so it will remain." She goes on to fault the weakness of Haiti's public institutions for the physical collapse of buildings, including the Presidential Palace (constructed by the Marines during the 1915-34 U.S. occupation of Haiti) and many other public edifices built by perfectly well-educated architects using the best practices of their day. It's a stunningly heartless argument.

I'm tempted to quote much more, but that's what links are for.

While many are opening their hearts and purses to Haiti's suffering, it’s important to note the corporate media's high profile exceptions. Televangelist Pat Robertson, carried on Disney's Family Channel, suggested Haiti invited the disaster by making a deal with the devil 200 years ago (FAIR Blog, 1/14/09). Radio big Rush Limbaugh discouraged donating to Haiti disaster relief on his January 13 show, saying:  "We've already donated to Haiti. It's called the U.S. income tax.... You just can’t keep throwing money at it." Meanwhile, Fox's Bill O'Reilly and New York Times columnist David Brooks each presented nauseatingly patronizing prescriptions for Haiti’s rehabilitation.

On his January 13 show, O'Reilly said the way to cure Haiti's economic and social problems was to impose discipline on Haitians:

My travels there have been illuminating. Only half the population can read and write. Unemployment's more than 50 percent. Most Haitians live on less than $2 a day. No matter how much charity is given, no matter how many good intentions there are, Haiti will remain chaotic until discipline is imposed.

In his January 15 Times column, David Brooks offered his prescription: To "fix"  their "progress-resistant culture," Haiti needs to develop "No Excuses countercultures," and turn to paternalism:

It's time to promote locally led paternalism. In this country, we first tried to tackle poverty by throwing money at it, just as we did abroad. Then we tried microcommunity efforts, just as we did abroad. But the programs that really work involve intrusive paternalism.

But according to the human rights group MADRE,  the U.S. has already tried that:

Ironically, Brooks' prescription of "intrusive paternalism" to "fix the culture," aptly sums up U.S. policy towards Haiti for the past 100 years: a brutal military occupation from 1915 to 1934; support for dictatorship from 1957 to 1986; and, more recently, the imposition of trade policies that have further impoverished people. What the outside world needs to "fix" is not Haitian culture, but its own self-serving policies that have left thousands of Haitians literally buried alive.

Bill Fletcher, executive editor of Black Commentator, had more to say on this subject on the latest edition of FAIR's radio show CounterSpin (1/15/10).

In his New York Times column, David Brooks cheers the rise of suburban independent voters in this week's midterms elections, crediting them with Republican victories in New Jersey and Virginia. Brooks has made a career out of singing the praises of suburban Americans, all the while suggesting that they are somewhat ignored. While liberals and conservatives have their own media machines and think tanks, Brooks writes:

Independents, who are the largest group in the electorate, don't have any of this. They don't have institutional affiliations. They don't look to certain activist lobbies for guidance. There aren't many commentators who come from an independent perspective.

If he's talking about centrists, it doesn't make much sense; actually, middle-of-the-road think tanks tend to dominate the media discussion.  (Perhaps Brooks has heard of Brookings?) But he tries to explain their significance this way:

The first thing to say is that this recession has hit the new suburbs hardest, exactly where independents are likely to live. According to a survey by the National Center for Suburban Studies at Hofstra University, 76 percent of suburbanites say they or someone they know have lost a job in the past year.

While that does sound suspiciously like a think tank catering to, well, those think tank-less independents, are those numbers very alarming? An Ipsos/Reuters survey from June found that 80 percent of Americans knew someone who lost a job. A July Marist poll on New York state residents found that "82 percent of city voters and 79 percent of those in the suburbs" knew someone who'd lost a job in the past six months. Maybe Brooks' suburbs aren't so special after all.

Dean Baker (Beat the Press, 7/21/09) has synopsized the latest fiasco of a David Brooks column under the headline "David Brooks Wanted Tax Increases to Pay for Stimulus"--since, Baker writes, "that is presumably the implication of his complaint that the Democrats paid for the stimulus package 'with borrowed money.'"

Predictably, "this is not the only peculiar item in his column. He also claims that only 11 percent of the stimulus will be spent in the first seven months of the program." Even though, as economist Baker explains, the "Congressional Budget Office puts the figure at 20 percent, which doesn't seem bad for a program that is just getting started and should be spent out over time in any case." And

then, in full Republican talking point mode, Brooks tells us:

The House [health care] bill adds $239 billion to the federal deficit during the first 10 years, according to the Congressional Budget Office. It would pummel small businesses with an 8 percent payroll penalty. It would jack America's top tax rate above those in Italy and France. Top earners in New York and California would be giving more than 55 percent of earnings to one government entity or another.

Let's see if we can rewrite this slightly:

The House bill adds an amount equivalent to 10 percent of the spending on the Iraq and Afghan wars to the federal deficit during the first 10 years, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Some small businesses will end up converting as much as 8 percent of their wage bill into healthcare insurance for their workers. The richest 1 percent will see an increase in their marginal tax rate, but it will still be lower than in most European countries. And the effective marginal tax rate for the wealthy will still be far lower than the marginal tax rate and reduction in benefits that most moderate income families face.

Baker's version of the same points renders somewhat silly the sentiment he attributes to Brooks' screed: "Are you scared?"

In a typically half-empty David Brooks piece (3/13/09), the columnist praises Barack Obama for embracing "rigor" in education policy, for endorsing "testing and accountability," for "mak[ing] sure results have consequences." He complains about the "education establishment’s ability to evade the consequences of data" and that watered-down proficiency standards mean that "parents think their own schools are much better than they are." He commends Obama's commitment to "use data to make decisions," and Education Secretary opposition to "ignoring failure."

But Brooks says many doubt whether Obama "has the courage to follow through" on these principles, and point to "the way the president has already caved in on the D.C. vouchers case":

Democrats in Congress just killed an experiment that gives 1,700 poor Washington kids school vouchers. They even refused to grandfather in the kids already in the program, so those children will be ripped away from their mentors and friends. The idea was to cause maximum suffering, and 58 Senators voted for it.

Obama has, in fact, been shamefully quiet about this. But in the next weeks he’ll at least try to protect the kids now in the program.

The odd thing is that the D.C. voucher program is a very poor poster child for the importance of rigorous, data-driven education policy that rewards success and punishes failure. The students participating in the voucher program have been watched closely, and according to two Department of Education studies they aren't doing significantly better in reading or math than the peers they left behind in public school. The one bright spot that the studies found is that parents of kids in voucher schools report being more satisfied--in other words, "parents think their own schools are much better than they are."

"Rigorous" is not a word one would apply to Brooks' argument here.

Salon critic Glenn Greenwald's look (2/14/09, ad-viewing required) at the journalistic powerhouse that was a recent New York Times David Brooks-Gail Collins Internet "conversation" yields the Greenwald observation that "Brooks did an excellent job of explicitly demonstrating most everything that is relevant--and destructive--about the mentality of the standard Beltway journalist." Greenwald quotes Brooks being "really annoyed by... the withdrawal of Tom Daschle" and providing an alternate "word for lobbyists: experts. Some are sleazy and many are quite admirable, but the idea of trying to run Washington without them is absurd." Greenwald's response:

To David Brooks, lobbyists are nothing more than "experts" who provide important and helpful insight to legislators as they earnestly try to craft laws in the public interest. Not only are lobbyists a positive influence, but they're actually indispensable. The fact that these so-called "experts" are paid by the wealthiest corporate factions to ensure that the laws Congress passes are designed to serve their narrow, insular interests--and that this is accomplished by pouring money into the coffers of the very people who write the laws so that they're writing the laws that serve these interests--never makes it into Brooks' understanding of this process. Thus, he is baffled that anyone would find lobbyist-domination of our political process to be at all objectionable.

In Brooks' position Greenwald sees "the full expression of one of the most predominant attributes of the contemporary Beltway journalist"--which spells bad news for any reader tempted to take such creatures seriously: "Because they are integral members of the Washington establishment, rather than watchdogs over it, they are incapable of finding fault with political power and they thus reflexively defend it and want it to remain unchanged."

Read FAIR's magazine Extra!: "David Brooks vs. the Real World: Columnist Dreams Up His Own Reality" (9-10/08) by Steve Rendall

You see some absurd standards being set for how far President-elect Barack Obama should tip his cabinet to the right. Al Kamen in the Washington Post (11/7/07) writes that if "he's serious about this bipartisan thing...then he's going to have to do better than his predecessors, probably putting at least three non-D's in the cabinet ranks, or it will look much like same-old, same-old." He then suggests turning over the departments of State, Defense and Energy to Republicans--because nothing spells "change" like allowing the party in power to keep setting foreign, military and energy policy, does it?

Conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks (11/7/08) writes about "the [Obama] administration of my dreams":

They will actually believe in that stuff Obama says about postpartisan politics. That means there won’t just be a few token liberal Republicans in marginal jobs. There will be people like Robert Gates at Defense and Ray LaHood, Stuart Butler, Diane Ravitch, Douglas Holtz-Eakin and Jim Talent at other important jobs.

Douglas Holtz-Eakin? The McCain adviser who recently described Obama's "basic goal" as "taking money away from people who work for it and giving it to people who Barack Obama believes deserve it"? "Europeans call it socialism, Americans call it welfare, and Barack Obama calls it change"--that Douglas Holtz-Eakin?

Or Jim Talent, who declared less than three months ago that choosing Joe Biden as a running mate "demonstrates that the Obama campaign realizes that Senator Obama doesn’t have the foreign policy credentials or experience to be president"?

These are standards for being "serious" about post- or bipartisanship that are fundamentally non-serious.