Our Miss Brooks: Propaganda's Preening Popinjay

By Dan Hagen

David Brooks is what passes for an “intellectual” in the modern Republican Party — mind pickled in the conventional party line, phraseology well-practiced in pettifoggery, lips curled in a perpetual sneer at the downtrodden and permanently chapped from being clamped tight to George W. Bush’s bottom for a full decade.

Despite his moderate, even-handed tone, Brooks is always fundamentally dishonest, because the party man is of necessity a liar.

Hey, Brooks, tell us again how we simply MUST invade Iraq in order to save this nation from those awful, terrible, really bad, nonexistent Weapons of Mass Destruction, won't you? You're always peddling some ugly, plutocratic, warmongering fantasy for your corporate masters with a smoke-screen sniff of superiority, aren't you?

Illustration by Jim Hampton

Silly me. I always think it's wrong to get a million innocent people killed in a war you gin up based on lies. I guess I don't understand the sophisticated moral principle that lets you slaughter as many innocent people as you like, and then get the corporate media shills like David Brooks to cover it all up for you.

Brooks' little pseudo-profound, phony-baloney literary smoke screens for Republican ruthlessness demonstrate what might be called The Limits of Bullshit. He is GOP propaganda’s preening popinjay.

So why is he published? We have plenty of wise, courageous thinkers out there, but sadly, the corporate media doesn't care for them at all. The corporate media likes David Brooks, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter and Sarah Palin. The corporate media prefers intellectual whores and vicious morons — combined, whenever possible.

Empty, ugly, rabble-rousing symbols and bumper-sticker philosophies surround Republicans so thickly that the light of reality almost never reaches them anymore. Their party is America’s glaring national black hole, and their major problem is preventing the public at large from figuring that out. Brooks exists to provide them with intellectual cover.

I swear, I think these Republicans could skywrite "Fascism Forever!" in the American sky, and people would still refuse to see it. Brooks would write a pseudo-erudite column in the New York Times about how our eyes play tricks on us.

Brooks’ carefully cultivated selective blindness is so very useful to the billionaires he serves. You've got to love the way Republicans condemn ordinary Americans for wanting to secure decent wages, health care and retirement benefits through union representation or a social safety net, but see no problem with corporate crooks grabbing hundreds of billions through “deregulated” financial manipulations that ruin the national economy and benefit no one but the CEOs' Swiss bank accounts.

Sure, Brooks’ Wall Street masters may have wrecked the entire world economy with fraud, but that’s merely a cue for Brooks to suddenly turn “thoughtfully non-materialistic.” Let’s not overlook just how character-building it is for people to be without decent wages, jobs, retirement and health care. Up, up, up by those bootstraps, people.

The commoners whose union jobs have been killed by Republicans really ought to thank the billionaires and their handmaidens in the GOP for diverting America's wealth overseas and giving them this great opportunity at self-improvement from the ground up, don’t you think?

Union wages and benefits. What a filthy, socialist waste of those nice tax dollars that rich people could be rubbing on their genitals.

“Yes, isn't it JUST AWFUL, all that money these socialists waste on old people? They're all worn out, and the corporations can't even use them to sweep up any more, so they're just worth NOTHING, economically. Pass me the canapés, would you, dear? And DO try the Montrachet 1978 from Domaine de la Romanée-Conti. One of my dear little lobbyists gets it for me by the case. Would you like a glass, darling? Oh, Brooks. Brooks!!! Bring the tray over here, please.”

David Brooks is the stuffy butler in the tux and white gloves whose job it is to carefully wipe the right wing's fingerprints off the scene of any crime. He passes around the propaganda right along with those exquisite canapés. You simply must try them.