Every once in a while, the Rude Pundit reads something from
New York Times columnist David Brooks that is so ludicrously irrational that he wonders if Brooks was writing it while tripping balls on cheap acid and getting his asshole fingered by an overpriced Georgetown call girl. For in his latest "
column" (if by "column," you mean, "bidet"), after drawing on Thomas Hobbes's
Leviathan for some damn irrelevant point (which mostly seems to be, "Look, I read
Leviathan"), Brooks opines about how Democrats don't understand the people of America: "Many Democrats, as always, are caught in their insular liberal information loop. They think the polls are bad simply because the economy is bad. They tell each other health care is unpopular because the people aren’t sophisticated enough to understand it. Some believe they can still pass health care even if their candidate, Martha Coakley, loses the Senate race in Massachusetts on Tuesday."
And then Brooks, seeing colors where there should be letters and getting his prostate massaged, unleashes this: "That, of course, would be political suicide. It would be the act of a party so arrogant, elitist and contemptuous of popular wisdom that it would not deserve to govern. Marie Antoinette would applaud, but voters would rage."
So, just to get this straight, a year ago, we inaugurated a President who campaigned on health care reform more liberal than either of the bills passed in the House and Senate. Nearly every campaign speech, nearly every debate, nearly ever interview with candidate Barack Obama contained the promise of a push for universal health care for Americans. You couldn't not know about it unless you actually blocked out the words from your brain. And we voted him in with a Congress that had vast majorities from his party precisely because we wanted his agenda to pass. That's what we did, a year ago. And tonight, should Scott Brown win in Massachusetts because Martha Coakley sucked as a candidate, Barack Obama will still be president with vast Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress.
Yet for Brooks, it would be "arrogant, elitist and contemptuous" for Democrats to do exactly what they were elected to do a year ago. He'd be right if he was talking about the exact opposite. It's actually contemptuous of the American voters for Democrats to ignore the results of 2008 because all of a sudden people are getting shit-scared of actual change and not just the fantasy of change.
No, what actually needs to happen is that Americans need to stop being such pussies about transforming the country. Yeah, yeah, there's plenty of time to pile on the Democratic Party and President Obama. But for the moment, let's talk about what pathetic little bitches many Americans have become since the election. It's like an average-looking dude who finally gets a chance to fuck a supermodel and can't get it up, so he blames the supermodel for being so intimidatingly hot that his dick is scared of failure. No, asshole, it's your fault.
A year ago, so many Americans were joyous because it seemed like we were actually going to make a big-ass turnaround from the despair that the Bush years had brought us. We declared that we were all ready to work together to bring the country back from the edge of the abyss. But then all of a sudden the potential changes in things like the health care system or our approach to climate change or tax codes or gay rights made too many Americans get the heebie-jeebies and run away, back into the open hands of Republicans, who nuzzled them, offering them a teat to suckle, and said, "It'll be okay. We'll cut taxes and that'll solve everything. Just drink this milk and you'll lose every bit of courage you ever had and you'll forget that we want to do the same shit that fucked us up in the first place." Goddamn, it's so comforting to curl into the arms of a myth and just make the hard work go away.
Brooks says that Obama is scaring Americans because he's trying to solve too many problems: "Driven by circumstances and self-confidence, the president has made himself the star performer in the national drama. He has been ubiquitous, appearing everywhere, trying to overhaul most sectors of national life: finance, health, energy, automobiles and transportation, housing, and education, among others." But that's because all those things needed overhauling after the neglect and damage of the Bush administration.
You want symbolism? Let's go to the heart of it. If you head over to downtown Manhattan, you can finally see something beginning to sprout at the site of the fallen Twin Towers. That fucking hole was created eight and a half years ago under the presidency of George W. Bush. It took nearly five years to clear the debris. And only now does it look like something might some day replace the destruction. The new place is scheduled to open in 2013, a dozen years after the damage was done. Hell, it's not until then that we'll know if we even like the joint. You got that? They had to haul away the wreckage before the building could even start on the hole left behind.
Brooks and so many others of the commentariati think that Obama needs to bend even further to the whims of the cowardly public, pissing themselves at the sight of distant change to their lives. They are wrong. That would be arrogant. That would be the President placing his re-election above why he was actually elected in the first place.
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