"Has there been any indication that Barack Obama does not believe in the 'old-fashioned bourgeois virtues?' Has the man been anything but bourgeois to a fault? Has he not believed in 'order' so deeply he's sacrificed his presidency to its maintenance? Has he not been so 'self-disciplined' that he's regularly accused of being robotic? Let's leave aside the inflammatory rhetoric of 'personal responsibility': Has Barack Obama ever been accused of being late? And if not, where the hell does 'punctuality' come from?"
—Yowch. The Times David Brooks gets severely beaten down for writing a sentence that is "either frankly racist or frankly forgiving of racism."
Joe Biden strikes me as the CPT guy in the executive branch.
I'm surprised he didn't comment on Obama's athleticism and fast-twitch muscle fibers.
Wow. That's the kind of Brooks take-down I dream of writing when I'm sober.
@lawyergay: There are so many good ones. But this is definite best-of-class material.
sheeeeeeit
Maybe I'm missing some sort of dog-whistle intended for the left or the right, but I think it's perfectly clear what brooks is saying: That America is racist and that Obama is unable to fix that fact. Therefore, if he wants to win in 2012, he has to play into a racist frame.
I don't buy his argument, but this "takedown" sounds like somebody deliberately misreading him.
No, what Brooks is saying is that Obama has to be less of a lazy nigger (when in reality the man makes Jackie Robinson look like Malcolm X).
Hammerzeit, I think Junod covered that when he said the sentence might be \"forgiving of racism.\"
I don't buy it. Acknowledging it as a fact is not forgiving it. And without that (stretched) equivalence Junod's argument falls apart.
@hammerzeit: Actually, no, suggesting that one go along with bigotry to get along is, in fact, forgiving racism. "Well, shucks, it's just how these people are. Can't expect them to change."
Further, as Junod makes pretty clear, how the hell would Obama play more into the racist frame? How does he get any calmer, any more disciplined? Unless there's a stereotype of black men as somewhat stilted, brainy people who don't get easily riled up out here in Real America that no one told me about?
I would like to file a grievance on the "bad faith in America" construction. It might make sense in trend piece on the revival of existentialism, but not a "fuck you, hippies" jeremiad.
Thanks for this. Over the years, David Brooks has committed so much idiocy to paper that I simply stopped reading him. In fact today, for some reason, I was having a random David-Brooks-is-an-idiot thought when I remembered how he suggested that the solution for women juggling career and children was to put off starting a career until their child-rearing duties were over. Considering the horrendous economy and the fact that women feel the effects of ageism much earlier than men, good luck with that.
Uh, and some of us aren't independently wealthy and need jobs to pay bills?
… In the august pages of the greatest newspaper in the world…
Where does he get off making that claim? Maybe somebody should ask him what other newspapers he reads. Or if he's ever heard of Judith Miller.
I think Brooks is caught pretty red-handed tolerating racism. Plus the gratuitous weirdness, because punctuality? Wha?
But when Junod claims that "This sentence would never have been written about a white politician,", bullshit. I have been hearing irrational prejudice like that about us shiftless crackers at least as far back as the time my front porch collapsed and killed all those dogs.