"BoBo" Discovers Economic Populism - Film at 11

David Brooks opined as follows in the New York Times yesterday (trying to draw a parallel between our current economic difficulties and our country’s history)…

When economic values did erode, the ruling establishment tried to restore balance. After the Gilded Age, Theodore Roosevelt (who ventured west to counteract the softness of his upbringing) led a crackdown on financial self-indulgence. The Protestant establishment had many failings, but it was not decadent. The old WASPs were notoriously cheap, sent their children to Spartan boarding schools, and insisted on financial sobriety.

Over the past few years, however, there clearly has been an erosion in the country’s financial values. This erosion has happened at a time when the country’s cultural monitors were busy with other things. They were off fighting a culture war about prayer in schools, “Piss Christ” and the theory of evolution. They were arguing about sex and the separation of church and state, oblivious to the large erosion of economic values happening under their feet.

(Actually, in the matter of TR, he “ventured West” in response to the grief of losing both his first wife, Alice, and his mother, the former Mittie Bulloch, within hours of each other on the same day in February 1884; though he grew up sickly, there was no “softness” in his upbringing…amazes me that Brooks actually gets paid to concoct this drivel, particularly the part about the “trusts” – think Goldman Sachs, AIG, Skank of America, and Shitty Group for Roosevelt’s time – being “not decadent.”)

However, it is beyond pathetic for Brooks to claim that “financial values” were somehow ignored while those sheep-like “values voters” preoccupied themselves with being hoodwinked by Bushco, particularly given that BoBo was one of the biggest cheerleaders for Dubya’s “ownership society.”

As noted here…

In his (2004) State of the Union address, the president will announce measures to foster job creation. In the meantime, he is talking about what he calls the Ownership Society.

This is a bundle of proposals that treat workers as self-reliant pioneers who rise through several employers and careers. To thrive, these pioneers need survival tools. They need to own their own capital reserves, their own retraining programs, their own pensions and their own health insurance.

Administration officials are talking about giving unemployed workers personal re-employment accounts, which they could spend on training, child care, a car, a move to a place with more jobs, or whatever else they think would benefit them.

President Bush has a proposal to combine and simplify the confusing morass of government savings programs and give individuals greater control over how they want to spend their tax-sheltered savings. Administration officials hope, in a second term, to let individuals control part of their Social Security pensions and perhaps even their medical savings accounts.

Yeah, well, I think we know how that turned out; as Joseph A. Palermo of HuffPo noted here…

I just wish David Brooks and Richard Stevenson and Steve Moore and Grover Norquist and George W. Bush and the Club for Growth and Americans for Tax Reform and the Cato Institute and the Wall Street Journal and all of the other class warfare enthusiasts will have the guts to finally admit that their economic forecasts and predictions were wrong. I wish they would admit that their radical privatization, deregulation, tax cuts for the wealthiest people and corporations, and all of the other neo-liberal claptrap they've rammed down our throats in recent years -- from Reaganomics and Rubinomics to Bush's kleptonomics -- have resulted in huge budget deficits, record national debt, scandals and rip-offs, trade imbalances, stock market sell offs, and inflation.

Welcome to the world of the George W. Bush recession!

Hey, David Brooks, What happened to your "ownership society?"

And from here (where Brooks claims that conservatives are "epistemologically modest" and “liberalism will suffer a grievous blow” if Obama fails and “conservatives will be called upon to restore order and sanity”)…

There was no "epistemological modesty" involved when Bush placed loyalty above competence and let lobbyists and other special interests loose in Washington, or when he launched a foolish and ill-planned war in an attempt to transform the entire Middle East. And let us not forget that Brooks himself was an enthusiastic supporter of these policies; I guess he forgot his Burke back when his party was in power.

As noted here, though (h/t Atrios), I suppose this is part of “backwards week” by the Times, with not only Brooks now pretending to care about economic equality, but a certain Tom “Suck. On. This.” Friedman now claiming that “the Right” hounded Former President Clinton mercilessly over the supposed Whitewater scandal (true, I know), forgetting his newspaper’s role in that whole inquisition.

(Also, I suppose this is somewhat amusing, though I didn’t get the whole “Put Kids On Bus” thing.)