OPINION:
ANALYSIS/OPINION:
If in the Land of the Blind, the one-eyed man is king, then columnist David Brooks of the New York Times is blind, deaf and dumb inside the Beltway.
In an election year where all the experts have been exactly wrong about absolutely everything, it really is something of a feat to be as spectacularly and enthusiastically wrong as Mr. Brooks.
This probably should not come as much of a surprise, given how highly revered the pundit-scribe is inside the Beltway. He serves as some kind of “Republican voice” for the New York Times and offers up nerdy commentary for “News Hour” on National People’s Television.
Mr. Brooks inducted himself into the Hall of Fame for the blind, deaf and dumb with a stupid and arrogant column he wrote last week in which he finally realized that Donald Trump is leading to become the Republican nominee for president.
Yes, this guy is supposed to be a political expert. If he were this clueless about baseball, he would not last 10 minutes as a sports commentator. Yet, in this world, he is hailed as some kind of genius. But it is what Mr. Brooks wrote after stating that firm grasp of the obvious that makes him so much more of a buffoon than his conception of Mr. Trump could ever be.
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The nomination of Mr. Trump, he said, is a “Joe McCarthy moment” and those supporting him “will be tainted forever.”
He then rattles off statistics revealing the hopelessness, desperation and isolation that so many Americans feel today — and have felt for a long time.
Always gasping to sound intelligent, Mr. Brooks terms this national despair “declinism.” Because at this moment in American history, what we really need is another stupid political pundit sounding intelligent while completely ignoring the hailstorm of misery all around him.
Discovering something amiss with the people, Mr. Brooks determines it is time to engage the problem.
“Trump’s success grew out of that pain, but he is not the right response to it,” Mr. Brooks writes. “The job for the rest of us is to figure out the right response.”
What??? You have just arrived six months late at the scene of a five-alarm fire caused by a long-brewing volcanic eruption in which millions of people are drowning in a sea of liquid fire and you, Mr. Brooks of the New York Times editorial department and National People’s Television, are telling the dog-tired firefighters to step aside — you will handle this.
Really??? And you are wearing a little plastic children’s fireman Halloween costume and your little truck has pedals and your hose doesn’t actually carry water, you arrogant little sniveler.
People are literally dying, Little Dave. People have hooked themselves on meth and heroin because they have no jobs. Because they have no work to do. They have no purpose in life. They have become dependents upon this great Federal Government of yours.
All these social programs that you espouse to make yourself feel better, all the lying, all the punditry has become a trap that is destroying lives and destroying relationships between people, families and their communities.
You mix in with that the rampant illegal immigration that steals jobs, deflates wages and spawns crime and you have a broiling powder keg. Oh, yeah, and then call anybody who is concerned about illegal immigration a “racist” and you can cast aside any hope of your precious civil discourse.
“I was surprised by Trump’s success because I’ve slipped into a bad pattern, spending large chunks of my life in the bourgeois strata — in professional circles with people with similar status and demographics to my own,” the insufferable gasbag wrote. “It takes an act of will to rip yourself out of that and go where you feel least comfortable.”
Oh yeah? You mean, like, what families across America are doing every single day confronting their sister, their son, their mother in the unholy clutches of addiction? You mean “least comfortable,” like going to the local church food pantry to get a week’s worth of canned goods?
Seriously, you don’t have to even leave the Beltway or Manhattan to see the kind of misery that is everywhere today.
“But this column is going to try to do that over the next months and years. We all have some responsibility to do one activity that leaps across the chasms of segmentation that afflict this country.”
Whatever. I don’t know what that means and neither do you, Mr. Brooks.
But don’t flatter yourself. Yes, you have been a part of the problem for a very long time and always will be. But America sure doesn’t need your help now. Please, just stay in your little “bourgeois strata” and leave us alone.
• Charles Hurt can be reached at charleshurt@live.com. Follow him on Twitter via @charleshurt.
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