Penn Skate

If you spend any time at all reading David Brooks -- and I can't in good conscience suggest that you do -- you know that the question is never, will he drop to his knees and subserviently suck off the wealthy and powerful in any given situation but whether he'll take the full porn star-style money shot to the face when it's all over. Nobody shills for the power structure like Brooks; not even his counterpart at the Times in imparting the enlightened view from the Upper East Side, Tom Friedman, even comes close. If he were a decent writer rather than a flatulent hack it could easily be argued that he takes shamelessness to an art form.

With all of that in mind, guess which side of the fence Brooks comes down on in the whole Penn State child rape and cover-up? In a piece in yesterday's Times with the breathtakingly ironic title "Let's All Feel Superior," Brooks cautions the little people against the "vanity" of voicing indignation in the direction of those who were aware of the horrors occurring right under their noses yet did nothing substantial to immediately put a stop to them -- the Penn State athletic and institutional Illuminati which includes Mike McQueary, Joe Paterno, Gary Schultz and Tim Curley. Employing a sense of moral relativism honed to a knife's edge by years of making excuses for Wall Street, Brooks over-intellectualizes the decision to, you know, do the right thing by bringing up motivated blindness, normalcy bias, the Rwandan genocide, Kitty Genovese and by generally raising his nose toward the heavens and beseeching only he who is without sin to cast the first stone.

It practically goes without saying that Brooks will give the automatic benefit of the doubt to those who've attained positions of authority and therefore know better and are made of higher-quality stuff than the average unwashed, but to indirectly condone the systemic concealment of child rape -- and the protection, inadvertently or not, of the rapist -- is new territory even for him. In the ethical purgatory Brooks and his anointed ilk inhabit, there are always acceptable rationalizations for why the powerful do what they do, regardless of which realm those powerful happen to move in or what it is they happen to be doing. His masturbating aloud by sternly scolding those who dare to look with disdain at a guy who didn't immediately put his fist in the face of a child rapist or at least go directly to the police is just more of Brooks being Brooks.

As usual, it's a lot of pseudo-cerebral horseshit that's meaningless to anyone who exists in the real world.

The fact is that whether any of us can conclusively say exactly what he or she would've done if confronted with the evil McQueary, Paterno, et al were aware of hardly matters. If you have a brain, a heart and a soul you would've done something more. Something right. And even if you wouldn't have, it in no way exculpates the actions of those who we already know didn't do all they should have. If you dropped the ball and didn't do the moral and human thing when put in that situation -- whether it be because you were blinded or scared, or because you wanted to cover your ass and the ass of your football program and school -- it would make you exactly the same as the people at Penn State who covered for Jerry Sandusky as he raped kids: wrong.

Assistants To the Quote of the Day

"A child of wealth, he is more at home with the immigrants and the lower-middle-class strivers, who share his straightforward belief in the Gospel of Success, than he is among members of the haute bourgeoisie, who are above it. Like many swashbuckler capitalists, he is essentially anti-elitist. Trump is no joke... (he is) the living, walking personification of the Gospel of Success."

-- David Brooks on Donald Trump

"Brooks is like a stalker who isn’t ashamed to be caught wearing just a t-shirt and stroking his dong outside some starlet’s window, only the starlet in this case is the whole class of rich Wall Street douchebags he’s spent his whole life worshipping."

-- Matt Taibbi on David Brooks

Quote of the Day

"But it strikes me that David Brooks actually enjoys his chosen profession. In fact, he strikes me as the kind of person who even in his spare time would pay a Leona Helmsley lookalike a thousand dollars to take a shit on his back. And here he is saying that the reason the poor and the middle classes are struggling is because they don’t work hard enough. Is this guy the best, or what? Does it get any better than this?"

-- Matt Taibbi in a hilarious, rude, and most of all dead-on piece on the New York Times' resident Randian David Brooks and his latest paean to the super-rich

Be sure and pay special attention to the part where Taibbi comes right out and says that the work that he, Brooks, and just about all political opinion journalists do may be time-consuming -- but it sure as hell can't be compared to digging ditches for a living.

That's the kind of observation that separates Taibbi from the insular pack of pompous, self-congratulatory windbags that's ruled the Beltway and New York City media establishments for decades.

Bonus Quote of the Day

"Although it is true that Haiti was just, like, five minutes ago a victim of a random earthquake that killed tens of thousands of people, I’m going to skip right past the fake mourning period and point out that Haitians are a bunch of lazy niggers who can’t keep their dongs in their pants and probably wouldn’t be pancaked under fifty tons of rubble if they had spent a little more time over the years listening to the clarion call of white progress, and learning to use a freaking T-square, instead of singing and dancing and dabbling in not-entirely-Christian religions and making babies all the fucking time. I know I’m supposed to respect other cultures and keep my mouth shut about this stuff, but my penis is only four and a third inches long when fully engorged and so I’m kind of at the end of my patience just generally, especially when it comes to 'progress-resistant' cultures."

-- Matt Taibbi "translating" David Brooks's comically elitist column on the Haitian earthquake aftermath and what it tells us about Haiti in general

And people say I gleefully blast gaping holes in propriety. That ticking sound you hear is both the bomb Taibbi just armed and the countdown to David Brooks demanding a formal apology.