Using his "kung-fu grip," David Brooks demonstrates for the TV audience how he slices facts into misleading, deceptive pieces.
Jeff Koopersmith explains the function of David Brooks – and politico.com – in the current presidential race and today's poltical discourse.
March 28, 2008 – Lugano (apj.us) – To help you understand why David Brooks is so hell-bent on destroying Hillary Clinton you must look to his past and realize that he must hate himself.
Here we find a “nice Jewish boy” from Canada who ended up growing up with his family in Stuyvesant Town, a section of lower eastside Manhattan which is called by some “The projects for the middle class.”
“Stuy Town” is no Alphabet City as defined by riots in the 1980s and could not be described as a slum. The people, who live there today, and in the recent past, favored the area because rents were comparatively lower than elsewhere in the Big Apple and apartments generally larger than the average. It is located near the East River between 14th and 20th Street on the lower east side. It was not a really “happening” place when Brooks grew up there. It was built largely under the influence of Robert Moses, who had a kind of schizophrenic reputation as corrupt, a lover of open space, and a man with an imperial aroma. Stuyvesant Town is really a high rise assortment of 9,000 apartments in ugly buildings, stacked one on top of the other between lower Fifth Avenue and Avenue “C” and built after World War II to house homecoming veterans. It is a centerpiece of Robert Moses’ slum clearance projects that cast out thousands of the poorest New Yorker to make way for Metropolitan Life Insurance Company’s huge investment in the area. Met Life was more or less railroaded by Robert Moses to engage in this venture. In all, 600 buildings, containing 3,100 families, 500 stores and small factories, three churches, three schools, and two theaters, were destroyed to make way for what would become Brooks's home.
At the time, the development was a regional scandal. These buildings have karma, and Mr. Brooks picked up all the wrong kind.
Brooks, now 47 years old was born in 1961. He was a grade school kid during the Woodstock era and was hitting puberty at about the same time as Americans were being evacuated from Saigon. He ended up at a hotbed for what then passed as conservative thinking, the University of Chicago, and graduated in 1983 with a history degree. One might assume that he hungered for riches and to be near wealth with historical roots. Brooks was too naive at the start of his career and is too adolescent today to realize he doesn’t belong where he has ended up – a puppet of much smarter and far more fearsome propagandists.
Brooks's employment history defines his grown-up education. He started at one of the least liberal papers in New York, The Wall Street Journal. Later he joined the Neocon-controlled Weekly Standard and became a senior editor under the wing of giggling William Kristol. He was moving up.
Bill Kristol and comedic-in-his-stupidity television commentator Fred "The Weasel" Barnes are editors of the Weekly Standard with other controversial (read: factually-challenged) staff, including Tucker Carlson, David Frum, and Charles Krauthammer, a miserable right wing cretin.
Of course, Rupert Murdoch – the Dracula of ultra-right yellow journalism – owns the Weekly Standard. It loses money for Murdoch, but it offers him just another of a dozen ways to mess with the minds of the ignorant by distorting the truth. Brooks was born for that.
Brooks moved on to Newsweek for some time, and then the Atlantic Monthly but it was the questionable “liberal” Jim Lehrer of PBS’s News Hour that made Brooks more prominent than he should be even as Brooks led the most easily duped of American intelligentsia down his garden path toward the Iraq War and worse.