Beat Me, Whip Me, Make Me Write Bad Columns

They seem identical, but only one of these celebrities should teach your kids about "the bad touch".

Shorter David Brooks:

Machiavelli said that a leader should be feared as well as loved. If only President Obama would sit next to me at dinner, I could do both at once.

As happens every Tuesday and Friday, Bobo uses his column today to spread falsehoods. This time he alleges that any likely health insurance reform plan will be a budget buster.(It won't.) As well, he purposefully misconstrues the actions and intentions of Senators and Congresspersons who are pushing that reform, as well as engaging in some old "democrats are wimps" code-speak, but most of that is pretty obvious, so let's pass on to the larger point. With recent developments in mind, the old "Is he stupid or evil?" discussion takes on a whole new dimension when unraveling Bobo's New York Times Op-Ed pieces.

Look at what Bobo advocates in this column. Usually we would argue that he is A. Wishing for a tougher president*, and B. Referring to Blue Dog Blue Cross Democrats as "brave moderates"*¹ because of either partisan tendentiousness or simple ignorance. But after his recent confession regarding his odd ideas of proper dinner etiquette it is possible to see that Bobo is perfectly capable of telling himself that something which is not so, is, in effect, so. Further, that this new thing is so just because someone more powerful than he engaged in, as Professor Krugman puts it, a little "cognitive inner thigh regulatory capture", after which Bobo apparently feels it is his duty to help all his readers see that this new thing is, in fact, so, or at least his duty to apologize for it when it turns out that it is not so.

David Brooks' offering to the public discourse is an instructive example of the fact that stupidity and evil are not in conflict -- not even in the silly way in which the perfect is sometimes said to be the enemy of the good -- and that abject, craven submission to authority enables them to work quite well together.

*"Tougher" in this instance meaning "will put the screws to the poor", and presumably not "will be groping me from the fish course on through the cheese plate."

*^{¹Note to Bobo, you can't be a moderate while taking a stand against something 75% of Americans want. That puts you squarely in the extremist category. Somewhere between obstructionist and reactionary.}