David Brooks is Bad for My Blood Pressure

A couple of choice columns from the NY Times's resident conservative remind me why I should never, ever read him. Happily, in both cases, commenters hammered him. I'm not going to link to them; if you must read him, you can find the columns yourself.

• "Goodbye, Organization Man," published September 15, about the disappearance of people who wanted to get things done. One of his examples is opposition to terrorism, the other is the fight against Ebola. Of course there is no acknowledgement that we can't respond rapidly to crises such as the Ebola epidemic because his conservative buddies want to shrink government and drown it in the bathtub. I can't tell you how many significant public health projects, including research, have gone unfunded because of Republican hostility toward science, the shutdown, the sequestor, etc., etc.
• "Snap Out of It," published September 22, tells us that things really aren't that bad! They used to be worse! All we need is for rich people to behave in a less entitled fashion and the "porous elite" to govern once again. Nothing about global warming; nothing about massive economic inequality, poverty, unemployment, and hopelessness; nothing about the persistence of racism. Also, Republicans and Democrats should just stop hating each other. He seems completely unaware that the period of cooperation from 1945 to about 1980 was the anomaly in American history. Back in the 1850s, senators used to come to blows on the Senate floor!

I wonder where he stands on The Death of Klinghoffer. No, on second thought, I don't want to know.