Charles Pierces Brooks

Oh, golly, it was soooo worth the wait:

Both Klein and Brooks have taken to the public prints to reassure Willard Romney — and, by proxy, all of the country’s Willard Romneys — that he is being treated so terribly unfairly, darling, by that man in the White House who plainly does not know his place. First, we have Brooks, who never saw a plutocrat for whom he wouldn’t happily serve as a footstool….

“Romney is going to have to define a vision of modern capitalism. He’s going to have to separate his vision from the scandals and excesses we’ve seen over the last few years. He needs to define the kind of capitalist he is and why the country needs his virtues. Let’s face it, he’s not a heroic entrepreneur. He’s an efficiency expert. It has been the business of his life to take companies that were mediocre and sclerotic and try to make them efficient and dynamic. It has been his job to be the corporate version of a personal trainer: take people who are puffy and self-indulgent and whip them into shape. That’s his selling point: rigor and productivity. If he can build a capitalist vision around that, he’ll thrive. If not, he’s a punching bag.”

All those steelworkers, and the people at that paper company, they were puffy and self-indulgent — and not hunks of iron-reinforced man-flesh like, you know, David Brooks — and that’s why none of them have jobs anymore. People at the business end of the “system” that so charms David Brooks over the canapes know the real score: The “scandals and excesses” are the system. Take them away, and Romney is clipping coupons back in Michigan.

But wait!   There’s more!

Pierce also takes on Joe Klein too.  It’s a twofer.  (Moral Hazard, alas, has decided to take a day off)

Bliss, sheer bliss.  I shall savor it slowly while I’m eating my lunch to make it last.

All Very Predictable

Today, Atrios wrote:

I imagine I’ll write a version of this post a million times, but the people in charge are failures. If, in January 2009, I given a rough outline of what would happen in policy, the economy, and the financial system over the next 3.5 years, people would have thought I was crazy. No one would have believed that the people in charge would tolerate such sustained high unemployment. And yet they have. It is indeed a choice. They can make things better but they have chosen not to.

And on December 20, 2008, I wrote:

Face it, Obots.  Obama is the biggest triangulator we have ever had.  We know this because he has already won the election but he acts like he’s scared of his own shadow.  He has plenty of backup in Congress and an angry constituency that is ready to tar and feather any Republican that gets in his way.  What is stopping him from promising to rescind “don’t ask, don’t tell”, the Conscience Rule and Gitmo?  What is stopping him from loudly demanding that the Treasury account for every penny right this minute?  What is stopping him from getting ahead of the game on HOLC?  He’s not in office yet but there is no downside to adjusting his rhetoric so that he can ask and demand anything he wants.  He ran like Genghis Khan but if he wants to be a real Messaiah now, there is nothing Hillary or Bush or Rove or the outgoing Republicans can do about it.  He is *not* operating in the same environment as Bill Clinton.  In fact, everything has changed.  Everything but Obama’s approach to politics.

HE seems to be stuck in the triangulating past.

Why is that Glenn?  I’ll tell you why.  It’s because Obama has been bought and paid for.  And not by you.

It wasn’t that hard to figure out.  Everyone was hoping he would do the right thing.  But the writing was on the wall early in the primary season and it only got clearer as the year went on.  It was the way the campaign operated, who was giving him money, the propaganda and screaming at Hillary Clinton to get out of the race after she had racked up big wins on SuperTuesday and then Pennsylvania, Ohio, Texas, the misogynism directed at Hillary and Palin, the telecomm immunity bill after the RBC hearing forced Clinton to suspend her campaign.  If you weren’t smitten with Obama, it was a lot easier to read.  I suspect that women and working people (low and middle class alike) were a lot more literate with that kind of stuff.

I keep circling back to the primaries not because I am *trying* to be annoying but because it was all right there, staring us all in the face.  Everything you needed to know about Barack Obama and who he was really going to represent was right there. He wasn’t even hiding it all that well.  It’s just that if you were already infatuated with the guy, nothing he said or did was going to make you abandon him.  The dude was a nasty piece of work, his whole campaign was scripted and he reeked of corporate ladder climber.

The damage the primaries had on the political system is incalculable.  The primary votes were compromised and redistributed, the convention was rigged and now, we are stuck (I’d replace him but that’s just me) with a candidate who is not the Democrat he ran as.  The party has a huge wedge driven between its major constituencies.  The whole damn caucus doesn’t operate like it’s a Democratic caucus. How will we ever be able to piece all of this back together and make the nomination procedure trustworthy again? You can bet the Republicans are going to use this as a model for future electoral skullduggery.  All this sacrifice for the self-actualization of one man who hadn’t earned all of the support he was getting.  Was it worth it?

Of course, there was nothing to stop Obama if he’d wanted to be the biggest M&^*(F^()ing liberal this country has seen since FDR.  But right off the election, he was already lowering expectations because he never had any intention of being the reformer the left wanted or that the country desperately needed.

And, yes, Atrios, people thought I was crazy.  Being prematurely correct is a surefire way to get yourself banned from all the A list blogrolls so, you know, I’m not surprised that the left blogosphere is having a Condi Rice “no one could have imagined” moment.  The truth hurts and no one wanted to hear it in 2008.  I’m only relieved to see the people I respected the most finally coming to terms with it.