Bobo's Paradise Lost

I was listening to NPR in the car yesterday when David Brooks came on and started blathering in his usual vein, revealing with every word his love for the establishment in Washington and his disdain for the proles, and pushing Broderism with all his might. So I was very pleased to see Glenn Greenwald dissect him in great detail in his latest post - David Brooks reveals the mentality of the Beltway journalist:

Here we see the full expression of one of the most predominant attributes of the contemporary Beltway journalist: because they are integral members of the Washington establishment, rather than watchdogs over it, they are incapable of finding fault with political power and they thus reflexively defend it and want it to remain unchanged.

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It's amazing how explicitly Brooks here is endorsing -- and demanding -- deliberate deceit of the public. There is, for obvious reasons, extreme anger among the American citizenry towards the piggish sleaze, systematic corruption, and wholesale destruction permeating the political establishment and our political and financial elites. In order to pacify those sentiments, political elites tolerated, perhaps even desired, a presidential candidate with credible outsider pretenses who claimed to empathize with that popular anger and who wanted to combat the political elites who were the targets of it -- but only on the condition that he didn't really mean any of it, that it was all just a means to deceive people into believing that they still live in some sort of responsive democracy and they retain even a minimal ability to shape what the Government does. The anti-Washington rhetoric Obama was spouting was tolerated by media elites only to the extent that none of it was sincere.

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What makes this journalistic servitude to the Washington establishment most repellent is that these same pundits generally -- and David Brooks in particular -- endlessly hold themselves out as the Spokespeople of the Ordinary American, even as they work tirelessly to protect the Washington political class from their beliefs, interests and sentiments. That's how people like David Brooks pile media deceit ("we speak for ordinary Americans") on top of political deceit (we view campaign commitments as "blather" to keep the masses satiated and quiet).

The most significant fact of American political life is that political journalists (of all people) see their role primarily as defenders of, servants to, spokespeople for the Washington establishment. That's how they obtain all of their rewards and remain relevant. The concept of journalists as watchdogs over political power has been turned completely on its head by power-revering servants like David Brooks, who is anything but atypical (indeed, there's a whole new generation of Beltway journalists who have learned and are eagerly replicating this model). Brooks is about as typical and illustrative as it gets. They benefit substantially from the prevailing rules of political power and, thus, their only concern is to preserve and strengthen it and protect it from the growing dissatisfaction and anger of the peasant class. The more they do that, the more they are rewarded.

Read the whole thing, the links within, and the comments....

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