David Brooks: Lying Elitist Jerk

I have always found David Brooks's condescending "reasonablyness" style in defending indefensible, mendacious, and mean-spirited Rightist policies annoying. Yesterday's column in the NYT (q.v.) was a particularly egregious example. In defense of his Rightist talking point that "everyone" needs to "share the pain," he claimed that "states with public employee unions tend to have fiscal problems."

Apart from the use of the weasel words "tend to," this statement is just plain false. Chris Hayes, substituting for Rachel Maddow on MSNBC last night, did a brilliant job of proving that this statement has no validity whatsoever. States with and without public collective bargaining are all over the map in terms of budget shortfalls. Moreover, as Brooks knows quite well, it isn't everyone he's referring to. He means essentially only working people, since rich people aren't anywhere nearly as much affected by state spending cuts as low to moderate income people, including most public employees.

More importantly, the whole concept that collective bargaining of public employees has anything to do with the fiscal problems of states is pure Right Wing propaganda and grossly intellectually dishonest. States' fiscal problems are demonstrably almost entirely caused by revenue shortfalls directly caused by the Wall Street Financial Collapse, as David Brooks, lying elitist jerk that he is, knows perfectly well. 

Text to movie version.