The New York Times quota-conservative David Brooks gets a lot of flak from conservatives. They think he is too bland, truckling to his liberal readers.
Sure, he serves up a bland conservative dish for the liberal readers at the Times. Writing, as he does, for liberals, he doesn't beat them upside the head. He seasons his conservative thoughts to make them bearable to sensitive liberal palates. It's called communication.
The advantage of building trust with your liberal readers is that, occasionally, you can slip a real scorcher on to the liberal dinner table. Like yesterday's "Faustus Makes a Deal."
(Yes. Very sophisticated. The Temptation of Faust.)
Says Mephistopheles to the liberal Dr. Faust: Whaddya want, pal?
Faust asks not just for a nice liberal president but the whole enchilada:
- An economic crisis to discredit Wall Street and capitalism
- The smartest Democrat in the land as president
- A fabuloso $800 billion spending package
- A dream health care package for a grateful nation
- An environmental disaster to discredit Big Oil
Hey Faust, you got it!
Imagine that. Our liberal Faust got everything he wanted. But then everything went wrong! Hell is getting everything you ever wanted.
And, indeed, everything Dr. Faustus wished for came to pass. Yet he watched events unfold with growing horror. Not in 70 years had there been a sequence of events so perfectly designed to fortify liberalism. Yet the country wasn’t swinging to the left; it was swinging to the right!
Oh no! Not that!
You gotta hand it to David Brooks. Sometimes he hits them out of the park.
But, remembering that he's got to humor his liberal readers, he ends with a swipe at conservatives: Faust's soul, he sniggers, will spend all eternity trapped in Glenn Beck's microphone.
Yep. That's the same Glenn Beck that just propelled The Road to Serfdom to the top of the best-selling charts. Who could be buying it? Conservatives don't read books. At least not as far as anyone knows in liberal-dom.
No comments:
Post a Comment