Brooks Watch

Regular readers of the Board of Pomposity may be familiar with my long standing antipathy towards New York Times Op-Ed writer David Brooks. At long last my bitter, shrill and unbalanced attacks are now paying off. Slate.com's David Plotz writes that "the liberal's conservative" has been turned on by his fellow pundits, speculating that the low quality of Brook's columns have brought this turn of events about. As if on cue, Mr. Brooks provided an sterling example of exactly what Plotz was talking about on Tuesday. In his latest opinion piece, "Bitter at the Top" Brooks describes how upper-income Americans are divided politically by education and culture. "Bitter at the Top" basically recycles the ideas of political analysts Ruy Teixeira and John Judis (whe's work he does cite) and the neoconservative theory of class conflict between a "new class" of professionals and the business elite. This column, like most of Brooks writing, is more or less just a long string of clichés that contributes nothing new or worthwhile*.


*The same could be said of the B of P, but this is a blog read by a handful of people, not a nationally published newspaper column.