Saturday, October 02, 2004

Bobo's Template

For the record, like most bloggers, I write my many screeds for free every damn day. I then go out and put a virtual sandwich board on myself and ask people to come read. Sort of pathetic, but there you are.

On a typical week, I put up more than 50 posts, about half the content comes from my own grey matter, such as it is.

Some of it hits, some of it misses.

There are plenty of other bloggers that write as well as me, that are as imaginative as me, many are better.

All of us...right, center, left, are cranking out material of a higher quality, for free, than that for which David Brooks is getting paid six-figures, and given the imprimatur of "pundit".

Yet the plain fact is, he is atrocious. Here is today's latest tripe.

I say atrocious not so much for his message, though the smarmy, tender-hearted, "fraternity member fascism" that he cranks out is pretty bad. He is, after all, the "Velvet Freeper".

No, the thing that is insulting, to people of all ideologies who write for fun and/or profit, is the way he sleepwalks through his columns and clearly makes little or no effort.

I find it hard to read Brooks' NY Times columns. This is not necessarily for their disturbing underlying message, but because they are all the same. Every damn column is evidently the product of a half-hour of effort tops, twice a week.

The world of Bobo is seemingly so full of obtaining appearance fee checks by being "the sober-minded nice guy of wingnuttery", that his principal job, NY Times Editorialist, is a mere afterthought.

I wrote a post parodying Brooks last week, find it here, that was well-received, which was my intent.

The disturbing thing is, how easy it was to write, how little time it took, how little thought was required, and how accurate the impression was.

It is far less a salute to my powers of perception, than a reflection of just how little David Brooks actually works at the task for which he is very handsomely paid.

I am not a trained writer. I have certainly never been paid because of my skills as a writer. I do not believe I have any real outstanding talent as a writer. I certainly have no one available to edit my posts.

And yet, I am a far better writer than Brooks is in the New York Times. And so are most political bloggers I have read. How much are we paid? How many other obligations do we have? Most of us certainly are not paid to have our little blogs, our little vanity projects.

I could say I do not mean to single out Brooks, for there are several other plainly lazy editorialists, including at his own newspaper. But I do mean to single him out.

Every Brooks column is the same hem-hawed, temperately phrased, vacuous piece of right-wing flummery. It is an insult to readers everywhere, for the "Pepperidge Farm Guy" of punditry to get a paycheck, let alone a lucrative one.

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