First came Colin Powell, who was once aptly called a “house negro” by none other than Harry Belafonte, demonstrating that service in the Bush Administration had given him a humbling reality check in more ways than one.  Although he must have been so stung by Belafonte’s remarks that he has now completely turned into a white person vaguely reminiscent of one of the box seat geezers on “The Muppet Show,” he still made a lot of sense, and showed some degree of vestigial dignity in pointing out the obvious fact that Cheney’s book was, well, unworthy of a former Vice President.  Powell, as you’ll recall, came by his war skepticism just as honestly as Cheney came by his relentless chickenhawkery; Powell served in his generation’s war (back when he was still black), and Cheney had five deferments and, famously, “other priorities.”  Well,  that’s the way the cookie crumbles.

Then came Lawrence Wilkerson, who served under Powell and sullied his reputation and that of his boss by allowing Powell to, metaphorically anyway, set his pants on fire before the UN in 2003, lying about WMD in Iraq.  He stated quite plainly that he would be happy to testify against Cheney as a war criminal if the Dick ever ends up in The Hague.  (Unlikely to happen…  Dick and Lynne know which countries to avoid as they spend their taxpayer-funded retirement and other ill-gotten gains at places like Jackson Hole and Dubai…)  This criticism is unlikely to sting all that much, since the guy worked for Powell, who we now know Cheney thought to be little more than a thinner Michael Moore.

My favorite response, though, came from fellow house negress Condi Rice, who whined, I kid you not, that Cheney had attacked her “integrity.”   You can’t make this stuff up, I tell you.  No one could have predicted, as it were, anyone attacking Condi’s fabled integrity.  Although she hasn’t yet turned white like Powell, her bootlicking response makes Powell look like Malcolm X: (from Reuters)

Rice said, “I am not going to question the vice president’s motives, because he is somebody with whom I had a good relationship and for whom I had, and still have, a great deal of respect.”

She did add that, contrary to Cheney’s telling, she wasn’t the crying kind, which is probably good considering how much she has to cry about (were she a morally functioning human), but aside from that, she pretty much let Cheney off the hook.  Who said there’s no honor among thieves?

As the criminals of the Bush Administration continue to roll out their immensely profitable (for them, not so much the publishers) books, it seems petty to remind them that the last bunch of books like this, from Watergate, were written in jail, and as such were a little more interesting.  As Oscar Wilde memorably put it, “the good end well, and the bad end badly.  That’s why they call it fiction.”  Cheney’s book may be a lot of things, but by Wilde’s standards, it certainly isn’t fiction.

Having had a somewhat longer commute than usual the past few weeks, I have once again become a daily New York Times reader, often to my considerable chagrin.  For the last 15 years or so, as my local newspaper, the Oregonian, got thinner and thinner, I readily coughed up the extra cash for something that would last longer than a cup of coffee and a trip to the bathroom.  My choices were the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and the Grey Lady, so I picked her.  It was, despite Maureen Dowd, Ben Stein, Tom Friedman, Judy Miller, Deborah Solomon, Elizabeth Bumiller, Frank Bruni, Jodi Wilgoren, and William Safire, not the worst choice I could have made.  After all, Paul Krugman’s lonely opposition to Bush’s onslaught on America will forever be remembered, if only for its singularity at the time, as a balm to many worried mornings of “smoke ‘em out” and whatnot.  Then, there was Frank Rich, whose fame (and astuteness) as a theater critic warranted him a reverent mention by the cynical playwright/murderer in Ira Levin’s “Deathtrap,” (a play I produced here in 1987), but he by then had blossomed into a searingly perceptive analyst of America’s Right (as well as the craven and compromised media that love it), which he continued to be until a couple of weeks ago, when he left to join New York Magazine.

It was a fitting move; New York Magazine, to which I subscribed for many years, was born out of the ashes of the New York Herald Tribune, whose Sunday magazine arose in the late 60′s, offering a haven for talent and journalism that the New York Times didn’t think was “fit to print.”  Seriously, a Sunday New York Times for SIX BUCKS without Frank Rich?  And a (hilariously inept) paywall, to boot?  Something, I thought, must be seriously wrong on 42nd street, and today, more evidence piles up.  Bob Herbert, it turns out, is bailing out as well.  Though Herbert was never my favorite columnist, his dogged focus on racial and economic injustice sometimes led him away from more stark and timely outrages and his earnest and plain-spoken style lacked the rapier wit of Krugman and Rich, in a paper laden with ads for furs, jewels and expensive watches, it was nice to read somebody who recognized, and compellingly wrote about, the very existence of poverty and injustice in America.  And now he’s gone, too.

This leaves an op/ed page feebly dotted with such glittering journalistic jewels as Maureen Dowd and Tom Friedman the only “liberals,” aside from Krugman (who has a day job at Princeton, thankfully), on a page so degraded that it unashamedly prints the execrable, adolescent caterwauling of Ross Douthat (!), who replaced the also pre-disgraced, but nonetheless hired, Bill Kristol in the right wing slot.   Pre-disgraced William Safire preceded them, so I guess there’s a pattern here…  At the New York Times, IOKIYAR rules.

The question, then, is who will replace them?  Unlike, say, The WaPoo, which is now primarily a Graham family enrichment scheme solely dedicated to promoting the Village values of war-making abroad and austerity at home, the NYT does depend on millions of Americans ponying up the cash to read it, and virtually none of these people do so because they like Ross Douthat and nuclear power.  No conservative would be caught dead spending two bucks daily, six bucks Sunday, for the “far left” New York Times, so it might be a good idea not to cater to them quite so much, at the expense of those who actually read and support the paper.

Newspapers are, by their nature, conservative institutions, in the true sense of the word, and that is why columnists like David Broder and Mike Royko, to name just a couple, continued writing until the grim reaper got them: readers develop relationships with columnists no wise publisher would ever want to sever.  Once, this arrangement was born of competitive pressures; in today’s monopolistic environment it survived, until recently, as tradition.  Those days are clearly over in this age when even big, once-powerful papers like the NYT struggle for survival, and let go the voices that personified them.

I don’t know who will replace Rich and Herbert, but if history is any guide, they will be disappointing, indeed.

UPDATE:  Well, it looks like Joe Nocera, one of a precious few good reporters in the business section, will be moving to the op/ed page, which is good, I guess, but it weakens the business section while not bringing any new voices to the paper as a whole.  On the bright side, such a move will surely save money…  Will they pass the savings on to their readers?

Today Ol’ Boner waxed (no pun intended) lyrical about the Free Market genius of the tanning industry, upon which he obviously relies for his rather distinctive appearance, and I couldn’t help but thinking such a weird statement would probably fly, poolside in Palm Springs, especially if he had a rubber flower on the side of his bathing cap, but still kind of fell flat with his intended audience.  You know, those who can’t afford to get fake tans, since they’re unemployed.   Putting it mildly, a lot of cocktailhags have been making asses of themselves lately; is it the weather?   Brewer went all ballistic about the same brown people who have undoubtedly been pouring her drinks into  pineapples all these years and clearly made herself look like the racist know-nothing she is in the process; Dowd got so pie-eyed that she actually wrote, no doubt with a lot of help from spellcheck and NYT editors, that Elena Kagan and Stanley McCrystal were (kind of) the same thing; Harman went to town declaring her primary opponent to be a terrorist,  and Quinn ruined two weddings and ended her unaccountably lengthy career with her drunken ramblings about her (mortified, and rightly estranged) family.

As a cocktailhag, I would like to offer these worthies a bit of advice, for the sake of the tribe.  1) Please consider issues about which you wish to expound before you hit the bottle.  Megalomania and drunkenness can contribute to less than clear thinking, and you only embarrass us all when you let loose so.  2) Excessive amounts of booze have become an unaffordable luxury for many Americans, none of whom have a fawning media that will flatteringly read your demented thoughts from the patterns in your vomit as you slip from incoherence into idiocy.  3)  Beer goggles only work one way.  Please make a note of it as you look at yourself in the mirror.

In the days before the civil rights movement, assimilationist African Americans often spoke of the “talented tenth” whom they thought would be their spokesmen and role models, while bemoaning the rhetorical, behavioral, and tactical excesses of the other 90%.  Suddenly, I know what they meant.  Hags, unless you want us to be a rightfully hated minority for time immemorial, please, pour yourself something, light up a More 120, and shut up.  You’re diminishing the brand.

I started wondering about this very human reaction to unpleasant reminders of choices that can’t be taken back, and how chagrined one feels to have been duped.  Which brings me, once again, to the firing of Dan Froomkin by Fred Hiatt at the WaPoo.  To Hiatt, Froomkin represented Hiatt’s Bush sign.  (Unfortunately, in this case, not just a sign, but dozens of enormous billboards and an armada of sky-writing airplanes….)  How could a guy who’d made such a credulous and public fool of himself for so long tolerate, in his own paper, not just a mute symbol, but a daily, damning barrage of “Nyah, nyah, nyah?”  Paul Krugman got it, no doubt from his own bitter experience at the NYT, where for some reason ol’ Pinch was even more cowardly than Hiatt, and just hid under the desk and hired Bill Kristol, while he kept the inconvenient Nobel Laureate around for “balance.”  Lord knows that the NYT’s credibility problems, from the ludicrous predictions of Tom Friedman and the addled irrelevancies of Maureen Dowd, to the flat-out malpractice of Judith Miller and wide-eyed cluelessness of Elisabeth Bumiller, could hardly be helped by summarily unloading one of the only columnists in his paper who was worth reading.

As luck would have it, Hiatt wasn’t similarly encumbered; pretty much all of his reporters were already widely recognized as mindless, corrupt shills, his paper’s every editorial position had been disastrously, exquisitely, and stunningly wrong for over a decade, and one could safely skip his leaden, drearily predictable op/ed page by lazily skimming Drudge.  If he fired Froomkin, who, exactly, would even notice?  Surely no one with two brain cells to rub together had really read his rag since, oh, 1993, and if they had, they’d probably be saying, “Nyah, nyah, nyah,” too, and raining down bothersome reminders in letters to the editor all the danged time.  If the Post were a restaurant, who needs the kind of customers who complain about the poor quality of the food, tacky decor, surly help, and never tip anyway?

At the WaPoo, their sign says that they reserve the right to refuse service to anyone, evidently, and that includes, especially, anyone who can remember what happened last week.   Looks like Hiatt won’t have to take down that sign.

Karl Rove said something truthful…  I hope you’re sitting down.  He called Maureen Dowd, among other true things, “bitter, deranged, snarky, nasty,” and such.  All true, but Karl being Karl, then he lied, when he said her nastiness was aimed only at conservatives, something that would surely make the Clintons gawk in amazement.

He had me going there for a second.

The pictures, also distributed widely on Italian news websites – and in defiance of legal threats issued by lawyers for Berlusconi – show two topless women ‘cavorting’ at a party hosted last year by the prime minister.

Berlusconi has been seeking to block the release of some 700 similar images, even as this week-end’s European parliament elections hit their peak.

CHNN Chief Correspondent Harlan Harrington, on assignment in Italy, says opinion is split among many Italians on the pictures and their possible impact on Berlusconi’s chances with voters.  Harrington reports Berlusconi supporters have scaled down previous projections for their leader and are now saying a forty percent pro Berlusconi vote would be a “good result.”

The pictures and the accompanying El Pais report, continue to circulate among voters at polling stations and among ordinary Italians, including those taking the sun at beaches, or mingling at espresso cafes, chat rooms,  and villages across the country.

In El Pais, writer Miguel Mora described a scene at the Berlusconi retreat as one of “uninhibited routine” amidst “infinite gardens, artificial lakes, sexual organs exposed, lesbian games, and special effects.”  The report goes on to explain the comings and goings of women in G-strings, mini skirts, and go-go boots, and some naked men, including one said to be a former Czech prime minster.  All faces in the pictures were pixelated to protect identities.

Mora quotes an unidentified Sardinia businessman, commenting on the pictures taken through a “long lens” by photographer Antonello Zappadu:  “Those who are invited to court, those who sleep there count a lot; those who spend a holiday there are in Caesar’s heart.”

“No question, this looks like Berlusconi’s opponents upping the ante,” said Harrington, via Internet phone to the CHNN World Desk.  “It’s definitely a – pardon the expression – finger in the eye of the prime minister.  But I’m also getting reports of counter-demonstrations, possibly in support of Berlusconi, centered in Naples – hometown of Noemi Letizia.  We’re trying to nail that down, even as we, unhh, look at these pictures … uh …  more closely.”  Harrington added, blushingly: “I’m from the Dakotas.  We don’t get much stuff like this back there.”

Questions about Berlusconi’s sex life and alleged philandering with underage women erupted several weeks ago when the prime minister’s wife said she wanted a divorce.  The center of the sexual storm since has been Letizia, an 18-year old aspiring model and politician.  Berlusconi’s wife, Veronica Lario, also a former model and actress, criticized her husband for attending Letizia’s 18th birthday party in Naples, where, wth Noemi’s family present,  the 72-year old prime minister gave the young woman a $10,000 diamond-studded necklace and, according to witnesses, an enthusiastic peck on the cheek.

Aside from gifts and attending Letizia’s birthday party, Berlusconi has steadfastly denied having an affair with the young woman.  Nothing “spicy” has gone on he has said, while pledging to step down if there is proof of a mutual taste for hot peppers, or evidence of a time-share sail boat between them.

“It’s getting worse and worse,” said Rome urban planner Vezio De Lucia, outside a polling place near the Vatican.  De Lucia said recent reports and the pictures “confirm the negative view I have of the prime minister.  It’s simply ridiculous.  I mean, you know he’s had several hair plug jobs don’t you?  What a clown!  I mean,  it would be like Joe Biden robbing cradles in America.”

Silvia Filasto, a lawyer, said Berlusconi “has committed no crime as far as we know.  His only defect is he’s simpatico, with an eye for pretty women.”

As for Noemi, she has suggested Berlusconi encouraged her to get into politics, along with several other young women.  None are reported to have any political qualifications, but that doesn’t faze Noemi.  “I want to be a showgirl.  But I’m also interested in politics.  I am flexible,” she said.  “I often sing with Papi Silvio at the piano, or we do karaoke.”  It’s unknown what political tutoring beyond singalongs has been offered to Noemi by the prime minister.

CHNN’s Harrington elaborated on the activities in Naples, apparently undertaken in support of Noemi’s political ambitions.  In the last day, Harrington reported passing over Naples beaches in the CHNN flying boat while noticing scores of young women in bikinis, wearing cheap sunglasses.  Harrington noted that all of the women had blonde hair, but he said he could not determine if all were real blondes or whether some had wigs.  But Harrington said they all displayed face fans with an image of Noemi on them, and CHNN’s intrepid correspondent said each time he flew over a beach, the women stood provocatively in the sand, looked up and waved, and placed the Noemi fans over their faces.

Harrington’s last filing from Naples to the CHNN World Desk seemed to suggest a planned rather than spontaneous beach action by the bikini blondes, perhaps as a show of indifference to the ” la affair de Berlusconi” brouhaha in mainstream news reporting.

Harrington also reported other Naples beach-goers appeared to support their hometown girl outright as a political figure, with hand-lettered signs held aloft, aimed at the CHNN flying boat.

Passing over the beaches, Harrington noted the signs said:  “WE’RE AGOG OVER NOEMI – SHE’S OUR VIRGIN PRINCESS”.

I think it’s this drearily familiar combination of abysmal quality control heavily larded with a haughty disdain for backtalk that is much more dangerous to the future of the NYT and print journalism in general than anything Ann Coulter or Craigslist could accomplish, even if they got together.  Disastrous decisions by upper management, like buying out the International Herald Tribune and Boston Globe, then building a splashy new headquarters building, all at the top of the market, show that the Sulzburger blood has thinned out to Kool-Aid consistency from a business standpoint, but cracking open the product shows that selling shit and calling it Shinola, for a higher price every few months, is the real problem here.

The New York Times has become the island of misfit toys; a situation that must be as demoralizing to its rank and file as it is infuriating to its readers.  Back in the day, journalists were forbidden to publicly adopt or advocate for any but the most uncontroversial causes, and any that tried to trade on the prestige of their publication in advancing outside careers quickly found themselves in hot water.  The New York Times, so conservative and hidebound in earlier years that it was called the Grey Lady, now seems to have morphed into an off-night flophouse for a bunch of celebrity nitwits looking to kill some time and make some easy dough, in between television appearances and book tours.  It’s kind of like FOX, only boring.  Good luck with that.

After “economist” Ben Stein joined forces with the mouth-breather set to make and of course star in a “movie” that made the laughably obvious point that people who thought the earth was 6000 years old were treated like some kind of dummies at US universities, a dismal failure of right-wing propaganda which was eventually seen by dozens of Americans only because of a fevered, months-long promotion on hate radio and hate religion all over the country, he was still allowed, even encouraged, to write about economics in the New York Times.  In what, crayon?  I’m no mental giant, but such outlandish cretinism is flatly disqualifying for anyone presuming to write for an educated readership, and if the NYT cared a whit for either its audience or reputation, Stein would have long ago been sent off packing to some nice “Institute,” Discovery, Enterprise, or whatever.

Piling out of the Sunday clown car next comes owly and oily David Brooks, this time with a drippingly disdainful book review (don’t they have qualified, disinterested people for this job?)  of a book he obviously hasn’t read, but nonetheless dislikes and wants to smear, since the author purportedly disagrees with him (wonder how much that set you back, Pinch…), but the piece de resistance, as usual, is the absurd “interview” that Deborah Solomon leaves in the magazine each week like a skid mark.  Her role is as interesting as it is humiliating;  she is able to “get” interviews with the world’s worst and most loathsome, lying, criminal scum, week after week, clearly because of her unique style of inquiry, which resembles that of a five-year-old, grilling her wicked stepmother.  Innocent-seeming questions receive curt, angry, answers like “none of your business,” “jump in a lake,” “because I said so,” and “that’s for me to know and you to find out” which are then deferentially typed up with nary a follow-up, so the flat-out lies scattered between almost begin to look like a scoop.  The only journalistic “value” involved, which I’m sure is an accident, is the full-length picture of the charlatan in question, which takes as much space as the interview yet is dramatically more informative.  This week it was Frank Luntz, Republican snake-oil salesman, looking so gob-smackingly schlumpy and repulsive that the battered and brow-beaten Solomon choked out at the end, “Are you married?”  Go for it, Deborah!  He only turned down Maureen Dowd because of her personality.  And yet another fascist manipulator shows how pathetic, impotent, and utterly unworthy of respect, the “liberal” media is.  Doesn’t that five bucks seem like a good investment now?

To be fair, there are many excellent reporters who are occasionally allowed to do excellent work, and their efforts often carry the paper for the clueless gasbags in the upper tiers.  But these relentless, high-profile insults to the readers’ intelligence, the daily drip, drip of “Enhanced Revulsion Techniques,” that turn the formerly shocking Jayson Blair and Judith Miller scandals into misty, fond memories and cause people to lose whatever respect they had for a newspaper, which is the only value it really has, that has brought the NYT to its current pass, to be delightedly picked over by Bill O’Reilly et al.  What does the soon-to be-former reader see?  Shallow reporting.  Wasted money.  Wasted space.  Arrogant, in-your-face nincompoops spouting pure hogwash.  Pentagon propaganda.  Nuclear propaganda.  At this point, Murdoch need only bide his time, or more likely, not.

The publishers seem to be quite capable of ruining their “Trust” on their own, thank you.

From: Overpaid Consultant

RE: “Talent”

Good seeing you the other night, Paunch.  The lighting in that restaurant did make you appear taller and less bald.  But let’s cut to the chase here.  Some of that dead wood on your OP/ED page is so petrified you guys don’t need an iceberg to sink.  The deck chairs alone will bring you down.  What are you doing, putting the Walrus and the Carpenter’s dream on TV all the time?  Are you nuts?  People go on TV all the time and say the stupidest things, but I have to tell you, your crowd ain’t delivering product like it should.  Not meaning to be shallow, but no flat-worlder should make such a big lump on Google Earth.  Doesn’t look right.

And no amateur psychologists should be so clearly crazy as that nut Dowd.  Nobody wants to spread out their paper and have their worst ex-wife come stomping into the room.  Unless she’s young and hot.  Bzzzzt!  Dowd goes.

Then there’s that Brooks.  He could actually work, if not for the unfortunate grease spots that keep befouling the set.  I have an ad in mind there, just to be safe, too.

See below….

(to be posted on Craigslist…  if response is weak, discuss the crushingly expensive option of “Week in Review.”  One week only.)

WANTED: OP/ED “Writers”

Position 1:

This column is a place for feminism without feminists, liberalism without anything to be liberal about, and places a snarky, annoying bulwark between real news and the gossip we prefer.

Owing to the Recent Unpleasantness, we ask that applicants submit their ghostwriters to rigorous standards, and avoid drinking to excess or being ostentatiously bony.  Jokes about Hillary’s coffee tables are no longer being considered.

Postion 2:

This space should be thought of as the Howdy Doody Show for globaloney.  Tossing in a thing or two about Polar Bears is just the spoonful of sugar that makes the sweatshops go down,  For obvious reasons, applicants should be Height/Weight proportional, and not display facial hair that suggests endangered sea mammals.  Access to cab drivers mandatory.

Position 3:

Every time Cheney goes on TV this position gets harder.  While Brooks seems to drip the right grade of condescension, he misses the point too often to be any good.  We need a Joe the Plumber with a bigger vocabulary for that spot.  I won’t write the ad until I get more input, Paunch.

Send me your ideas before I post these….

A)  Spitzer was years ahead of anyone else in seeing the dangerous lawlessness of Wall Street, and despite being torpedoed in a very suspicious manner by an extraordinarily excessive Bush-led FBI right before the whole thing hit an iceberg, the former Governor and Attorney General of New York has a lot of important things to say about the financial crisis that has brought the country to its knees, and possibly some pretty interesting insights about who the chief culprits are, and what might be done now.

Or,

B)  Well, Spitzer was soooo smokin’ hot until this whole hooker thing came along, and then, wham, he was, like, so embarrassed to walk his dog and stuff on the upper east side, you know, ’cause it’s a lot like the Village where you just see everybody, but he’s about halfway through the publicist rehab thing, and even though he’s way getting bald, his wife forgives him, and he jogs, and now he even takes the purse dog out too, since he’s not so embarrassed as he used to be.  He still goes to restaurants off hours, though, even with Ed Koch, and he totally wouldn’t answer when I asked if he’s had therapy.

Alert Hag readers familiar with that and other fine publications will naturally suspect (B), of course, and be, rather discouragingly, right.  Minutiae like AIG, Joseph Bruno, Charles Grasso, and others are mentioned in passing as minor, nemesis-like characters in the larger, more revealing drama of hookers and dog-walking, retribution and redemption, the macho wheaten terrier vs. the sissy bichon frise’, sitting in the backs of restaurants, and strictly enforced self-flagellation, performed solely as theatre, of course, for the benefit of the media.  This timely and crucial progress report helpfully informs the eager reader that a chastened Eliot is doing a pretty good job, but it’s not done.  The end.

Page after excruciating page of cinematic, touchy-feely tripe about his childhood, family, daughters, etc, nothing about anything worthwhile.  Nothing.  I mean, honestly, Darman could have at least shoe-horned in a pertinent fact by calculating how many hookers the AIG bailout could have bought, perhaps with a graph of little hookers, represented by that mudflap icon, stretching up one side of the page.  Nope,  Too boring and math-y.  Has Maureen Dowd dipped into her plastic surgery fund to endow a Journalism School somewhere?  It certainly looks that way, especially in HDTV, and on the pages of Newsweek.

I wish it were still astonishing, rather than just more of the same, to encounter such prurient, gossipy nonsense, even as the economy crumbles due in no small part to miscreants with whom Spitzer was uniquely familiar, plopping out of the rear end of another MSM dead-ender.

Six pages, and so many dead trees, that we’ll never get back.

“The Commercial Republic.”  Hmmm.  Now, I don’t ordinarily think much about David Brooks, and generally avoid his NYT column, because if I happened to be in the mood for something insultingly elitist, completely irrelevant, and stupefyingly clueless, I have a veritable smorgasbord already with Tom Friedman, Maureen Dowd, and until recently Bill Kristol, all of whom are more entertaining, on that particular page.  Of course, while the “liberals,” Friedman and Dowd, are utterly guileless in their scattershot meanderings, and seem to be both too stupid and self-absorbed to have any “agenda” beyond navel gazing and cocktail weinies, the righties are, well, different, and only ignored at one’s peril.  That title grabbed me as being something, like a gruesome accident, that compelled my attention, no matter how predictably revolting.  I was not disappointed.

Every righty utterance is a carefully woven fabric of meme repetition, historical revisionism, preemptive assault on opponents, and plain old lies, but no one works the loom better than David Brooks.  And today’s tapestry is something to behold.  He begins, as righties always do, with linking his current obsession with some great historical tradition from an imagined but glorious past that is self-evidently vindicating of his viewpoint, regardless of whether said “tradition” is cherry-picked, distorted, or just plain made up.  In this case, Brooks is peddling the idea that, as Calvin Coolidge put it, “the business of America is business,” and all of our progress is owed to avarice, which of course he doesn’t call by its real name, but by ennobling euphemisms like  ”energy, ” ambition, and success.  He calls forth Horatio Alger, the Carnegies Dale and Andrew, and just because he can, even Donald Trump and Jim Cramer as sterling exemplars of this proud past to which we must surely return as soon as practicable. In the upside-down world of Patio Man, plutocrats and shills are the real heroes and risk takers, and everyone else, well, if not non-existent, at least cheering from the gallery, or ought to be.  

Sadly, all of this, which embodies our greatness, is in a heap of trouble now, because a putsch has been conducted by a bunch of danged “lawyers,” and even worse, “academics,” who though they are smarty-pants elitists, of course, shun the “risk” that make businessmen so fascinating and stupendous, and to hear Brooks tell it, are busy making sand candles and having drum circles and poetry slams, because they don’t know any better.  You see, (and this is where reading a Brooks column moves from being a grim chore to a laugh riot…)  the Obama administration lacks business people, and, swallow whatever you’re drinking before reading further, “self-made entrepreneurs.”   (!)  

Like whom, Mr. Brooks, Dick Cheney?  Bush?  His business experience turned out a lot like his Presidency.  Well, there’s guys like Joe Allbaugh and any number of hangers-on in Bush world who did quite well for themselves by fleecing the taxpayers, and I do remember one guy who had a pretty good scam going at Target for a while, but the only Bush official who had actual success in business outside of influence-peddling was Paul O’Neill, who was promptly tossed.  Seems he got all math-y on them.  Everyone in BushWorld knows that “business” and entrepreneurship are religions, and daring to desecrate the Holy with godless, reality-based arithmetic requires immediate excommunication.  It’s kind of like having celibate priests dictating everyone else’s sex life; the crazier it sounds, the truer it must be.

So today is, once again, Opposite Day in BoboLand.  Of course Bush, Cheney, Condi, Powell, Ashcroft, Gonzales, Rove et al are, in some ways “entrepreneurs,” if only because they have all enriched themselves due to government “service” and corruption, but to call them self-made is worthy only of snorts, guffaws, and howls of laughter.  And to call Obama’s people, far too many of them closely tied to the sleazy business practices of the past few years, a bunch of “lawyers and academics” simply beggars belief.

But then again, this is the NYT op/ed page, a place where people just say the darnedest things, and it’s fit to print.  I’d much prefer a funnies page, like a proper newspaper, but you take what you can get from the Gray Lady.