That’s a trick question, of course; strawmen can’t talk.  Fortunately, they have David Brooks to speak for them.  The NYT op-ed page: giving voice to disenfranchised strawmen since the dawn of time.  

Today David Brooks asks the important question: why isn’t Obama as radical as, I dunno, Mitt Romney?

While American companies operate in radically different ways than they did 40 years ago, the sheltered, government-dominated sectors of the economy — especially education, health care and the welfare state — operate in astonishingly similar ways.

Follow-up question: remember when David Brooks wrote that alarmist column about Obama’s impending death panels?  Yeah, me too.

The Obama campaign seems to be drifting willy-nilly into the opposite camp, arguing that the pressures brought to bear by the capital markets over the past few decades were not a good thing, offering no comparably sized agenda to reform the public sector.

C’mon already, Obama, we are all dying to see a plan for comprehensive healthcare reform.  NO LITERALLY WE ARE ALL DYING FOR WANT OF HEALTHCARE.  If only Obama had proposed something like that, oh, I don’t know, a few years ago?  Republicans: the party of change.  Unless that change was the idea of a Democrat and involved marginally higher (or just constant) tax rates for the top brackets, in which case, Republicans: the party of hyperbolic alarmist rhetoric and protracted litigation.

Not Tom Friedman!  No, Tom Friedman knows: bikini season is upon us!  And in his quest for the perfect beach body, he’s growing increasingly desperate.

From ‘I’m not Mitt Romney,’ 4/10/12:

Sure, Ryan makes deep spending cuts to balance the budget in the long term. If I cut off both my thumbs, I’d also lose weight. But I’d also have a hard time getting another job.

From ‘Do you want the good news first,’ 5/20/12:

Maybe we could grow as a country without a plan. But we dare not cut without a plan. We can really do damage. I can lose weight quickly if I cut off both arms, but it will surely reduce my job prospects.

I wouldn’t say Tom Friedman has jumped the shark here so much as he has attempted to jump the shark, fallen short and landed on it, thereby crushing it to death, eaten the entire shark in one sitting, and then made himself throw up because he was feeling a little fat.

David Brooks longs for a simpler time.  A time when people hated themselves more, when governments were less transparent, and when a secret elite ruling class told people what to do rather than asking them what they wanted.  Ah, the good old days!  Nowadays Americans are like women: so damn demanding! 

The Obama campaign issues its famous “Julia” ad, which perfectly embodies the vision of government as a national Sugar Daddy, delivering free money and goodies up and down the life cycle.

Seriously, people.  If you want your government to buy you those Louboutins— or some other extraneous luxury good, like healthcare— you’d better start putting out:

Having lost a sense of their own frailty, many voters have come to regard their desires as entitlements. They become incensed when their leaders are not responsive to their needs… they command their politicians to give them benefits without asking them to pay.

Voters today: so damn spoiled!  They’re all like, I want to put my 20k a year salary into an offshore Caribbean bank so I won’t have to pay any taxes on it, AND I want food stamps!  

You know what was a great system for reining in the desires of the proletariat?  Feudalism.  Because, I mean, nothing to make you remember your frailty like working a fief in Louboutins.

Noted social psychologist David Brooks is absolutely mystified as to why Obama isn’t losing this election.  So he comes up with a theory:

Obama has displayed a kind of ESPN masculinity: postfeminist in his values, but also thoroughly traditional in style — hypercompetitive, restrained, not given to self-doubt, rarely self-indulgent.

You know when you’re in a fight with someone, and you try to make eye contact with them, but they manage to look sort of at you but avoid eye contact so that really they’re looking everywhere in the vicinity of your eyes, but not AT your eyes?  To the point where, even as you’re annoyed by them you’re also a little impressed by how well they’re evading your eyes?  Right, so in this metaphor, ‘someone’ = David Brooks, and ‘your eyes’ = Facts.  And ‘Mitt Romney’ = the creepy puppet in the corner of the room that’s going to come to life after dark and go on a violent hair-cutting rampage.

This is going to shock you, but: Tom Friedman does not know a lot of stuff.  He did not know that Pete Rose would write an apology on a baseball and sell it to you!  He did not know that novelists accept money for product placement!  (But, being Tom Friedman, he cannot resist mentioning the fact that he does know a Harvard professor.  Like, personally, you guys.)  

Apparently he also does not know that Tom Friedman is the world’s biggest brand-name dropper (see: every Tom Friedman book, column).  And that he wrote a book that was basically one long breathless “omggggggg markets!” (that synopsis makes it sound a lot more articulate than it is.)  But hey, Tom Friedman is not one to let facts stand in the way of a good anecdote.  

Notorious ladies’ man Ross Douthat is annoyed that the White House is “focusing on social issues.”  Why can’t Obama just sit back and shut up (or even better, run a fear-based campaign) and let the Republicans continue to systematically disenfranchise women and gays?  Instead he continues to cynically “exploit” our desire to exercise some modicum of control over our bodies.  God, what an asshole.

Everyone’s entitled to one, right?  After one year and two weeks of reading and writing about David Brooks, surely we’ve earned a very brief respite?

Some days reading the NYT makes me feel like I’ve been punched in the stomach; other days, it’s more like getting a lobotomy with a coke spoon.  (I expect both feelings to increase in frequency and intensity as November approaches.)  Either way, I’ve been generally happy and less venomous than usual as late, so I’m just going to roll with that for a couple more days and regular posting— and hair tearing, and ulcer formation— will resume soon.  But don’t forget about us, k?  Because we really, really want to remain your number one source for David Brooks-related imperatives.

Seriously, we’ll be back in a week or so.

Even compared to other Tom Friedman columns, today’s is just awful.  Right from the get-go:

DOES America need an Arab Spring?

Hmmmm, let me think.  Um, HELL NO?  Tom, I know the Acela sucked, but this is kind of an overreaction.  I will spare you the rest of the first paragraph, in which Tom calls up his buddy Frank Fukuyama and asks him 

a very radical question about America’s political order today, namely: has American gone from a democracy to a “vetocracy”…?

God, I hope that is exactly how that conversation went down.  ”Hey Frank, Tom here.  Listen, I got a very radical question for you…”  I have a very radical question of my own, which is, why the hell would anyone give Tom Friedman their phone number at this point?  You just know when he asked Krugman for his digits, Paul was all, “sure, it’s 212-555…”

Anyway, I digress.  What actually happens is Frank drops some nonsense on Tom and Tom spins it into like six paragraphs of completely terrible ideas.  Shocking, yeah, I know.

“But we forget,” Fukuyama added, “that government was also created to act and make decisions.”

I had TOTALLY FORGOTTEN that, you guys!  This is probably because I am a lady, and the government lets me make so many decisions that it’s almost like I forget they’re there!  

Tom Friedman is worried that the government is not deciding enough things for us, so he thinks we should give that decider-ing ability to a “small supercommittee” of deciders.  

I know what you’re thinking: “That will never happen.” And do you know what I’m thinking? “Then we will never be a great a country again, no matter who is elected.” 

So just to recap, Tommy began by asking whether we should have a populist revolution and concluded by suggesting that the government is too transparent and power should be concentrated in a small group of veto-proof insiders.  Because, you know, at least the trains would run on time.  What a wanker.

Ross Douthat’s reasons for not not condemning homosexuality are rooted in literalism, non-ballsiness, and literal non-ballsiness.  Let’s just get right down to it, shall we?  (Ooooh, I know this one!  What are: words Ross Douthat has never said to a lady!)

The Christian view of gay sex is bound up in the Christian view of straight sex…

See, gay friends!  It’s not that your sexuality is gross— it’s that all sexuality is gross!  I mean, it’s not like Ross Douthat is just making up reasons here; everyone knows that only GOD makes reasons.  And people!  (But not gay people.)  

It’s a narrative in which human sexuality has a clear teleology—the reunification of the two equal-but-different halves of humanity (“male and female he created them … therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and cleave to his wife, and they shall become one flesh …”)

Bottom line is, even if Ross Douthat doesn’t like gay people, you can’t get all mad at him, because Ross Douthat also doesn’t like Ross Douthat:

Homosexuality may be innate, but recall that one of the core doctrines of Christianity is that that sin itself is innate—that our innermost being is in some sense broken and fallen and turned from God’s desires for us.

And Jesus doesn’t say it’s not wrong.  So.  

It’s true that Jesus himself does not specifically say anything about homosexuality. But neither does he revise the male-and-female model for sexuality… He leaves plenty of room for alternative ways of life besides marriage—believers are urged to break family ties if necessary and even to become “eunuchs” for the sake of the kingdom of God.

Jesus LOVES alternative lifestyles, you guys!  Like, as an alternative to pursuing a life that will be both happy and fulfilling, you can always, you know, cut off your balls!  

Christian orthodoxy does not require a blind Biblical literalism…

But only because it’s hard to read the literal truth of the Bible if you’re blind, amirite?   At least we can end on an ecumenical, conciliatory note:

if I’m wrong—if Christian moral doctrine could develop on this question without betraying the core of the faith—then we’re waiting for an intellectual or theological breakthrough that hasn’t happened yet.

Amen.

From “One for the Country”:

 The paved street in the traffic circle around Union Station was in such poor condition that I felt as though I was on a roller coaster. I traveled on the Amtrak Acela, our sorry excuse for a fast train, on which I had so many dropped calls on my cellphone that you’d have thought I was on a remote desert island, not traveling from Washington to New York City. When I got back to Union Station, the escalator in the parking garage was broken. Maybe you’ve gotten used to all this and have stopped noticing. I haven’t. 

Oh, SO close there, Tom… wrong verb, though: we had hoped you were on a remote desert island.  But gosh, I bet you’d have a hard time picking only three metaphors to take with you!

we are facing some real storms ahead. We need to weatherproof our American house — and fast — in order to ensure that America remains a rock of stability for the world. 

Eh, I’m not worried: when the storm hits, I’m pretty sure there’ll be room for all of us in Tommy F’s house.  And, you know what, the escalator there is never broken.

*Obviously this title is ironic, because, I mean, come on.