Via Glenn Reynolds‘ link to a link well worth rescuing, I learned that David Brooks — a man who claims to be a great arbiter of civil society if not civilization itself — is upset by what he calls “unmediated” people. I read what Brooks said twice and I don’t think he meant “unmedicated” but missed the c. Clearly, the man thinks it is bad to support the dowdy and rumpled Ron Paul, but civilized to support Barack Obama.
The reason?
Well, ranking high among them is that Barack Obama had perfectly creased pants:
“I don’t want to sound like I’m bragging,” Brooks recently told me, “but usually when I talk to senators, while they may know a policy area better than me, they generally don’t know political philosophy better than me. I got the sense he knew both better than me.”
That first encounter is still vivid in Brooks’s mind. “I remember distinctly an image of–we were sitting on his couches, and I was looking at his pant leg and his perfectly creased pant,” Brooks says, “and I’m thinking, a) he’s going to be president and b) he’ll be a very good president.” In the fall of 2006, two days after Obama’s The Audacity of Hope hit bookstores, Brooks published a glowing Times column. The headline was “Run, Barack, Run.”
Here‘s “Run, Barack, Run.” Does Brooks deserve to be derided endlessly over the fixation on the pants crease? It is hilarious. It’s like Rich Lowry getting “little starbursts” from Sarah Palin’s wink. You can’t not bring it up. But let’s remember, Brooks’s vision of perfection, seen in a pant’s crease, came after they conversed, in depth, about Edmund Burke. That is, the 2 men were talking, in all likelihood, about the importance of civil society.
Sheesh. I knew Brooks was a fool, but I didn’t think he was that much of a pathetic dupe.
MORE: In other weird news, Pat Buchanan is advocating Republican racial politics.
FWIW, the Dems are so hopelessly racialized that I think the Republicans would do better as the only non-racial (race-blind) party. Playing up the white demographic angle is a loser.
Comments
3 responses to “The civility of a man can be measured by the crease of his pants”
What is a loser idea is for any political party to play to its weakness. Can anyone imagine the Democratic Party attempting to win the gun vote? Or to appeal to the Christian vote?
How does the GOP appeal to groups that have put their votes up to the highest bidder?
Eric, I had to read through twice to find what I thought might be your reference to ‘advocating Republican racial politics’. I came up with this:
‘If Republicans are opposed to what mass immigration is doing to the country demographically, ethnically, socially and politically, there are, as Reagan used to say, “simple answers, just no easy answers.”’
I consider myself a ‘Constitutional libertarian’, have rarely been supportive of significant Democrat Party platforms and find myself less and less supportive of Republican platforms.
In the above ‘if’ statement, the only ‘demographic’ I would be concerned with is the political (I’m not sure this is a demographic) which relates to how individuals perceive their relationship to the ‘state’ which is a product of societal consensus. We seem to be in jeopardy of losing our traditional American consensus, I agree.
The only opposition I have to the current state of affairs is that we seem to want to abandon the concept of ‘rule of law’. If we had an adequate penalty for breaking existing law, changed the immigration laws to eliminate all the barriers that have been the reasons for the laws, and go all out to convey the knowledge needed for all Americans to understand traditional American political ideals and the benefits thereof, what else can we do?
@ Bob. Run in my district (or anywhere I have a say) with those points, and I’ll vote for you.
The barriers NEED reform. We let in losers and ban people who could actually add value. (Blue class AND Tech.)
Then we ignore every ‘jump on the welfare bandwagon’ family that manages to sneak in.