Donkasaurus Post

Today, David Brooks doing what he does best;  and that is, miss the real story.

Brook’s aforelinked column, is a good one, in one sense.  It teaches some history.

In another sense, it is atrocious.

Brooks:  Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, have no power because they can not merely summon a wish, and have millions act upon their specific command. 

Wow, they are not Merlin the Magician. (Except when it comes to turning non truths into believable assertions, that is.)  Therefore, Brooks reasons, they are somewhat irrelevant, the strong implication throughout this piece goes.

Brooks even writes the following remarkable sentence:

They are enabled by the slightly educated snobs who believe that Glenn Beck really is the voice of Middle America.

Perhaps this is some sort of metaphor that is not immediately graspable. Beck is a somewhat deranged, rhetorically gifted genius, who has a very difficult time not only telling fact from fiction, but from not relying upon only those fictions which support his often incendiary and outrageous views.

He taps into a nerve, because hyperbole and outrageousness (which also, to many, make him appealing) aside, he reaches a general distrust and concern that people have, as well as plays upon the very ignorances that he himself does great service to wildly exacerbating.

And it is in this quality — their effect upon general mainstream information and perception, the overwhelmingly influence upon the nature of our debate, that this small handful of not very well informed by wildly accusatory and fanciful pundits — that these pundits are far far more important than they should be. Not their ability to singlehandedly, and magically, make millions change their voting predilections near instantaneously.

It should also be noted that Brooks essentially uses the example of John McCain, somewhat exaggerating these pundits’ scorn for him, to make his point. But McCain easily pulled the most dramatic character change, from a somewhat media beguiling and crafty statesman, to blatantly Machievellian figure, perhaps ever occassioned on our national stage.

And he did so why? Because he was not far right enough to win the nomination.

But Brooks missed that little detail, too.

Update:  If by Beck and the like being “enabled” by “educated snobs” who continue to dismiss them as being “so obvious” to people, while not — particularly in the media – making the effective case as to how wildly misinformed and misleading these same pundits are, particularly given their enormous audiences and constant mentions — then yes, Brooks is correct here. But there is ample evidence Brooks does not mean this. Perhaps it is high time some of our “real” pundits like Brooks, however, started to.