It's David Brooks Fisking Day!

A commenter earlier chided me for having neglected our weekly ritual of abusing David Brooks, who today deserves as good a punk-smacking as ever:

America once had a responsible economic culture, Obama argued. People used to save their pennies to buy their dream houses. Banks used to lend by "traditional standards." Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac used to stick to their "traditional mandate." Companies like A.I.G. used to limit themselves to the "traditional insurance business."
But these traditions broke down, Obama continued. They were swamped by irresponsibility. Businesspeople chased "short-term profits" over long-term investments. . . . Americans consumed too much and saved too little. America became corrupted by "excessive debt," "reckless speculation" and "fleeting profits."
Obama vowed to end this irresponsibility and the cycle of boom and bust. It's time to get back to basics, he said. He embraced tradition, order and authority. He quoted the New Testament and argued that it is time that the U.S. built its economic house on rock and not sand.
If Republicans aren't nervous, they should be. Obama is arguing for his activist agenda not on the basis of class-consciousness, which is alien to America, but as a defense of middle-class morality, which is central to it. Obama is positioning the Democrats as the party of order, responsibility and small-town values. If he pulls this mantle away from the Republicans, it would be the greatest train robbery in American politics.

It's your fault, David Brooks. You aren't part of the solution. You aren't even part of the problem. You are the problem.

Let's go back to 1997, Mr. Brooks. The Republicans in Congress had fought Clinton to a stalemate over basic economic issues. Clinton had been forced to declare that "the era of big government is over" and -- after vetoing it twice -- had finally signed welfare reform into law.

And what was your response to these hard-fought conservative victories? "National Greatness," an unprincipled and dishonest embrace of the same big-government agenda that the GOP had spent so much political capital opposing.

Now that the GOP and the nation have reaped the bitter fruit of your big-government Republican agenda, with characteristic dishonesty you attempt to evade responsibility for the disastrous consequences of the betrayals of conservative principle you enthusiastically advocated for more than a decade.

You are a gutless crapweasel, David Brooks, and the only people you deceive nowadays are those few so ignorant of your long career of mendacity that they don't burst into laughter at your latest prevarication. You are the living examplification of a treacherous bastard, inspiring contempt in the hearts of all honorable and decent people.

You are a colossal monument to what can be achieved in American by someone who believes in nothing except his own self-advancement. For centuries and millennia to come, generations of backstabbing swine will revere you as their idol.