Brad's Microblog on tumblr
David Brooks writes Romney fan fiction. And Wonkette laughs: As we all know (if we are nerds), in the world of fan fiction, a “Mary Sue” is a character who exists solely as a surragate for the author — it’s the ordinary girl who is a better Quidditch player than Harry Potter, or the super-spy who gets to raid Lara Croft’s secret treasure vault, if you know what we mean. So it turns out that plodding centrist boringpants David Brooks has written a fan fiction story of his very own! Only the Mary Sue in his story is not merely a character who gives Mitt Romney a winning strategy, it is a wholly fictional version of Mitt Romney himself, who says all the things that David Brooks thinks would win America over and elect a hypothetical centrist Republican. We have seen similar “centrist boringpants are the real conservatives” fantasy pretty recently (by Tom Friedman, natch), so it’s not surprising that David Brooks would want to play Starfleet Captain, too. And the New York Times, which has a weakness for this sort of candidate fan-wankery around upcoming debates, even let him republish it from his LiveJournal. So, in Brooks’ richly imagined fantasy world, the “Mitt Romney” character has enough self-awareness to admit that Mitt Romney makes mistakes. Talk about a plot twist! So this fictional Mitt (let’s call him “Brooxney” so there’s no doubt about who’s really speaking) then admits that while his true love is actually Sensible Centrism, sometimes in the heat of a campaign, “the consultants want to make you something you’re not,” and I’ve allowed that to happen to me. I’m a nonideological guy running in an ideological age, and I’ve been pretending to be more of an ideologue than I really am. I’m a sophisticated guy running in a populist moment. I’ve ended up dumbing myself down. It hasn’t even worked. I’m behind. So I’ve decided to run the last month of this campaign as myself. We have to admit that this is a pretty gutsy move for Brooks, since it suggests that somewhere inside the outer shell of this year’s right-wing Mitt, and possibly under the liberal-ish 1994 Mitt, you’d find a core of Actual Mitt Romney. But Brooks is looking for the real Chauncey Gardner and finding only an idealized version of himself. http://wonkette.com/485683/david-brooks-pens-stirring-debate-statement-for-imaginary-mitt-romney-who-is-actually-david-brooks
It really looks like Charlie Cook really does not understand why people show him the private polls that they do http://themonkeycage.org/blog/2012/10/02/should-you-trust-campaign-pollsters/
1 note
James Heartfield: Eric Hobsbawm and the tragedy of the left: Where Hobsbawm’s histories of the 19th century were enlivened by his Marxism, his histories of the 20th century were corrupted by his Stalinism.
(Source: spiked-online.com)
2 notes
George Will says the only reason Obama is winning is because he’s black thkpr.gs/Prf7L6
— ThinkProgress (@thinkprogress) October 2, 2012
“There will be no magic recovery…” Actually, David Brooks is saying Romney *would* create a magical recovery nyti.ms/SZvMWR
— Matt O’Brien (@ObsoleteDogma) October 2, 2012
slate.me/RxpUr2 Todd Akin believes stem cell research will lead to harvesting people for organs.
— Amanda Marcotte (@AmandaMarcotte) October 2, 2012
2 notes
