I do find Brooks an exceptionally good spokesperson for all things conservative, but I’m not sure what this means. Actually, if it means what I think it means, it is genius. Certainly, the tea partiers have a WalMartesque ethos about them and they seem to give unflinching fealty to corporatism in Amerika.

Isn’t it cute, spelling America with a ‘k’? The sixties live on.

Hey I love Walmart!

MichelleF says:
March 3, 2010 at 11:19 am

Hey I love Walmart!

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I’ve done some grocery shopping there. I still haven’t seen the savings Walmart touts. I seem to do much better at a traditional grocery store.

Brooks is conservative like Carrot Top is a comic.

David Brooks does not speak for conservatives, Republicans, or even RINOS. He’s an elitist prick that sacrificed any “conservative” cred when he began fellating BHO.

He is irrelevant.

I save tons at Walmart! My 11 year old soccer playing son eats from sun up til sun down. I shop other places when there are sales, but for everday prices, I’ve found you count beat Wally World!

Is this the David Brooks that fawns over Obama? I believe it is.

Tim Z. Ank: I have to take exception to your comment. Brooks is very much a conservative, in the traditional sense of the word. His conservatism goes to matters fiscal, and he tends toward the “traditional conservative” (an odd pairing of words) position of individual choice in most social matters. Indeed, I would call Brooks Buckleyesque despite his expulsion by Buckley the Lesser. If you were to say Brooks is not a rightist, I would tend to agree.

When you’re to the left of Stalin, your view of what’s conservative becomes a bit skewed.

I save tons at Walmart! My 11 year old soccer playing son eats from sun up til sun down. I shop other places when there are sales, but for everday prices, I’ve found you count beat Wally World.

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I have found that. I suppose I am blessed by living in a highly competitive grocery market, thanks in no small part to Walmart I am sure. I generally find Walmart produce remarkably inferior, and since only my wife and I are left at home, we are not consumers of frozen and prepared foods (as one seemingly must be when the kiddos are still about). I am an indirect beneficiary of Walmart, I suppose.

He may be relevant to you Real Racist Sexist King, because as writer points out so aptly, you are left of Stalin.

Brooks wasn’t using Walmart in the way that our ever-so-egalitarian-my-heart-bleeds-for-the-poor-and-the-downtrodden-middle-class liberals, like TRRRK mean it.

In other words, Brooks wasn’t making an elitist put-down, he was being ironic. Tea Party are normal-joes. They are anti-establishment (hippies) ESTABLISHMENT (everyday joe) folks.

That’s a fair summation.

The book We Were Soldier Once…and Young, gives a very good history of the “everyday joes” priests…nuns..housewives… accountants…. who were not anti-establishment types, but who found themselves at odds with the Vietnam war. Who found themselves stepping into what was for them a Twilight Zone world of protest.

Now judging by the headline of this piece, our writer assumes that Walmart hippies is a put-down, but what can you say about Mediaite writers other than they do have their ears to the ground… and that by doing so they often are impervious to irony or to historical references.

Tea Partiers = Wal-Mart Hippies…I like it.

Brooks is in fact a conservative but the fringe tea-bag crowd is so far right they don’t recognize it.

Probably because the Tea Party folks think “small govt” Brooks goes along to get along.

The same way the protesting (and helping young men into Canada) monks, priests, housewives, and accountants felt about their neighbors who disapproved of the war, but kept their mouths shut.

When you’re to the left of Stalin, your view of what’s conservative becomes a bit skewed.

by writer

Bingo.

Brooks said it himself… in this climate Ronnie Regan (aka Christ II) would not have been welcome into the Tea Partaaay. His approval ratings among tea baggers would have been five degrees colder than Alaska! (I’m going to continue to use that one. It’s killer!)

Of course Brook would say that. That’s rather self-serving to align himself with The Gipper, as much as it was for silent Vietnam War critics to point at the boisterous critics and say they were aiding and abetting Brezhnev.

Yeah. Totally. Raising taxes is tooooootally a Tea Bagger thing to do. You’re running down a blind alley…

I agree with Cecelia’s assessment. He didn’t mean it as a put down and even if he did, I believe the majority of the movement would probably wear it as a badge of honor, right up until the time, the anti-Walmart elitists try to make headway turning it into a slur.

Of course, irony alert and probably unbeknownst to Brooks (whom I’ve slammed in the past in this forum and in others for being elitist, himself); Walmart was one of the President’s early supporters concerning the concept of Health Care Reform; They’re using their market power to switch us all to compact fluorescents and in addition to a multitude of in-house environmental initiatives, just last week, they announced an initiative to cut 20 million metric tons of greenhouse gas from the global supply chain.

OH, and raising taxes IS a traditionally conservative thing to do, merely because Reagan did (and later regretted it).

A visceral dislike of taxes is quite an intellectually dishonest criteria for calling people extremists.

You might just be projecting if it comes to that, my friend.

Magister, Brooks didn’t mean as a put down PERIOD.

Good lord! How much money would Walmart save with a single payer option?!

@Cecelia: I agree that he didn’t mean it as a put down. He was just being clever.

And, I’d have to look to see where I wrote about Walmart’s being an early proponent of Health Care Reform, but as you can see from the letter linked from their press release, their public face for possibly higher taxes, an employer mandate, continuous coverage, triggers and whatnot was all about cost-containment. While the cynics at the time noted that by partnering with SEIU, they were also taking some of the ammo from the United Food and Commercial Workers Union, which has been a thorn in their side.

Baby, I’m so extreme.

And regretting raising taxes is the easy way out. There are plenty of things I regret (though I can’t remember all their names… hi-yo!). But you can’t make the argument that he’s cool now because he regretted raising taxes. That’s so…. republican.

… in this climate Ronnie Regan (aka Christ II) would not have been welcome into the Tea Partaaay. His approval ratings among tea baggers would have been five degrees colder than Alaska! (I’m going to continue to use that one. It’s killer!)

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It is rather good. And, if agree with your assessment about Raygun. At Raygun’s time, there was double split in conservatism, the fiscal/Northeastern style conservative, the social conservative and the libertarian conservatives. Raygun was of the social conservative sort. Certainly, our Holy Father of the Modern American Deficit wasn’t in the least fiscally conservative, and he had an intolerance about him when it came to personal expression. We now have a complicating factor in the Tea Partiers, who are themselves badly fractured. It seems to me that they are not conservative. Their fiscal conservatism is of the cafeteria sort. Deficits are fine with them as long as they are for war expenditures or to promote various rightist agenda items. Their social conservatism is of the cafeteria sort in which pre-marital sex (Kristol Palin) and extra-marital escapades (Senators Ensign and Vitter, Governor Happy Pants) are fine, provided any child produced is not African-American or Hispanic or provided that the bediapered pervert in question loudly proclaim his devotion to family values from the second floor of the cat house he is visting. Their libertarian conservatism is of the cafeteria sort as well since they pick and choose the various Constitutional rights which inevitably results in the Second Amendment being given precedence of speech, due process and equal protection provisions. The good news is, that while these various competing factions may well cause serious problems for the Republicans in the years ahead, they don’t seem to be so dangerous to our nation. Indeed, even PHOX seems to be disavowing all save the social conservatives. I have no doubt that the Goldwater, the Father of Modern American Conservatism, Raygun and William F. Buckley would not recognize the Republican party or the state of conservatism in America today. I am equally sure they would disavow the same.

Magister, when you have a congress who couldn’t get health care passed with a majority ( Are bluedog dems ever heralded as being “true” liberals?) and a president who was counting on them to come up with the plan (and to take the heat), it does get a bit murky…

tlj, I’ll settle for the argument that conservatives don’t like raising taxes.

I’m completely sure that Goldwater might not have recognized conservatism under Reagan. I’m even more sure that neither Goldwater nor Reagan (thanks for using AAP’s Raygun) would recognize YOUR summation of it.

I totally agree with him but not in the literal sense. The movement is truly the 1st of its kind, of the last 30 years, that’s has not been brought forward by the youth. They’re too busy counting how much money they’re screwing the middle class and seniors out of or they’re waiting for Mom and Dad to die for their inheritance. Or even better, still in college trying to get the street cred for drinking, parting and spending Mom and Dads money before they have to leave the nest all the while listen to the over zealous socialist professors latest rant on why American is evil but big global business is good.

It time for the boomers to stand up and be counted once again because. If we don’t, this country is headed for 3rd world status, if it’s not already.

We did get a very good lesson in politics in Texas, yesterday. As I noted in a previous post, none of the Tea Party candidates won. Less than 20% for the Tea Party candidate for governor. As that was happening, with all of the focus on the top of the ticket by the Tea Partiers, the extreme right incumbents on the State Board of Education, Don McLeroy and Geraldine Miller, were defeated. These were the people who, only a few weeks ago, passed a provision requiring textbooks in use in Texas to describe Margaret Sanger as a “proponent of eugenics which later become part of Nazi ideology”; to devote space to Phylis Schlafly as a leader of conservative resurgence; to present the good side of Joe McCarthy …. You get the idea, the sort of people who believe the tiniest dose of abstinence education stops all teen pregnancies and that Jesus rode into Jerusalem on (what would become) Palm Sunday on a dinosaur. Of course, all of this will be be rescinded, and the Tea Partiers would seem to have lost their most influential notch in Texas.

Similarly, in their haste to villify Kay Bailey Hutchinson, a woman who doesn’t need any help destroying her own brand, and promote the 9/11 Conspiracy Theorist, Deborah Medina, the Democrat nominee, in a poorly attended primary (no hotly contested races), Bill White, garnered more votes than Hutchinson.

At least one of the conservative factions, if we can call it conservative, seems to have lost its focus badly. If the Tea Partiers were grass roots, they are no longer.

I’m completely sure that Goldwater might not have recognized conservatism under Reagan.

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Cecelia, Goldwater and Raygun were contemporaries. Raygun had been out of office a decade when Goldwater died.

I never implied otherwise, Mark.

Although Goldwater like Reagan, he despised the progressive income tax and would have never conceded it to be conservative in any sense.

Thus the speciousness of mentioning Reagan raising taxes as a way of arguing that a willingness to do so is a sort of touchstone of “real” conservatism vs extremism.

Did I mention Raygun raising taxes? I thought I said Raygun was the Holy Father of the Modern American Deficit. He was. He invented deficits in peace time. I think you just got confused, dear. Happens to all of us. Or, it will.

TRRK, as usual, you are saturating the thread from beginning to end. Your nickname calling is too cute by half. If only you entertained the rest of us as much as you entertain yourself. YAWN.

I don’t know what you are talking about Trickledown. TRRK has some tea-baggers all lathered up and others with their panties in a bunch. Now that’s what I call entertaining.

That disingenuous, Mark (aka TRRK) You know that my remarks were about the speciousness of suggesting that is nothing in between Goldwater, Reagan, and extremism.

Well, if you say Mark (TRRK) wears panties, who are we to differ, Ted.

Doesn’t take much to entertain Ted. Spell America with a ‘k’ or Reagan as Raygun and he’s entertained for hours.