Your 3rd Grade English Teacher Would Not Be Proud

Sometimes, the good folks over at the Daily Kos are so anxious to rush to their favored spot of moral indignation that their basic reading comprehension skill slip a bit.

[quoting David Brooks]

Some people believe that Pelosi is an airhead, but that is wrong. Some people believe she is a radical San Francisco liberal, but that, too, is wrong. The main fact to know about Pelosi is that she is a creature of the modern fund-raising system. Some politicians rise because they run political machines. Some rise because they are great communicators. Pelosi has risen because she is a master of the thousand-dollar-a-plate fundraising circuit....

She paid her dues selecting party favors, arranging seating charts (after that, legislation is easy), and laying thick dollops of obsequiousness on cranky old moguls and their helmet hair spa-spouses. She has done what all political fund-raisers do: tell rich people things they already believe, demonize the other side, motivate the giving with Manichaean tales of good versus evil.

Airhead? Party planner? Thank you, Mr. Brooks, for so minimizing the achievements of this talented politician. Would David Brooks ever discuss another, male politician in these terms? Would David Brooks ever ask if a prominent Republican, say George Bush, was an airhead? If he got to where he is in politics because of his name, his family connections, his money?

O.K. Let's see the missing paragraphs from Brooks piece:

Living amid a web of investors, venture capitalists and West Coast technology tycoons, she raised heroic amounts of money for the Democratic Party before she ever thought of running for anything herself. In 1984, she was the state party chairwoman. In 1986, she was the national fund-raising chairwoman for the Senate Democrats.

Since coming to the House, she has discovered what many a savvy pol has discovered — that the fastest way to ascend in Congress is to raise a lot of money and give it to your peers.

I'm sorry, this is Brooks minimizing her achievements how exactly? And as to questioning people like Bush because of what background they emerged from, that is what Brooks' entire piece is about! (Read it here.)

I have a dream, my friends. I have a dream that we are approaching the day when a ranch-owning millionaire Republican like George Bush will make peace with a vineyard-owning millionaire Democrat like Nancy Pelosi.

I have a dream that Pelosi, who was chauffeured to school as a child and who, with her investor husband, owns minority shares in the Auberge du Soleil resort hotel and the CordeValle Golf Club, will look over her famous strand of South Sea Tahitian pearls and forge bonds of understanding with the zillionaire corporate barons in the opposing party.

and

She is part of the clash of the rival elites, with the dollars from Brookline battling dollars from Dallas, causing upper-class strife that even diminutive dogs, vibrant velvets and petite salades can’t fully soothe.

It pains me to see plutocrats fight, because it sets such a poor example for those of us in the lower orders who fly commercial. It pains me even more because politicians from the rival blueblood clans go to embarrassing lengths to try to prove they are most authentically connected with working Americans.

Hmm..seems to me it's a complaint about the nature of political culture in this day and age, Nancy Pelosi and George Bush more than included. I guess if it makes you feel any better you can believe Brooks is nothing but Archie Bunker in a better suit. Such a belief says something about somebody's prejudices, but I'm pretty sure not Brooks'.