Why I would marry Charles Pierce

I avoid Brooksie like the plague. I often don't even read the myriad of posts that eviscerate his latest idiotic punditry, but when Charles Pierce bashes David Brooks, it's just too delicious to resist. In my next lifetime, I want to write like this:

Actually, no. He does, however, interview some very well-spoken poll results, and proceeds to interpret them in ways that make you wonder if he's dropped in from Alpha Centauri. He notices that poor people are having fewer babies, which makes him sad. But, things are looking up! People have stopped using their "bank-issued" credit cards as much. (These would be the cards they used so as to support the overstuffed suburban lifestyle that David Brooks so celebrated in his earlier, funnier work.) This means, to Brooks, "Quietly but decisively, Americans are trying to restore the moral norms that undergird our economic system."

Jesus H. Christ in a fking Volvo, no, it doesn't. It means people are broke. People are broke because the end product of 30 years of economic theorizing and political action that you supported has resulted in a shattered middle-class. People are broke because the Wall Street casino that your politics created and celebrated and enabled finally broke the entire country and took the rest of us down with it. People are broke because you and the rest of your "conservative" pals latched onto a crackpot scheme called supply-side economics, married it to a deregulatory frenzy and free trade, and then pitched it to the Bobos as economic liberty. You got rich. You got important. Now people are not using their credit cards because they can't afford to buy the overpriced, Chinese-made crap that you once proposed as the new staple of American society. That is not a conscious mass moral choice. You've got to be on mushrooms to believe that.

The world is such a better place now that Charles is blogging. He often speaks the simple truths we already know, but his command of the language is so gorgeous. I put him right up there with our own Capt. Fogg.

[More posts daily at the Detroit News.]