In the court of public opinion

David Brooks doesn't stand a chance of being exonerated. Especially when Charles P. Pierce is the prosecutor:

I don't think it's too strident to demand at this point that David Brooks be hauled up before a jury consisting of everyone else in America and forced to defend himself against several million counts of being an insufferable twat in a public place. In today's episode of Missing the Point So I Don't Miss a Meal, Our Mr. Brooks informs us that he once again has placed us all under close inspection beneath his monocle and discovered that some of us are very angry, not because some thieves in nice suits pillaged the national economy and then held the scraps for ransom. Oh, no, that isn't it at all, and he's got some wholly arbitrary ad hoc sociological categories to prove it.

You know the drill. Read it all for yourself. And in case anyone is still wondering why I've developed such a mad crush on Mr. Pierce since he migrated over to Esquire, it's because he says what I think, but so much more eloquently. I'm still mulling over Pierce's take on the Oakland occupation:

It’s time for the country to realize that something is dangerously out of control here, and that it’s not a bunch of people in sleeping bags in the public parks. There is a tradition of public protest in this country. Hell, this country is itself an act of public protest. Preserve that, or preserve nothing else, because there’s nothing else worth preserving. Police officers are public servants. They are not soldiers, facing down enemies. This is not a war. This is America

.In case you somehow missed it, he's talking about this:



I don't think overkill is too strong a word to describe it.