How to Save the Economy -- Be More Patriotic!

Our Miss Brooks is even more asinine than usual -- and Brooks is consistently asinine -- today. Here, in his own words, is his plan for saving the economy: "We now need a movement transcendent of partisan cliques and organized around a broad revitalization agenda and love of country."

The Constant Weader comments:

I don't think I have seen such nonsense in a New York Times column since way back on Wednesday when Maureen Dowd turned her column over to her (perhaps fictional) brother Kevin. (You can read my comment on Dowd's column here [#6].) But Kevin, if he's a real-life person, does not get paid to know what he's talking about. You do, Brooks, and like the deficit commission you trumpet, you are not earning your paycheck.

Case in point. It's nothing short of stunning that you could make your fingers type, "The report from the chairmen lists some of the best ways to raise revenue and cut spending." This isn’t a wrong-headed opinion. It’s a flat-out misstatement of fact. The catfood commission chairmen's proposal is a disgusting, duplicitous plan to redistribute the wealth upward. Nothing could be worse for our economy. Nothing could do more to bring on the doomsday scenario that you have envisioned than to turn all but a few Americans into serfs who will die when they get sick or old for want of a safety net. The chairmen's draft proposal is so Dickensian that I am at a loss for words adequate to condemn it.

Your solution, on the other hand, is something I would expect to hear from a dimwitted beauty pageant contestant. And here I mean one of the losers, not the winner, who would have to come up with something better than "patriotism" as her idea of solving the nation's economic problems.

"Revived patriotism"? That's your plan? What will get us out of this economic mess is millions of serfs waving tiny American flags made in China and purchased at the Walton family store? Maybe there's still time to go back to your computer & write another column, Mr. Brooks. This one is, as Nancy Pelosi said of the Alan & Erskine show, "simply unacceptable."

The Brooks Plan: