A Connoisseur's Guide to White Men, courtesy of David Brooks

By A.J. Liebling
Meta-Content Generator

Another year and we're still talking about white male bloviators for The New York Times.  It's good to know that some things, unlike the American constitutional order, never change.

Today the Old Perfesser himself, David Brooks, takes on a searching examination of two kinds of white men: good and bad.  More specifically, the good kind of U Bum critic (himself) and the bad (Michael Wolff, who apparently wrote a book based on his reporting inside the White House of Grift).

What distinguishes the white bread from the chaff?  After slogging through the mansplaining, we haven't a clue:

 . . .the anti-Trump movement, of which I’m a proud member, seems to be getting dumber. It seems to be settling into a smug, fairy tale version of reality that filters out discordant information. More anti-Trumpers seem to be telling themselves a “Madness of King George” narrative: Trump is a semiliterate madman surrounded by sycophants who are morally, intellectually and psychologically inferior to people like us.

Not sure what facts he can adduce that undercut this conclusion, but OK.   It takes a couple more paragraphs for him to come to what passes for his point:  Michael Wolff bad!

We anti-Trumpers have our lowbrowism, too, mostly on late-night TV. But anti-Trump lowbrowism burst into full bloom with the Wolff book.

Let the World's Greatest Authority, David Brooks,
explain it all to you

It's bad enough that Stephen Colbert tears the Groper-in-Chief a new one every night, but now we have a journalist who wrote a book based upon a year of reporting that demonstrates the reality of the narrative the Old Perfesser was so contemptuous of.  What did Wolff do that was so terrible?  Did he make a bunch of stuff up?  Good white man David Brooks alleges he did but unlike Wolff he doesn't present any facts to buttress his case.  As we once said about Col. McCormack, Brooks cites no authority, being it.

We've read a bit here and there about Wolff's supposed disregard for the facts, and thus far as we understand exactly one person has disputed one quote attributed to him.  Whether we should believe Mr. Loose Lips remains to be seen.  And the lawyer for Wolff's publisher notes that U Bum's latest fulminating mouthpiece, not-80's-porn-star Charles Harder, cites no factual errors in his 11-page screed. 

Just in case the any particularly dim Times reader fails to get his point about the difference between good and bad white men, Brooks concludes with:

There’s a hierarchy of excellence in every sphere. There’s a huge difference between William F. Buckley and Sean Hannity, between the reporters at this newspaper and a rumor-spreader. 

William F. Buckley?  Who he?   And what was his excellence?  To learn about His Excellency, you need go no further than the exact same op-ed page, where  another Times columnist, not-a-white-man Michelle Goldberg, writing about the Likud dream of permanently disenfranchising the indigenous Palestinian population, said:

Israel’s apologists will be left mimicking the argument that William F. Buckley once made about the Jim Crow South. In 1957, he asked rhetorically whether the white South was entitled to prevail “politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically.” The “sobering answer,” he concluded, was yes, given the white community’s superior civilization.

That must have sounded more excellent to David Brooks than it does to us.  In fact, we seem to recall that Excellent Bill opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 based on the "superior civilization" that brought us George Wallace then and Roy Moore now.

Now that Michelle Goldberg has reminded us what a loathsome racist William F. Buckley was, we'd be inclined to put him and lying sack of s**t Sean Hannity on the same rung of the hierarchy of excellence.  And what about David Brooks?

Let's just say he's in a class by himself.