Not Quite 100%
by digby
I didn’t know quite what to make of David Brooks’ even-more-than-usually noxious column this morning, but luckily I read Pandagon and it all made sense:
I was surprised that his vendetta against famous, successful women became so hysterical this morning that he insinuated that Sandra Bullock should have been at home making a sandwich instead of winning an Oscar, and that would have saved her marriage. Even someone as dedicated to making sure that no woman who works makes more than minimum wage as Brooks usually makes an exception for Hollywood actresses, understanding that it would be disconcerting for modern audiences to adopt the Elizabethean practice of having young boys play female characters in the movies, and it would bring to a crashing halt the practice of having nude sex scenes in films. Unless of course you only made movies for the Catholic priest population, but I just don’t see that bringing in the big bucks that Hollywood has grown accustomed to.
Read on …
Ouch.
My personal experience with the institution of marriage has been terrific, but I would no more make judgments about other peoples’ marriages based upon that than I would judge their taste in desserts. Everybody’s different. But these “values” conservatives never hesitate to inject themselves into the relationships of those to whom they feel superior and oddly enough, they tend to the same conclusion: the woman failed to keep her man happy.
Marcotte, however, answers the main question I had about Brooks when I read this thing this morning:
Why is he in such a crisis of anxious masculinity that the unique, self-contained Hollywood world is bothering him? I’m afraid that we have to assume he’s upset because Nancy Pelosi took his balls. When forced to consider the subject of Nancy Pelosi’s massive success as Speaker of the House—success many people like Brooks would not think a woman capable of—he said this, after Mark Shields suggested Pelosi is the most powerful female political figure in our history:
JIM LEHRER: Do you buy that, David?
DAVID BROOKS: I’m trying to think of alternatives.
Some people say Edith Wilson was very powerful when Woodrow Wilson had a stroke.
Already we’re deep into wanker territory. But it gets worse! Because Brooks simply cannot accept that a woman might acquire power the way a man can, by working hard and winning elections and getting good at her job.
DAVID BROOKS: But, certainly, this is a great accomplishment. And sort of it’s an interesting picture of what it takes to succeed in a job like this.
She is not a great speaker—I mean a spokesperson, a communicator. I personally don’t think she’s great on policy. But she has the skills to know how to control this body, which is a fractious body, even when you have a majority. And, so, those skills are maybe in her blood from her father and her brother, but also skills that she really possesses. And there’s no denying she is a very effective legislator.
Nice of him to admit that she “really possesses” some skills, but it would seem that most of them are passed down from the men in her family, so it’s hard to know if they “count.” But I think that passage illuminates a lot more about Brooks than Pelosi, don’t you?
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