An Open Letter to the New York Times

Dear Newspaper of Record:

Are you nuts? Your stock price is sinking faster than a submarine with screen doors, you're getting scooped by blogs on all the big issues of the day, and your circulation's so bad that if you were a human being you'd need a quadruple bypass, and yet you continue to pay David Brooks to write editorials. Why?

His most recent attempt at cognitive doodling proves beyond the shadow of a doubt that he is caught up in a fantasy in which he sees himself as a scriptwriter for The West Wing. You remember that television program, no doubt? A chimerical vision of government run by honest and competent liberals? Brooks apparently thinks he's been hired to write scripts for a series of return episodes, West Wing: the Obama Years.

The title of Brooks' article - "The House of Tranquility" - is actually intended to apply to the current atmosphere in the White House. With health care and cap-and-trade falling apart, the unemployment rate in double-digits, Republicans staging dramatic comebacks and the President's approval level at record-setting lows, if there really is a feeling of tranquility, then it is the tranquility of someone in a coma.

And Brooks would have us believe that Biden - Joe Biden - is now a serious and respected member of the team.

Obama casually asked Biden to take the lead on Iraqi policy. This was a potentially dangerous moment in which the vice president could be tromping over ground occupied by the secretaries of state and defense. But Biden seems to know every player in Iraq down to the alderman level — and, so far, he seems to have done the job without stepping on too many toes.

The guy's a lightweight. He could tromp on toes all day long, and who would notice? And the main point is his advice was ultimately ignored.

Biden also was asked to oversee the stimulus spending, a job that occupies 20 percent of his time. He has spoken to 49 governors and 100 mayors successfully policing the spending splurge and heading off potentially damaging stimulus projects, like a Napa wine train that would have shepherded tipplers from one vineyard to another.

Ah, but old eagle-eye Joe seems to have missed all that stimulus money going to non-existent congressional districts and zip codes, and the $252 billion that represents nothing but non-job-creating income transfer payments.

Finally, Biden was asked to come up with a middle-class agenda. This is a surprisingly difficult job because many of these programs — credits for college affordability and child care — fairly reek of Clintonism. This is an administration that is staffed by Clintonites but does not want to appear Clintonian in any way.

Middle-class tax increases, anyone?

Some would say the administration is underreacting to the incredible shift in the public mood. Some would say they need more voices from the great unwashed. But no one could accuse them of panicking, or of scrambling about incoherently. In their first winter of discontent, they are offering continuity and comity. Whatever their relations with the country might be, inside they seem unruffled.

There is enough b.s. in that single paragraph to fertilize an azalea nursery for an entire year. David Brooks is rapidly becoming Walter Duranty redux, covering up this administration's truth-famine. This is one reason that your newspaper is becoming less important than a supermarket flyer; at least with the latter, we stand a chance of occasionally getting 20% off the price of pork and beans, which is likely to become our daily fare before David Brooks' hero is done with us.