Blue Wards Are Like This ... Red Wards Are Like This ...

Okay, that wasn't all. More notes on the idiocy of David Brooks:

- Is it only people in Northwest D.C. that hate "dumb people who are richer than they are"? Isn't hatred of these people pretty much universal?

- I understand that D.C. policy wonks are famously ugly, but how does Wall Street represent "people with good bone structure"? Have you been to Wall Street? I guess John Thain kinda looks like David Hasselhoff with a shirt on, but still ...

- Apparently, there aren't any "lawyers, TV producers and senior civil servants" in New York. Just can't find a lawyer anywhere in Manhattan! (My theory w/r/t his belief that the center of the media world is D.C.: he's way too boring too dumb too ugly his bone structure is too poor to get on TV in New York, and so the only TV producers he knows are on the Sunday morning "two conservatives for every half a liberal" political shows.)

- Another one of the three things people in Northwest D.C. disdain: "cleavage." Really? Was there a poll?

- Also, doesn't New York disdain "hunting", too? Probably even more so that D.C., right? Isn't this one better suited to some manufactured "Upper West Side vs. Wasilla, Alaska" hate-off? ("Wasillans despise three things: non-Second Amendment rights, phonies, and restaurants with unlaminated menus.") It's pretty clear this one's on the list just so the right-wing anger bears can reminisce about the good times, when Brooks' Jeff-Foxworthy-channels-the-culture-war routine allowed the rank-and-file to pretend that the corrupt oligarchy they were abetting was (surprise!) actually a populist movement.

- Is there a more perfect encapsulation of David Brooks than his statement that -- in the midst of two wars, an enormous financial collapse, a recession, climate change, and any number of actually important policy disputes in Washington -- he's "become increasingly concerned about the rising number of rich people who are being caught unawares by shifts in the sumptuary code"? I say no.

Newspaper of Wrecked Word

David Brooks, in the opening paragraph of a typically asinine column, says this:

Then there was John Thain, who was humiliated because it is no longer acceptable to spend $35,000 on a commode for a Merrill Lynch washroom.

Back on Sunday, Deborah Solomon and J.D. Trout, in one of Solomon's usual Russert-level dialogues, had this exchange:

[JT:] When you’re spending lots of excess money — money that wouldn’t make any difference to your subjective well-being — you’re spending the money on a hedonic vomitorium of sorts.

[DS:] You’re comparing piano lessons to the apocryphal vomitoriums into which decadent Romans supposedly regurgitated their dinner?

[JT:] The vomitorium image is just the idea that you’re consuming something that can’t be used by other people, and it gets wasted on you.

A commode is -- and I believe we went through this with Duke Cunningham, didn't we? -- a set of drawers (h/t). You don't put it in a washroom.

A vomitorium is a tunnel in an amphitheater. (Solomon almost avoids the error, but the vomitoriums weren't "apocryphal" -- the Roman vomit parties were.) Vomitoriums allow actors to come onstage, and aren't actual conduits for purging.

These people are paid to use words correctly. That is all.