Op-Ed Columnist - The Worst-Case Scenario - NYTimes.com
David Brooks is the NYT "token conservative" -- he is essentially "just to the left of Olympia Snow and Susan Collins". I don't know if he ever actually came out for BO, but he was close.
Here is a bottom line that I think he essentially gets right:
People indeed have a lot of brain cells, but at the bottom, our emotional repertoire is likely not much different from the family pet, with fear being by far the easiest lever to pull even unwittingly. Our cognitive / rational fore-brain only gets to play when our emotional low to mid-brain is satisfied that "the crisis is over".
The lefties were constantly in accusation mode that the Bush team "played on people's fears" relative to terrorism -- as if the worst foreign attack on US soil since the revolution wasn't something that was going to engender a legitimate fear response that was best dealt with by taking action to remove as much of the potential for future attack as possible.
When the new President gets up and tells us that if we don't throw $800 Billion + of pork fat to the beauracrats in DC, "the recession will turn into something we can't recover from", and then his Treasury Secretary gets up and says he is going to throw $1.2 Trillion around with no plan and all, while the President's appointees are dropping or backing out like Mormons at a Gay Bar, the scent of fear overcomes even the scent of BO.
The Rubicon has been crossed, the die has been cast -- at some deep level, even BO seems to now realize that he doesn't know what he and his troops are doing and that we may in fact head to some place that is "not recoverable". I'd argue that as long as he doesn't start down the path of the "Fairness Doctrine", and radical gun control, America WILL recover -- but it could be a very long time with an awful lot of pain.
David Brooks is the NYT "token conservative" -- he is essentially "just to the left of Olympia Snow and Susan Collins". I don't know if he ever actually came out for BO, but he was close.
Here is a bottom line that I think he essentially gets right:
The crisis was labeled an economic crisis, but it was really a
psychological crisis. It was caused by a mood of fear and uncertainty,
which led consumers to not spend, bankers to not lend and entrepreneurs
to not risk. No amount of federal spending could change this psychology
because uncertainty about the future remained acute.
Essentially, Americans had migrated from one society to another — from
a society of high trust to a society of low trust, from a society of
optimism to a society of foreboding, from a society in which certain
financial habits applied to a society in which they did not. In the new
world, investors had no basis from which to calculate risk. Families
slowly deleveraged. Bankers had no way to measure the future value of
assets.
People indeed have a lot of brain cells, but at the bottom, our emotional repertoire is likely not much different from the family pet, with fear being by far the easiest lever to pull even unwittingly. Our cognitive / rational fore-brain only gets to play when our emotional low to mid-brain is satisfied that "the crisis is over".
The lefties were constantly in accusation mode that the Bush team "played on people's fears" relative to terrorism -- as if the worst foreign attack on US soil since the revolution wasn't something that was going to engender a legitimate fear response that was best dealt with by taking action to remove as much of the potential for future attack as possible.
When the new President gets up and tells us that if we don't throw $800 Billion + of pork fat to the beauracrats in DC, "the recession will turn into something we can't recover from", and then his Treasury Secretary gets up and says he is going to throw $1.2 Trillion around with no plan and all, while the President's appointees are dropping or backing out like Mormons at a Gay Bar, the scent of fear overcomes even the scent of BO.
The Rubicon has been crossed, the die has been cast -- at some deep level, even BO seems to now realize that he doesn't know what he and his troops are doing and that we may in fact head to some place that is "not recoverable". I'd argue that as long as he doesn't start down the path of the "Fairness Doctrine", and radical gun control, America WILL recover -- but it could be a very long time with an awful lot of pain.
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