Thursday, February 11, 2010

A history of creased pants and shopworn ideas
for David Brooks and other trouser jockeys


Today Matt Patterson takes on The New York Times’ David Brooks for his infatuation with Obama and the “limits of [Brooks’] understanding.” The jumping off point for his piece at Big Government is Brooks’ “continued fascination” with Obama’s perfectly creased pants.

So let us jump off Obama’s lap and begin this discussion with a bit of history.

You are likely not aware that trousers with creases were once sneered at.  They announced to everyone that your pants were “store bought” — creased from sitting on a store shelf, a sign they were factory-made and of inferior quality.  Those weren’t “creases” — they were permanent wrinkles.

Really nice clothes don’t come from a factory or off a store shelf; they are bespoke, expressly for you, by a tailor who begins with fine materials and finishes each detail with skill.  Any tailor who goes out of his way to steam a permanent crease in your pants is either a poor tailor, or a tailor who is trying to appeal to the class-conscious, the nouveau riche, and people who generally don’t know a lot about clothes.

But I don’t give a tinker’s cuss about Obama’s pants.  It’s his ideas I am worried about.  David Brooks should be worried, too, instead of running his hands up and down the president’s leg admiringly, like some trouser jockey.

If Obama were the real thing, and not so prêt-à-porter, his clothes — and his ideas — would not show signs of being shopworn.  They’d be original, not borrowed from the libraries of socialism.

And if David Brooks were a man of true intellect, and not a product of Ivy League factories, he would readily recognize both the origin and the consequences of Obama’s views.  Obama is anything but an original thinker; his politics and his strategies are factory-made, lifted right out of the book.  It is inexcusable for Brooks not to see this.

David Brooks may be a nice fellow, but American Thinker’s Stuart Schwartz nailed it when he labeled him an “Obama-designated conservative intellectual” and “MSNBC-anointed voice for America’s conservative masses.”  Brooks is not as smart as he thinks he is.  His conservative bona fides are highly suspect, and he is a perhaps a bit too class-conscious.

It has been endlessly and authoritatively documented that Obama has lifted his dangerous, un-American, and, frankly, crackpot ideas from the writings of some of the most poisonous minds in politics, like Bill Ayers, Saul Alinsky, Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, Jeremiah Wright, and yes, Karl Marx.  His appointees and lifelong associates are all disciples of the same school of thought (if you can call it thought), and have been hand-picked by Obama or his handlers expressly for that reason.

Team Obama all shop at the same store, and drink from the same sewer.  Their brains are permanently wrinkled. You can see it in their inferior ideas.

2 comments:

nyc conservative gal said...

Even if we iron his pants, it still won't smooth out his step.

Roger v.d. Velde said...

What a highly flawed article. You didn't even get it right about the tailoring. Creases developed because of the new idea of doing the ironwork with the trouser panels on the double. That dates from about 1900 and probably from Germany.

As for Obama, his administration was neo-liberal light. The Obama government oversaw more repatriations than any Republican government, but they kept it quiet because it's not seen as very 'democratic' behaviour. The Republicans say nothing about it because it makes them look bad when they are doing less than the Dems. The Democratc Party follows almost 1:1 the same economic ideology every U.S. administration has followed since the med-1970s.

I know facts can be awkward, but blind opinion just doesn't cut it.