Smackdown

Rolling Stone‘s Matt Taibbi is one of a kind. Fearless. Dedicated. Rude, crude, and socially unacceptable. Matt pulls no punches in his writing. His “great vampire squid” line will follow him into the afterlife.

Last week Taibbi couldn’t resist re-targeting one of his favorite Beltway sychophants, David Brooks, for his latest fawning tribute to America’s rich. Brooks believes they are simply “more industrious” than commoners. Brooks: Let Them Eat Work

True to form, most of Taibbi’s blog post is NSFW, but a brilliant smackdown nonetheless. Here’s a less-crude sample:

I would give just about anything to sit David Brooks down in front of some single mother somewhere who’s pulling two shitty minimum-wage jobs just to be able to afford a pair of $19 Mossimo sneakers at Target for her kid, and have him tell her, with a straight face, that her main problem is that she doesn’t work as hard as Jamie Dimon.

[...]

Brooks is right that most of the people in that 5% bracket log heavy hours, but where he’s wrong is in failing to recognize that most of us have enough shame to know that what we do for a living isn’t really working. I pull absolutely insane hours in my current profession, to the point of having almost no social life at all, but I know better than to call what I do for a living work.