I love watching Krugman open a fresh can of whup-ass, particularly when David Brooks is the recipient. This morning he responds (without mentioning his op-ed colleague by name, of course) to Brook’s recent praise of Charles Murray’s latest.
So we have become a society in which less-educated men have great difficulty finding jobs with decent wages and good benefits. Yet somehow we’re supposed to be surprised that such men have become less likely to participate in the work force or get married, and conclude that there must have been some mysterious moral collapse caused by snooty liberals. And Mr. Murray also tells us that working-class marriages, when they do happen, have become less happy; strange to say, money problems will do that.
Speaking of Brooks, his own column this morning provides reason number elventy billion and fifteen why David Brooks is a Weasel:
I don’t actually know what sort of person Romney is. He’s a reticent man. He’s unwilling to talk about his roots, home and family history, so it is hard to understand what’s really going on in his head. But he is giving the impression of being a classic other-directed type.
So Romney doesn’t talk about his family history, because he’s reticent you see, kind of a Gary Cooper type. Man of few words.
Oh, also, this:
The candidate’s great-grandfather, Miles Park Romney, was born in 1843 in Nauvoo, Ill., where Joseph Smith founded the Mormon church. Miles Park Romney had five wives and 30 children, and fled to Mexico after passage of the 1882 Edmunson Act that barred polygamy. Among the first Mormons to settle in to the rolling Mexican valley bordering Texas, Miles Park Romney married his fifth wife after the church banned the practice in 1890.
If I were running for President and had an interesting story like that in the family tree, I might be “reticent” too.
