PICKING OFF LOW-HANGING FRUIT

It's too easy but Kelso can't resist: David Brooks' "Lunch Period Poli Sci" in yesterday's Tissue Of Lies WEAK IN REVIEW section.

The conceit of it is borrowed from a Tom Wolfe essay in Commentary (jeez, wotta surprise!), that one's politics is formed in high school and the enemy is "one's adolescent opposite." Pure sophistry, of course, but not bad as a gimmick, Kelso will give Wolfe and Brooks that. Now, here's where it gets weird, and we quote "...If my opposite, my natural enemy in adolescence, seemed overly sensitive, soft, cerebral and incapable of action, I identify him with the 'liberal' position."

Take Uncle Kelso's hand and follow the path. Brooks is a conservative hawk, so naturally, we are to assume that he was a jock or a rich kid or a super stud and certainly a tough guy in high school. Only natural, right? Except it is 100%, Grade A bullshit. Brooks was a very "soft" and nerdy boy and is a very "soft" man who is completely incapable of "action." His writing is "soft"; his subjects (Bobos In Paradise!!!) are "soft" and the fuckhead hasn't taken a single risk in his life. Oh, he's happy about Appalachians and Blacks dying by the thousands in Iraq, but you'd find neither him, his children, nor any member of his family on the front-lines. They have "other priorities": shul, hating niggers, you know, that kind of thing.

How is it that Kelso can say this with such authority, having only read the man's writing and seen his face on television? Velly, velly simple. Don't listen to Kelso. Listen to the liberal columnist Tom Oliphant -- a friend of Brooks's -- in an interview on WNYC from around the time Brooks got the Safire spot as Tissue Of Lies op-ed conservative. Oliphant is unsparing in describing just the kind of irony Kelso set out above. His basic point was that as adolescents he, Oliphant, was a Kips Bay tough kid who became a dove and Brooks was a Stuyvesant Town nerd who became a hawk. Kelso sez: QED.

There is, however, something even weirder in the Brooks piece. You'll recall a few weeks back, Brooks cited a book of Tom Wolfe's as some kind of defense of the Duke lacrosse players. Well, what do you know? Again Wolfe. Again the Duke lacrosse players: "...In adulthood, the former high school nerds will savor the sort of scandals that befall their formerly athletic and currently corporate adolescent enemies -- the Duke lacrosse scandal [that's not a scandal, asshole, that's a crime of violence], the Enron scandal, the various problems that have plagued the frat-boy Bush..."

What are we to make of this? That the conservative Brooks doesn't give a shit about the rape of the stripper? Guess so. That he's so concerned about the subject but not the victim suggests something really twisted. Kelso thinks that the guy has reinvented himself in his mind as some kind of jock and wishes he had had a crack at that stripper. But what's really, really pathetic about this is that as ugly a crime as that was, it does take some kind of -- oh -- violent abandon to perpetrate it. And violent abandon is exactly what this fucking prig lacks. He's wound tighter than a 2006 baseball. That he also lacks compassion and common sense makes him a perfect fit for the Tissue Of Lies Op-Ed page of the Bill Keller era.

The radio host Mike Malloy likes to talk about whom he "'gets'" when the lights go out": Limbaugh, McLellan, Rove, usually. When the lights go out, Kelso gets Brooks.

Kentucky Derby and maybe some hockey later this week.

Kelso's Nuts love you.