When Kerry uses the word "values," it's meant to send a message: I am not who I am. I am not the blue-blooded prep-school kid who married two millionaires, dated a movie star and has a prenup and umpteen homes in tony locales; who has spent the past two decades as a moderately liberal senator from Massachusetts; and who likes to snowboard at Sun Valley and windsurf off Nantucket. I'm just your back-fence neighbor in Mayberry, out there in overalls, sidlin' over to the fence to chat: "Howdy neighbor! Would you like to come visit for a spell and hear about my values of faith, hope and opportunity?
Yes, that's right: because Kerry is rich and liberal, things like faith, hope, and opportunity (let's just pretend those are actually values) can't be important to him. But wait, it gets better. In his last three paragraphs, Brooks -- a prominent and fairly wealthy pundit -- manages to forget his net worth and complains in general terms about `these upper-class types [who] want our values'.
So, to sum up: Rich people, especially rich liberal people, have different values from such exemplars of the working class as David Brooks. They shouldn't pretend to care about faith, hope, and opportunity, because they don't have tattoos and aren't on the Atkins diet.
Update: Eschaton and Pro-war.com have more on Cons' understanding (or lack thereof) of the term `values'. Fixed Blogger's odd formating decisions.
2 comments:
The new posting system sure is neat, but I could do without the weird spacing problems.
And it screwed up the hyperlink too. Mozilla kept crashing when I was trying to publish, maybe there's a bug in the way the publisher interacts with the editor.
Post a Comment