« A Bridge Too Far | Main | Known Unknowns » Tan Brooks vs. Pasty Bloggers03 Jul 2008 06:24 pm Here's a slice of the panel I was on yesterday: This was one edition of the Allstate Ideas Exchange at the Aspen Ideas Festival. Before taping I was encouraging Marc to engage in some old-time radio plugs for our sponsors but he demurred so let me be the first to assure you that you're in good hands with Allstate. Comments (52)
Of course Matt Yglesias is going to come up with some reason why Allstate, Chevron, BP, Intel, and whatever other corporate sponsors support this Atlantic event have not, in fact, shaped the way the event works. But give me a break. This is nonsense. And maybe Matt Yglesisas is some sort of lone wolf among a sea of centrist commentators - Ambinder, Goldberg, Sullivan, etc. - but the fact remains that this is a corporatist event. 
Did you ask Brooks if the Aspen Applebee's salad bar was any good?
I'm impressed. You guys are even pastier than I am. Of course, the sun is a lot stronger here in Colorado, so I only need to see it for a few minutes. Any more than that, and I'll have second degree burns.
Marc Ambinder is a moron. This is a guy who says that a rejection of Bush would involve the rise of Grover Norquist. HAS MARC AMBINDER FOLLOWED POLITICS THIS LAST 8 YEARS? GROVER NORQUIST IS PART AND PARCEL OF THE RISE OF GEORGE BUSH. THERE CAN BE NO REJECTION OF BUSH WITHOUT A REJECTION OF NORQUIST.
Going to repeat myself, but: Jesus, which one is the ugly one?
Noooooooo! Matt, why did you shave your beard? I'm melting, meeeeeeeeltiiiiiiing!
Ambinder is "Meatloaf". Douthat is only "Anything for Love". I called Douthat "meatloaf" for awhile, but I'd never seen Ambinder then.
"was encouraging Marc to engage in some old-time radio plugs for our sponsors but he demurred" His contract with McCain has an exclusivity clause.
"Hello, friends, it's your old pal Matt Yglesias, host of the Aamco/Military-Industrial Complex Old-Fashioned Blogging Hour. Y'know, many of my friends ask me, 'Matt, where can I go to have my transmission and my belief in the existing order tuned up to within an inch?' Well, that's when I give the trademark Yglesias chuckle, and say, just pull into any Aamco, and, while our trained technicians keep your gas-guzzler in tip-top condition, our infotainers will give you all the news you need that'll make you feel just like you know what's going on! Tell 'em Matt Yglesias sent you and get a free audiobook, 'The Atlantic on Aquifers,' read by Philip Baker Hall!"
Looking at Ambinder in the flesh, you get a clearer sense of why he crushes so hard on McCain. Seriously, one rub of the belly by a manly man like that -- or one of his people -- and that guy is totally gone.
Um, Brooks really doesn't like you, Matt. The look on his face as your introduced is total Sour Patch Kid.
Um, Brooks really doesn't like you, Matt. The look on his face as you're introduced is total Sour Patch Kid.
When you deal with legitimately big media people, is it hard to be polite and not say "Hi, I'm Matt, nice to meet you, most of the things you write about are silly"
let me be the first to assure you that you're in good hands with Allstate. Speaking as an attorney who litigates insurance claims, let me point out that you are most definitely not.
I see white people.
I see from the web site that Bill Clinton, the best president in the last few decades, will be there. Given your posts in the primary, I certainly hope you will make a point of finding him in person and call him a racist.
You should ditch that shirt, Matt. It makes you look like a 1960s comic book super-villain. And especially not with the jacket.
It looks like you grabbed it out of the women's golf attire section at Macy's. Why not just wear a plain shirt instead?
the camera guy needs to get off Brooks' dick.
So do any of the insurance companies have good hands? Sorry, I can't bring myself to watch a panel with Brooks on it.
looks like a group of fat, pasty white guys who all supported the war in iraq but who failed to enlist to fight penal battalions for various periods for the lot
Two questions: 1) How many seconds did it take for Brooks to get the golf course after escaping this panel? 2) How the FUCK is David Brooks writing a book about neuroscience? The man doesn't know anything about politics, let alone science.
Wow - with apologies to Grover Norquist, David Brooks is obviously bent on being the tan William Kristol.
"How the FUCK is David Brooks writing a book about neuroscience?" Neuroscience is popular now. Someone has to express the point of view of those that don't understand neuroscience. Who better than David Brooks?
It makes you look like a 1960s comic book super-villain. Or like a sidekick to Popeye.
Anyone who's been that close to Brooks and didn't have the sense to detonate a bomb is not to be trusted. Brooks is the scum that scum scrape off their shoes. You're a spineless, careerist sh!t, Matt. And I think you know it. I can't wait to watch you pimp school vouchers, privatization of jails, and the next war when Moloch/Sulzberger/Murdoch pay you enough to do so. You are worthless.
There would probably be less snark on this board about the video if the Atlantic could give us, say, the whole panel, rather than these sorry little clips which are parceled out to MY, MA, and RD in no predictable fashion. It's like watching the local news: 10 minutes of ads, 10 minutes of promotion of upcoming stories, and a measly little bit of content sandwiched in between. Am I the only one who thinks of the following quote when I hear the word 'aspen'? "It is fall now … Out West, where you vacation, the aspens will already be turning. They turn in clusterfucks, because their roots connect them. Come back to work—and life." (slightly edited)
Boy, seeing this makes me want to indulge my inner Ogre and fly to Aspen to start inflicting some wedgies of Martin Princelike proportions.
Mark, Matt -- seriously, you guys are getting FAT. You're both in your mid 20s, right? Really, you need to change the way you're living.
Allstate sucks. NOLA.com 2/20/08: "BATON ROUGE -- Insurance Commissioner Jim Donelon fined Allstate $250,000 Wednesday and ordered the state's second-largest insurer to reinstate the wind and hail coverage of several hundred customers whose policies were dropped in disregard of a key consumer-protection law. It is the only fine that Louisiana has levied against a homeowners insurance company since Hurricane Katrina, and the fine is the maximum penalty allowed by state law." See also, 'Allstate suspended from doing business in FL for failure to comply with a state subpoena' after proposing an across the board 43% rate increase to FL home owners.
TomT,
man, people on the internet are jerks!
Allstate? You mean the guys who replaced their "good hands" logo with boxing gloves in their internal presentations to show how they should treat their less profitable customers? As a former financial industry consultant, to heck with those guys, and the whole industry for that matter - you're in good hands with a good attorney who can review a contract well and make sure it is air-tight and the insurance guys can't get out of it.
Jesus Bleeping Jesus ... Can this decade be over soon enough? Aspen Allstate Airheads
Who knew that neuroscience could be mined for glib observations that conform to political and cultural stereotypes? David Brooks did!
Why does Brooks seem so itchy, anxious and paranoid in this video? Did somebody bring up the 'any criticism of neoconservatism is really anti-semitism' thing again? And I'm sorry, but without Megan its not really The Table now is it? Although those rambling, rolling Ambinder introductions are always riveting.
Well. This thread has probably been the most brutal set of comments I've seen here in quite a while - and I haven't even posted yet. I haven't even seen the video yet (something else is downloading at the moment - babe pictures, of course.) Funny posts, too. I especially like this one from Tom: "Anyone who's been that close to Brooks and didn't have the sense to detonate a bomb is not to be trusted." This reminds me of a line I heard once, about how this sort of thing makes one want to oil up the Uzi and waste a bunch of corporate bigwigs. You know, Matt, if I was still running my old game that got me eight years in prison, I'd probably have blown up the whole crew in Aspen. Or perhaps just knocked off a few silently with a suppressed handgun and let the bodies be found when they didn't show up for their panel the next day. If I were you, I'd start wearing a Kevlar vest to these things, because people are getting antsy about the economy that these corporate and statist flakes have produced in this country.
So I just watched this piece of shit. Man, that was a waste of five minutes. I could have been downloading more babe pictures from Superiorpics! Who the hell wants to listen to Ross babble about the future of conservatism? Isn't this supposed to be Matt's blog? WTF? Well, I suppose this is the first "Table" video where Matt didn't hog the whole damn thing by not letting anyone else get a word in edge wise.
Brooks is thinner than you guys too. And older. If I didn't know how to read I'd wonder if was on the right side.
I spent a few months gutting houses outside New Orleans after Katrina. I saw a lot of abandoned homes with "The Bad Hands" written on the exterior. But Matt got to party with David Brooks, so I guess that puts Allstate back in the black, karmic debtwise.
Or at least be a lot more specific about what has got you so outraged here. We can start with a few long articles about this. This one, from Philadelphia Magazine, which reveals that nearly all of his quasisociological facts are fabricated, and this one, from the Washington Monthly, which makes the case that, while he is occasionally insightful, he's just as often bloviating a la Michael Savage. Then there's the fact that he painted everyone who opposed the war as "chicken littles", "deranged Bush haters", and so on. Maybe this is the best way to put it: Brooks and his neocons cohort have, in effect, murdered thousands of our troops and tens of thousands (perhaps hundreds of thousands) of Iraqis. And then there he is in Aspen, looking tanned, happy, and rested, as he chats amiably about his latest plans to f*ck up our country. Hannilbal Lecture should be so conscienceless.
Wow, what a horrid and whiny and jealous set of comments. Matt looks fine, Brooks looks pampered and self-satisfied. In Matt's defense to all the haters: He's spent the whole conference making fun of the corporate sponsors and making it pretty damn clear that he is uncomfortable with their presence and their various attempts to rebrand and greenwash through their sponsorship. Are you really telling me that he should have quit his job rather than gone and made his views clear? Happy Independence Day. Here's to civil debate and respectful disagreement.
TomT,
The video was a waste of time. Where was the beef? George
"You should ditch that shirt, Matt. It makes you look like a 1960s comic book super-villain." This is precisely why he should NOT ditch that shirt. If you're going to be the token lefty Young Turk at a corporate-sponsored self-serious centrist "ideas" conference, then your categorical imperative is to play the super-villain role with style and panache. Matt seems to have played the part quite well. I think some of the folks in this thread need to tune up their irony detectors.
Less Irony, and more hypocrisy. Sucking cock in a sarcastic manner Matt, still means you are sucking cock. Doesn't matter how much snark you give, and how much you try to dress 'outsider'. At least Ambinder is more honest - he loves the free stuff! though Sigg bottles arent that expensive to buy - $25 isn't much for retaining a sense of dignity/self-righteousness.
If people who differ on the war cannot discuss it with each other, how can persuasion occur? Or learning? If you actually read either of the articles, you would know that Brooks treats all who disagree with him with derision. How is "discussion" possible with someone like that. I feel like I"m being trolled by David Broder here. Jason: there is no virtue in being naive dupe. You seem like a reasonable sort at heart, but I wonder what rock you've been living under for the past seven years.
I'm glad Marc demurred. I think the 40 second pre-roll ad was more than enough. Have a safe and happy 4th of July.
Exactly how large does your head have to be to work at The Atlantic. Good Lord, you guys look like South Park characters.
Thanks for posting the videos. I do have to say... what's the point of a lapel mic if you're going to hold it?
Comments closed July 17, 2008. |
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Heads in the Sand
I love the soundtrack on this one. A 30 sec. remix of the Love Boat theme song (and what says cutting edge ideas like the 70's and an insurance company), followed by, what, The Strokes?
Ah well. Can we have clips that are longer than, like, two minutes? The continuity is terrible.
Posted by lampwick | July 3, 2008 6:41 PM