According to David Brooks, Americans

…live in the world of Perverse Cosmic Myopia, an inability to focus attention on the most perilous matter at hand.

Mr. Brooks always mistakes himself or the Villagers for “all Americans”. It is the Beltway that is so near-sighted that it can’t see beyond its own interests. Mountaintop-less Appalachians know that times are hard. Like a solid majority of Americans, they are clamoring for their government to address their needs. So, too, are the people who live in dozens of Detroits, major urban centers that are largely black, and their hundreds of surrounding, upscale white suburbs.

They know that the current economic downturn in manufacturing is not routine. It’s the death knell of an abundant past; it will produce a permanent cosmic shift in employment, wealth and opportunity. They want their government to assist in the inevitable painful transitions. They know that that means raising taxes, spending on long-term projects, and fundamental re-regulation of markets and monopolies to reduce the devastation of future bubbles and the blackmail of enterprises that are too big to fail.

None of that fits into the thimble that is BrooksWorld. For Brooks, those aren’t real Americans. Regulation is an ideologically invalid solution. And the problems we face have not been festering during eight years of Republican misrule. Obama is to blame [not], because he’s trying too hard to fill the sinkholes his predecessor left behind. That’s an interpretation only Karl Rove could love. Had Bobo directed his sarcasm at Mr. Cheney’s truthiness instead of Mr. Obama’s ambition, the bandits at Fox Noise would have accused him of gross disrespect:

Why he has not also decided to spend his evenings mastering quantum mechanics and discovering the origins of consciousness is beyond me.

What really terrifies Bobo’s feudal lords and, hence, Bobo, is that Democrats might be “shortsighted” enough to re-regulate out of control financial markets. “That never works,” Bobo confidently says, as if he were the pope critiquing condoms.

In normal times, leaders like to focus on the short term at the expense of the long term. But now the short term is really confusing, so leaders take refuge in projects that are years or decades away.

That describes George Bush selling us on “clean coal” (there isn’t any), his touting of hydrogen-fueled cars (always about thirty years away) and electric vehicles (remember when Dubya nearly made Darth president when he tried to plug a 220 volt power cord into a hybrid’s gas tank?) But it doesn’t describe Mr. Obama.

Mr. Brooks distracts attention from a full-court press of Republican obstructionism by claiming that it is Mr. Obama’s ambition to fix “everything at once” that’s getting him into trouble on Capitol Hill:

The results of this overload are evident on Capitol Hill. The banking plan is incomplete, and there is zero political will to pay for it. The president’s budget is being nibbled to death. The revenue ideas are dying one by one, while the spending ideas expand. By the latest estimate, the health care approach will cost $1.5 trillion over 10 years and the national debt will at least double, while the Chinese publicly complain about picking up the tab.

Mr. Brooks is a bit off kilter. Deficits are still largely Mr. Bush’s doing, a problem Mr. Brooks ignored until Mr. Obama got his job. And Mr. Obama, in some ways, isn’t doing enough. Paul Krugman has made that argument regarding his stimulus plan, and Glenn Greenwald and Scott Horton have made it regarding his acceptance of too many of Bush’s ludicrous claims of secrecy and executive power. Bobo tries to get around them with full bore hypocrisy and a change of subject:

We’re in the middle of a multitrillion-dollar crisis, and our political masters…have decided to risk destroying the entire bank-rescue plan because of bonuses that account for 0.001 percent of the annual G.D.P.

That faux arithmetic allows Brooks to avoid analyzing the bail-outs themselves. The AIG bonuses, while corrupt, are only a roman candle on a ten foot-high birthday cake. But they represent the blank checkiness of the Bush-Obama bail-out scheme. It demands little in return for two generations of taxpayer resources and avoids investigating civil or criminal wrongdoing.

It is not Obama’s ambition to be responsible, something unknown to his predecessor, that most frightens Bobo. It is that he might follow the same path as Europe and enact credible regulations to fix massive problems that stem from fifteen years of deregulatory abandon. Obama’s tentativeness in proposing serious regulatory changes means Brooks has little to fear. Like other highly-paid lobbyists, he must be anticipating that DFH’s and the general public will prod him toward greater reforms.

If Republicans allow that, it might dethrone the transnational financial barons who created our current nightmare. So Bobo obediently urges that they be allowed to collect their bonuses (in addition to trillions in public subsidies) and be allowed an unfettered opportunity “to fix” the problems they created. Anyone who doesn’t see it his way is "perversely cosmically myopic". That they might be far-sighted, instead, is too much for poor David to contemplate.