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You can add this interview to "part the infinity" as to why anything David Brooks says should never be taken seriously again. Why, oh why is this man paid to write a column for The New York Times every week? From this week's The PBS Newshour, Brooks apparently believes that GOP Ayn Rand fanboy Paul Ryan, who has never met a budget he could actually balance should be considered a policy "wonk."

Listening to this tragedy on PBS reminded me of Esquire's Charlie Pierce and his similar dismay over the praise of Ryan in Politico, or as he appropriately calls them, Tiger Beat on the Potomac: Things In Politico That Make Me Want To Guzzle Antifreeze, Part The Infinity:

Sometimes, it's the way it does its business, and sometimes, it's simply what's in it.

Obama, who has always regarded Ryan as one of the leading intellectual forces of the opposition...

Is this a dagger I see before me? Let me plunge it into my eyeballs.

His budgets don't balance. The CBO has his picture up on the wall like the mug shots of stalkers that hang in the guard shacks of Hollywood studios. Actual economists look at his work, when he actually shows it, which is not often, and they tell the tales of it to their children to scare their children out of ever becoming economists. His performance on the national stage last autumn was a clown show of epic proportions. He is a Leading Intellectual Force in a party full of people who eat oatmeal with their toes. [...]

It goes without saying, but we will say it anyway, and again, but there is simply nothing that the zombie-eyed granny-starver could propose that should be treated by any Democratic president any differently than a free introductory case of the mange. He has nothing to offer to any progressive vision of the country, not even the president's, which is admittedly a fairly pale one. He wants to demolish the social-welfare component of the government because he considers it philosophically illegitimate. He wants to establish an oligarchical system, not because it will profit him personally, although it will, but because he considers it the natural order of democracy. In every sense of the word, he is an extremist, the Louie Gohmert of economic policy.

Never mind that though. Here's what passes for a very Serious conversation by the "adults" in Washington where Brooks is downplaying the damage this sequester might do to our economy if it's allowed to go on, and praising Ryan as though he cares about anything other than lowering taxes on the rich at the expense of the rest of the country.

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As Susie already noted here, Elizabeth Warren's first chance to ask questions as a member of the Senate Banking Committee and to take some of these SEC chairs to task for not prosecuting anyone on Wall Street for their behavior, apparently hurt some of the bankers' feelings. MSNBC's Chuck Todd used the occasion to play the Villagers' favorite false equivalency game and compare wingnut McCarthyite Sen. Ted Cruz to Sen. Elizabeth Warren. Funny, how he sounds an awful lot like that anonymous Wall Street executive who was complaining about her.

And as Susie also pointed out, Warren telling the truth is not the same as Cruz' sorry display. What's really pathetic about Todd and and his cheap shot at Warren here is that even his colleague Chris Matthews went after Cruz and his attacks on Hagel for being the "new McCarthyism" in one of his segments on Hardball this Friday.

What I found humorous about the segment above is that even though Todd and his guests, Ruth Marcus and Michael Steele, did their best to be dismissive of Warren by even mentioning her in the same sentence as Cruz, you could also tell something else: They're scared to death of her.

Marcus admitted that maybe it was alright because Warren "was in her wheelhouse" (which I'd say is the understatement of the year), and they all had to admit that she'd be formidable if she decided to run for president -- -- although I find putting her in the same category as Marco Rubio is insulting as well.

There is no "Marco Rubio of the left," because the left doesn't need to prop up the few members of their party who are minorities to try to cover for their racist policies.

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Ah yes... Ronald Reagan... that great man of the working people and the American middle class... or at least he was in the alternative reality that is called Peggy Noonan's brain. After her predictions of "Romney rising" in the polls and that the enthusiasm factor would "carry the day" for his big win, Noonan was asked by This Week host George Stephanopoulos about the fact that the presidential election wasn't even close.

Noonan gave the audience a big dose of revisionist history on Reagan. And like most Republicans since Romney lost the election, seems to believe that Republicans don't really need to do anything differently. They just need to work on their messaging. I hate to break it to you Peggy, but it's not just the rhetoric. It's your policies. And they haven't gotten any better since Reagan did his best to help destroy our middle class.

It does seem impossible for Nooners to have a conversation about anything, without dragging out St. Ronnie's corpse to worship. It's pretty humorous given the fact that their party is so far off the cliff these days that he wouldn't make it through a GOP primary race right now.

STEPHANOPOULOS: And, Peggy Noonan, one of the things they're going to have to absorb is one of the points you've made is that this election in the end actually wasn't all that close, President Obama, 330 electoral votes. They're still counting the popular vote...

NOONAN: Yes, they are.

STEPHANOPOULOS: ... but he's above the -- he has more than a 3 percent lead over Mitt Romney right now.

NOONAN: Yeah. I think -- I mean, from the beginning, it struck me as this is not just the re-election of a president. This is the rebuffing, if that's the right word, of the Republicans.

Look, I think there are many lessons to be learned over this election. There was a not ideal candidate. It was a not ideal campaign, et cetera, et cetera. But, yes, America is -- in America, something's always being born. It's always changing. Demographically it's changing. At the end of the day, elections are actually about ideas. They're about the stands each party takes.

The Republicans do have to sit down and say, what are we doing? And as important, how are we doing it?

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From this Tuesday night's PBS Newshour, apparently the network decided their viewers just weren't getting enough of David Brooks' Villager conventional wisdom with his weekly appearance on Friday night and had him on to weigh in on the State of the Union Address as well. Par for the course with Brooks, he spent the better part of his time during this interview trying to whitewash whether Americans at at time when we've got record income disparity in the United States are going to care about Mitt Romney's finances and his time at Bain Capital.

Brooks doesn't think voters are going to care because hey... they just expect everyone who runs for president to be "super-rich." Maybe he's correct that the electorate is just looking for "he most assertive manly man" when it comes to some really angry Republican primary voters, especially given who they have to choose between right now, but in the general election, that's another story.

He's also enamored with the current crop of candidates for wanting to do something "big" like turn Medicare into a voucher program. As Ruth Marcus pointed out to Brooks, their proposals might be big things but they do nothing to address the concerns of everyday Americans and would primarily benefit the wealthy.

Brooks also came just short of repeating his spiel about the Republicans being the party of the working class again here. As I noted when he repeated that nonsense on Charlie Rose's show a few weeks ago, "Sadly, The New York Times, that supposed bastion of evil liberal ideology if you watch Fox or listen to right wing radio, is still paying this man way too much money to write a column there every week."

Transcript below the fold.

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The Washington Post's Ruth Marcus, who has already shown she'd rather bash unions than get her facts straight was at it again on during the panel segment on ABC's This Week. Marcus described anyone who is opposed to the report issued by the Catfood Commission's co-chairs as "behaving incredibly childishly" and thinks we should be listening to the adult in the room, Mr.-We-Need-Some-Shock-Therapy Kent Conrad.

Thankfully Paul Krugman was there for some push back but he was outnumbered by the wingnuts on the panel three to one.

AMANPOUR: The deficit commission, we had two members just -- just -- just earlier. You've written very, very strongly about a lot of the proposals, among other things, saying this proposal clearly represents a major transfer of income upward from the middle class to a small minority of wealthy Americans.

KRUGMAN: Yes. I think the most important thing to understand is that the commission did not do its job. It has a bunch of ideas for reducing the deficit, some good, some really bad, some of them not ideas about reducing the deficit at all.

But, you know, anybody, it's easy to come up with ideas. I can come up with ideas for reducing the deficit while padding my tummy and rubbing my head, you know?

AMANPOUR: What should they have done?

KRUGMAN: What they -- what they were supposed to do was produce something that was good enough to have an up-and-down vote, something that a lot of people could sign on to, and they did not do that.

In particular, now, leaving aside the distributional stuff -- which is awful -- the core of the deficit problem, everybody who's serious knows the core is health care costs, and you have to reduce health care costs, not reduce them, but reduce the rate of growth. The way you have to do that is by deciding what you're going to be willing to pay for.

They completely wimped out on that. They simply assumed they were going to reduce the rate of health care cost growth. And they said, how are we going to do that? By monitoring and taking additional measures as necessary.

So the report was completely empty on the only thing that really matters and then had a whole bunch of things which involved large tax cuts for the top bracket. What on Earth is that doing in there?

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Mrs. Greenspan took some time away from the Aspen Ideas Festival to speak to the AFL-CIO's Richard Trumka about jobs and the economy. Of course like her fellow over privileged Villager Ruth Marcus, Andrea Mitchell just could not understand why the peons can't just be happy having their retirement ages raised so that we don't have to over burden her ilk with higher taxes.

Mitchell: You recently sat down with the editors of the Washington Post and they had some tough questions for you and Ruth Marcus wrote from that session "In the world according to Trumka, no benefits need be cut, no retirement ages adjusted. Simply requiring the rich to pay a fairer share would bridge the gap." She went on to say "The top two rates would have to rise to 72.4 and 76.8 percent, more than double the current level. You don't have to be anti-tax zealot Grover Norquist to think this would be insane."

I mean one of the things that they were asking about is just raising the retirement age, the Social Security benefits age, to 63, what would, what would be wrong with that?

Trumka: First of all you know, I love Ruth but her column is a very, very simplistic and a very shallow analysis of that whole conversation that we had. It was an hour and a half long and when I said...

Mitchell: Well we both love Ruth but... but her point is that you are not looking at the deficit side and that you just want to put the burden on the rich, so let me...

Trumka: Here's what I'm saying. In the short term we don't have a deficit problem. It's the long term that we have to look at and the Social Security problem is not contributing in major ways to that deficit...

Mitchell: The Medicare is...

Trumka: Medicare is. That's exactly right and that deals with health care and I think that we ought to strengthen the health care bill. We ought to have a strong public option. We ought to negotiate better drug price containment and we all ought to work to contain those costs. I think Ruth, her idea is to soak the middle class. My idea was look, the rich have gotten by and part of the deficit problem we have long term is because of the Bush tax cuts so let's take a little of that back. Let's make the system a little more fair and we can all win in this process.

It's easy for someone like her, whose biggest financial worry might be how to pay for their next vacation in Europe rather than whether their back is going to give out after years of physical labor, to talk about raising the retirement age from her perch at MSNBC.

She went on to ask Richard about the Chamber of Commerce's Tom Donohue carping about all the money unions are going to be pouring into politics after the Citizens United case and Trumka had to remind her that the unions were never going to keep up with big business and their donations and that he doesn't quite make the same salary as lobbyist Donohue does. I have a hard time believing that Mitchell isn't already fully aware that labor doesn't contribute the same amount of money as corporations do but that didn't stop her from playing dumb when asking him the question.

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Howard Kurtz admits that the media "has fun" covering the pissed off Republicans at the town hall protests. Hey Howard, I didn't think having fun was supposed to be something the media considered when deciding what "news" stories to cover. And no, the coverage has not been fair. There's been very little coverage of these Remote Area Medical events with people lined up for miles and hours on end to get treatments they can't afford.

KURTZ: Jeff Zeleny, is Robert Gibbs right and Obama right that the media are providing a distorted picture of these town halls by focusing on the most confrontational moments?

ZELENY: Well, I think in a sense they are, but in a sense they're not. First, I think, I mean, the images and the passions that were shown this week from town hall meetings show real Americans having real concerns about this. I think that's one of the things that has been left out of this.

I spent most of the week in Iowa going to several town halls. There are real, patriotic voting Americans, some who voted for President Obama, who don't like what they see shaping up as a plan. But...

KURTZ: But is that the whole story?

ZELENY: But it's not the whole story. And I think we have been missing the context of all this

YouTube is fantastic. It takes us everywhere, into town meetings that we couldn't go, but it doesn't give us any context. And that has been a problem this week.

KURTZ: And when I watch cable, Amy Holmes, it almost seem like this endless loop of these loud moments. I mean, there's one woman in a blue dress, Katy Abram, we're going to play later. I've seen her 50 times.

HOLMES: Indeed. And it's perfect for television. You've got the audio, you've got the visuals, you've got the heat and the passion. But there are some loops that have not been played endlessly.

Kenneth Gladney, an African-American gentleman who was at one of these town halls, was beaten up. And yet, he has not been splashed on the front pages. He has gotten less attention than Professor Gates and his arrest at Harvard.

So, I think if you look at conservatives, the context that they are concerned about is the context that this is supposed to marginalize and characterize the entire opposition to health care plan as being fringe and hysterical. And the same treatment is not given to the other side when their folks come out to protest.

KURTZ: And Ruth Marcus, Obama keeps repeating this line about how TV loves a ruckus. And here we just heard Gibbs say the media was disappointed that no one yelled at the president after his first town hall meeting in New Hampshire.

Is there a grain of truth there?

MARCUS: Sure. Look, conflict is more interesting than lack of conflict. When flowers bloom and the sun is shining, it's not necessarily news. And so, we are all going to naturally gravitate to -- we, being the media -- naturally gravitate to the more exciting moments.

And it is more exciting if you're a journalist to have those exciting moments. And I think it's a little naive and a sign of some -- to some extent their -- the way they have been rocked back on their heels to hear the White House complaining about, you know, following the ruckus. They know that.

KURTZ: Right.

HOLMES: This White House complaining about media coverage after Obama being on the cover of "TIME" magazine how many times?

KURTZ: It's really striking though how often Robert Gibbs and the president have complained about the media coverage. And here's a funny note.

When Fox News was breaking away from that first Obama town hall, the anchor, Trace Gallagher, said, "Any contentious questions, anybody yelling, we'll bring it to you." In other words, that would cause them to go back.

Now, Jeff Zeleny, the other night, the "CBS Evening News" led off with a story about 1,500 people lined up in L.A. for a clinic that was providing free health care for a couple days. And it made me think, well, the reason the existing health care system -- we've all kind of gotten away from covering it -- I think news organizations have made an honest effort to try to unravel the complexities of this health care issue. But, let's face it, covering angry, shouting folks is a lot more fun.

ZELENY: No question about that. And that free clinic I think was one example of that. I think we had it on the cover of our paper as well, this week.

But I think if you look at the coverage, what I was struck by, talking to voters and seeing people this week, how well-informed people really were about this. Not necessarily -- all the information was not accurate.

MARCUS: They knew about the death panels?

ZELENY: Well, some, I think -- I think that was another thing that was taken a little bit -- perhaps given more attention than people actually thought. But without question, I think a lot of news organizations are devoting a lot of time to serious coverage of this. But it's a complicated issue. It's impossible to break it down in a long newspaper story, let alone a 60-second TV story.