Bobo Wants Protestors Who Are Half Joe Camel and a Third Fonzarelli

Jamelle has dealt with Bobo’s hilarious attempt to get in on Friedman’s radical centrist racket, but there’s a bit I can’t help but quote.     As Jamelle says, Brooks is contemptuous about the Occupy Wall Street supporters because they’re not radical — why, they don’t even seem to embrace Brezhnevomics.   They abjure new paradigms, have thrown boldness under the bus, and they’re certainly not thinking outside of my box.   We need a game-changer.  On steroids!   So who is the great sage Bobo would have us turn our lonely eyes towards?

Look, for example, at a piece Matt Miller wrote for The Washington Post called “The Third Party Stump Speech We Need.” Miller is a former McKinsey consultant and Clinton staffer. But his ideas are much bigger than anything you hear from the protesters: slash corporate taxes and raise energy taxes, aggressively use market forces and public provisions to bring down health care costs; raise capital requirements for banks; require national service; balance the budget by 2018.

Now that’s bold, new thinking — a bunch of reheated center-right mush featured seven days a week on Fred Hiatt’s crayon scribble page, married to third party dreaming that betrays a remarkable ignorance about how American political institutions function. Now that’s big!