Why is David Brooks Such a Fraidy Cat?

Check out David Brooks' latest Op Ed, The Big Test.

How many times did he say he was scared or worried? How did he go from being a self-confessed young liberal college student to such a pasty wuss? What happened? Did he fall in love with some like-minded hottie way back in the day? Did she dump him hard and break his heart? That might explain his, "I'll never get hurt again" approach to life.

Fear.

Worry.

Mr. Brooks should check out Michelle Obama's speech back in the summer of '07 in which she said, "I am tired of being afraid" and questioned the place of fear in making decisions.

A mother, a wife, an Obama about to watch her husband run for the highest office in the land, with all the things she had to fear, she refused to let her worries get the best of her.

Mr. Brooks can have his fear and allow his moldering worry to danken his days. But it is courage that clears that allows us to go out and try.

According to Mr. Brooks, there were too many initiatives at once. Too many tasks for the administration to have any hope of accomplishing any one thing. I think this is not a choice that Mr. Obama has made. As he said in his speech, "Difficult decisions were put off for some other time."

That was inaction in action. Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton and Bush again. It's not like any of them had the courage to do anything about oil dependence, for instance.

The time is now because nobody did anything for so long.

Mr. Brooks stated that history is littered with the charred remains of government initiatives that have crashed and burned but he fails to notice the triumphs of desegregation, the New Deal and public education.

No, they aren't perfect but we shouldn't call them failures.

Go slow?

Dr. King wrote a letter while locked in a Birmingham jail in which he called out those who urged caution when it came to integration. He wrote that time itself does not make change, people, he wrote, make change. People who wait, don't make anything.

Do I need to mention that there is nothing to fear but...

The time is now.

Why are we still listening to them?

And conservative lawmakers are grumbling about being "shut out" of the shaping of the stimulus package when overnight money set aside to fix crumbling schools and designed to give middle-class Americans a fighting chance against stagnant earnings for the last decade disappeared overnight.

I don't call that being shut out at all.

I call that wielding extraordinary power.

There is no debate to be had. It's over. The post-mortem has been performed and as the toxicology reports dribble to reveal that our economy has been sick for a long, long time. It was just a matter of time. Just a small matter of time before the drumbeat of tax cuts for the rich, tax cuts for the rich, tax cuts, tax cuts would pount this economy into into recession.

And the stimulus package comes out and they complain. Those who earmarked their way to secure seats in our Nation's heartland throwing chump change to their constituents while doling out the real money to agri-business, big oil, pharmaceuticals, and wall street.

So why do we still listen to them? They got us into this mess. True believers in their version of the free market, they still believe in their version of truth. They still believe that the economy will turn around on its own. They still believe that it was all a bad dream and things will pick up again if we just do nothing.

Well, they were wrong about that trickle-down economics thing. Dead wrong. Give tax breaks to the wealthiest five percent and they become wealthier while the middle class uses credit to fill the void where reasonable income growth should have been.

Don't do it. Don't listen to the supply-siders. They are wrong.

Spend, Baby, Spend!