This week’s “Shut the fuck up, Ralph Nader” is devoted to New York Times columnist David Brooks. On the face of it, Brooks seems to have much in common with Decry. Like Decry, Brooks is arrogant, smug, and self-righteous, and like Decry, he writes publicly.

But that is where the similarities end. Unlike Decry, Brooks is paid to write, and the readership of his New York Times exceeds the readership of Decry by infinity percent, which is what you get when you divide 1,500,000 by zero. And most importantly, unlike Decry, Brooks is a stupid, whiny conservative who desperately wants people to believe that he’s an intellectual.

Brooks is not the only New York Times columnist who should relinquish his job to someone more like me (see future entries “Shut the fuck up, Bill Safire,” “Shut the fuck up, Thomas Friedman,” and “Quit being such a pussy, Nicholas Kristof”), but he is the most obnoxious. Just look at his picture. As if that weren’t enough, Brooks also has goofy teeth and irritating mannerisms, like twitching his head to the side every time he finishes a sentence. You can watch him doing this while discussing his multiple moves to and from suburbia here.

I would forgive Brooks his puniness and ugliness if it weren’t for the screed that he makes me read every three days. His most recent column is again a steaming pile of crap that describes a fantasy world of global welfare and credits it to free trade.

November 27: “Good News About Poverty”

Brooks leads off by saying that he “hates to be the bearer of good news” because “only pessimists are considered intellectually serious.” Oh yes, David Brooks, we know how important it is to you that you be considered intellectually serious. We can see it reflected in your silly glasses and in your affectations, and in the way you howled when it was observed on November 3rd that nearly every literate American voted against George Bush.

Brooks continues on to make a willfully ignorant case that globalization helps poor people worldwide, principally by citing national economic indicators from Asian countries and rehashing a trickle-down argument. He quickly dismisses all of sub-Saharan Africa as an outlier, blaming their troubles on “bad governments and AIDS.” It is not clear why David Brooks thinks he is qualified to discourse on global flows of capital and world suffering; perhaps he learned about these things while cutting his journalistic teeth as a police reporter for the Chicago City News Bureau.

“Write this on your forehead,” Brooks pukes, “Free trade reduces world suffering.” Well, no thank you. But here’s what I will write on my forehead, you foreskin: “Shut the fuck up, Ralph Nader.”