For whom the Brooks trolls

Via Bette's Classic Movie Blog.

Couldn't figure out what Brooksy is up to today with seven paragraphs of book report on his Kindle searching of Elizabeth Warren's A Fighting Chance.

He didn't want to actually read the thing, that sounds a little like work, so instead he just called up all the instances of the words "fight" or "fighting"—224, he tells us—and culled his quotations from there, and then he devoted the remaining six paragraphs to speculating on whether she's running for president or has a chance of winning, like it was last May—to be fair, he's only a day behind Steve Inskeep at NPR.

Is he trying to draw the NPR audience? (Stands to reason, it's us civility-loving liberals who got him where he is today.) Is he concern trolling, trying to goad her into the contest in hopes that might hurt the party? (That seems to be the genial Susie Madrak's view—I don't see why it would hurt, necessarily, but he might think different.) Is he just trolling, looking for little opportunities to badmouth Obama?

There’s an underlying and sometimes vituperative sense of frustration toward President Obama, and especially his supposed inability to go to the mat.

(I do wonder how an underlying sense manages to be vituperative, let alone wander in and out of the state.) Is he displaying his nonpartisan urbanity? (I guess that's Steve M's take; Brooks certainly makes no effort to tell lies about her, while acknowledging that he belongs to the club of "those of us who disagree with Warren fundamentally".)

Then I happened to wonder what Politico might be saying about Warren, and got my answer:

He did it to get a mention in Politico! He wants to be famous! He did it because nobody pays any attention to him any more! And it's working.

Something hilarious to me in the Politico article:

On Monday, Warren said several times during a press conference that she was not considering a bid for the 2016 Democratic ticket. However, she hasn’t ruled out running for the presidency in another presidential election year, and many are still speculating whether she could enter the fray.

In an exchange Monday morning with NPR’s Steve Inskeep, Warren repeatedly tells the NPR morning host that she isn’t running for president after he presses her on the issue.

There was no press conference; the link in that first paragraph is to a report (on CNN) of the NPR interview, which young Trevor thus has described as if it happened twice, creating an imaginary buzz out of simple error, though I can't see how he managed to link to the CNN piece without seeing what it was. You don't suppose he's one of Brooks's protégés, do you? Because he has remarkably similar working methods.