David Brooks has it all figured out

High in his mountain-top headquarters in upper Manhatten, NY Times conservative-lite columnist David Brooks has intuited what's really wrong with Haitians:

"There is the influence of the voodoo religion, which spreads the message that life is capricious and planning futile. There are high levels of social mistrust. Responsibility is often not internalized. Child-rearing practices often involve neglect in the early years and harsh retribution when kids hit 9 or 10."

Apparently Brooks read a book of his choosing about Haiti and has it all figured out.

When this crapola hit the Times today, a dozen people pointed out that this was hogwash, not too much different from what Pat Robertson has already told us about how it's all the fault of the Haitians. (Read the comments to Brooks' column HERE. They have been limited to 48: who determines this?)

One more thing. Read the quote from Brooks above and ask yourself if it doesn't apply to at least a few segments of (gasp!) Chrisitian American society that we know about. Who suffers from a lack of internalized responsibility more than the entire "blame the Commies" tea-partying no-nothing right? After 8 years of Republican control leading to the worst terrorist attack on American soil (which some now seem to deny ever happened under their watch), an unnecessary war they lied us into, and the worst depression since the 1930s, caused by their "free-market" ideology, the Republicans can't seem to internalize any responsibility whatsoever. Do they remember their "voodoo" economics, as George Bush (Sr.) himself put it?

Arguably, the American wealth destroyed in the past decade, or transferred abroad or to the very rich, is far greater in relative size or social/economic damage than anything that has occurred in Haiti. A country that used to be the worlds undisputed number one economic powerhouse now has 1 in eight families on food stamps, massive childhood poverty, and a destabilizing amount of debt owed to a foreign country (China). Where is the internalization of that responsibility?

Brooks thinks everything must be OK here because the '89 San Francisco earthquake didn't kill anywhere as many people as the one in Haiti.

Does Brooks actually read more than one book or article on a subject, and does he actually have any area of expertise?