Stuffed-Shirt Alert: Columnist (and Boy Anglophile) David Brooks

The AT gang takes a dim view of professional stuffed shirts, folks who are so effete, dainty and out of touch that they have no idea what life is like among us "ordinary" folks.

Today's nominee is author and columnist David Brooks, who lives, apparently, in a chilly world of conservative ideas and legendary figures. In a conversation with Gail Collins published today in the New York Times, Brooks drops names like the professional prig that he is, revealing his private world of highmindedness and exclusivity.

You rubes from Nowhereville keep your distance!

The winning Brooks quote:

[Y]ou’re conversing with someone whose pet turtles as a boy were named Disraeli and Gladstone; who once lost every one of the British novelist Margaret Drabble’s soccer balls when we subletted her house one summer in 1971; who once got a bruise when he accidentally bumped into Margaret Thatcher while backing away from a lunch buffet at a free market conference.