Column 2005-7-30 Commentary

Well, Brooks isn't quite as lazy as I thought: he only took a few days of vacation this time. However, he comes back with a column about how great his son's AAU baseball team is, and how people should stop criticizing youth sports because, as he reasons with typically Brooksian logic, if his son's team is so good, all youth sports teams must be good. (It must be noted that his rhapsodic descriptions of youth baseball suggest that he fits the stereotype of the parent who is living through his son's athletic success to a T.) Combined with his previous column on the dangers of airplane travel with small children, it appears that either Brooks is remaking himself into a family-oriented columnist (another attempt to get himself removed from the op-ed page and perhaps moved to the Style section?) or is simply too lazy to write about any actual issues that might require actual thought or actual research, though this theory is undermined by the fact that Brooks never does any thinking or research anyway. But I should stop looking a gift horse in the mouth: Brooks is not tormenting his readers with his idiocy, and that's all that I could possibly ask for.