Yes, yes, thank you for sending us 342 emails about how New York Times columnist and Bethesda resident David Brooks wrote something really ridiculous today about District’s Ward 3. The column posits that the upper-upper-middle-class section of Washington is populated entirely by trial lawyers, TV news producers and Democratic staffers, and that these people are only upset about the excesses of Wall Street executives because they are envious. They are wealthy, you see, but not as wealthy. A sample:

People in Ward Three have nationalized extravagance and privatized Puritanism. Under their rule, the federal government is permitted to throw hundreds of billions of dollars around on a misguided bank bailout, but if a banker like John Thain spends $1,500 on a wastepaper basket then all hell breaks loose. Dazzling personal consumption is out. Middle-class drabness is in. It’s sad, but there’s nothing to be done.

Ward 3 Council member Mary Cheh told the City Paper that Brooks should be ashamed of himself, which doesn’t do a lot to lessen the impression that Ward 3 residents are all humorless, judgmental liberals. Now, clearly Brooks is exaggerating here, in order to make the larger point that the culture war has shifted since the economy tanked and Obama took office. Apart from the liberal part, surely Brooks’s household fits right in to the income bracket he’s describing. Lines like, “On any given Saturday, half the people in Ward Three are arranging panel discussions for the other half to participate in,” could just as easily apply to Bethesda. Is Brooks making huge, largely ridiculous cultural generalizations? Of course he is. He’s David Brooks. He’s written entire books full of them.