David Brooks, who blinks more than a guy with contacts in a sandstorm, says Obama’s got a problem–he can’t naturally fit in when he goes to an Applebee’s salad bar. Not only is that the kind of insipid, zero-brain-cell hogswallop that passes for informed political debate in this crumbling democracy, it’s even dumber than you thought. (Wait for it…)

As a Valley resident, I’m fortunate enough to have several thousand restaurant choices where non-corporate food without shiny advertisements on the tables is available to me. So I never eat at Applebee’s. But not only do I not give a tinker’s dam whether a president fits in at Aplebee’s, I don’t want a president who fits in at Applebee’s. I want a president who fits in a high-pressure decision room miles below the earth’s crust, or who fits at diplomatic functions in which knowing your gazpacho from your finger bowl is important. I want a president with an IQ of 4,087 who can calculate 18-digit sums without mouthing the words. I want a president who not only graduated with honors, but who could teach the professors why their atom-smasher is misaligned. At this point, I’d settle for a chief executive who understands that somebody, somewhere, someday, is going to have to pay back all that money we’re borrowing to blow up brown people who never had weapons of mass destruction other than a mildly comical (balsa wood?) drone.

But David Brooks, between all the blinks, also has this thing wrong in a way that reveals that he ain’t exactly a grease-swilling populist himself. Monsier Fancypants Brooks: Applebee’s HAS NO SALAD BAR.