I’ll admit it. I enjoy reading David Brooks, the columnist who tries to make conservative ideas presentable in polite company. He talks to a lot of interesting people, follows up on interesting ideas, and is literate.

But like most people who marinate in the media’s maelstrom of mushy groupthink, he frequently loses sight of what real life is like. Today, he’s produced a real howler.

Brooks is as much taken with the Tea Party movement as he was with the groundswell of wishful thinking that produced our current administration. While most of our elites dismiss the Tea Party movement as a rabble of bigoted thugs rapidly being taken over by profiteers, Brooks fears it. Accordingly, he’s warned that Obama had better co-opt the Tea Partiers’s message before they tear the country apart, as populist movements have in the past.

This week, Brooks has been thinking about older people. These would be the people that many of you would recognize as grandparents. And grandparents are lovable, not least because they love us. And they want to do things for us. (If you want the sociological terminology for all this, read his column.)

Brooks then goes on to recognize that our society’s commitments to older Americans, quite obviously, are the cause of the impending fiscal disaster that will soon bankrupt our government, and reduce our economic prosperity for the next two decades or so. (Hmm. Maybe seniors are happy because as a class, they’ve gotten a pretty good deal.)

What comes next is the funny part. Brooks thinks that seniors may become energized enough to form a Tea Party movement of their own. They’ll see that we can’t afford our societal commitment to them, and they’ll also see that Washington doesn’t have the nerve to solve the problem by reducing (or at least means-testing) their benefits.

Look out. Those busloads of angry people soon to start pouring into Washington to shiver and demonstrate, will be your grandparents. And they’ll be demanding that our government take away some of what they have, and give it to their children and grandchildren.

Whatever Brooks is smoking, I want some.