Friday, March 29, AD 2024 7:45am

David Brooks, Clueless Commentator

My friend Jay Anderson at Pro Ecclesia takes the clueless David Brooks, a “conservative” commentator who endorsed Obama in 2008, to the verbal woodshed.

Check out David Brooks’ latest attempt at responsibility avoidance with this rich piece of Op/Ed mendacity:

… The center has been losing political power pretty much my entire career. But I confess that about 16 months ago I had some hope of a revival. The culture war, which had bitterly divided the country for decades, was winding down. The war war — the fight over Iraq and national security — was also waning.

The country had just elected a man who vowed to move past the old polarities, who valued discussion and who clearly had some sympathy with both the Burkean and Hamiltonian impulses. He staffed his administration with brilliant pragmatists whose views overlapped with mine, who differed only in that they have more faith in technocratic planning.

Yet things have not worked out for those of us in the broad middle. Politics is more polarized than ever. The two parties have drifted further to the extremes. The center is drained and depressed.

What happened?

History happened. The administration came into power at a time of economic crisis. This led it, in the first bloom of self-confidence, to attempt many big projects all at once. Each of these projects may have been defensible in isolation, but in combination they created the impression of a federal onslaught…

Yeah, that’s it – “History happened”. What a bilious load of vomitous nonsense and absolute crap!

How about this for a REAL explanation, Mr. Pantcrease Admirer:

All the “post-partisan” posing was a lie. You KNEW it was a lie, but WANTED to believe the lie, so you CHOSE to believe it. You then aided and abetted the lie by writing glowingly of the “moderate” credentials of a man who had NEVER exhibited one iota of political centrism in his entire (albeit short and unremarkable) political career, all the while trashing the REAL centrist in the race who, ironically, you had up until then spent the previous 8 years heralding, fellating, and otherwise trying to foist upon the rest of us.

Meanwhile, all us yokels out here in Jesusland saw right through the lie and chose NOT to believe it. For that, you belittled us, called us a “cancer”, questioned our intelligence and intellectual curiosity, and treated us as generally inferior to your more sophisticated and urbane sensibilities. Maybe the “uneducated class” is a whole lot smarter and more politically astute than the coastal elites in the “educated class” give us credit for. At the very least, it appears that the riff-raff are a whole helluva lot smarter than you are.

Go here to read the rest.  My own opinion is that Mr. Brooks has either been mendacious all along in regard to Obama being a post-partisan figure, or he is the type of oblivious fool who gives oblivious fools a bad name.  As for myself, I am shocked, shocked that Obama turned out to be a left-wing ideologue.

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Susan
Saturday, April 24, AD 2010 8:44pm

Always loved this clip from Casablanca! Shocked, just shocked! Yep – I’m with the yokels out in Jesusland. And, I have to say, nothing Obama has done has shocked me at all. I fully expected it, just sad that I was right.

Michael Denton
Saturday, April 24, AD 2010 9:52pm

noooooo. if you keep putting up Casablanca clips I shall soon lose what little desire I have to study and instead watch Casablanca! Curse you and your temptations!

Donna V.
Donna V.
Saturday, April 24, AD 2010 11:52pm

I read Brooks’ book “Bobos in Paradise.” His thesis in that book (published in 2000) is that the cultural radicals of the 1960’s melded with the economic conservatives of the 1980’s and produced “bobos.” “Bobos” is Brooks shorthand for “Bourgeois Bohemians”: the sort of upper-middle class types who follow the stock market, but accept things like global warming, “a women’s right to choose,” gay marriage, etc. I live in a neighborhood full of bourgeois bohemians. (I live in one of the few affordable housing units around these parts – just down the street from me there are mansions with Mercedes with Obama stickers plastered to them parked in the driveway – those folks are the bobos Brooks speaks of: they drive the Mercedes 3 blocks to shop at Whole Foods. I love my new home and am still astonished that I am able to afford this particular neighborhood, a block away from Lake Michigan. But during most of my adult life, I’ve been able to find good deals in ritzy urban neighborhoods – neighborhoods not filled with Republicans, but with wealthy liberals. OK, so I gave up my car to live here – but work is 3 blocks away. So I know the bobo breed well.)

Brooks hates the culture wars. He wants those pesky socon issues, like abortion, to just disappear and go away and is very annoyed at socons who fret about things like pro-life issues, which Brooks can easily shrug off.

Art Deco
Art Deco
Sunday, April 25, AD 2010 8:45am

If you look at the occupational history of the 15 notables who ran for President in 2008, what hits you is that Barack Obama was the least prepared of them all to assume the office (though one might argue his judgment is less unreliable than that of Messrs. Gravel, Kucinich, or Paul). Given how little time he had put in as a working lawyer, he would have been a mediocre candidate for Attorney-General of Illinois (or for a municipal corporation counsel, while we are at it). His election to the Presidency is an indication that politicians are now merchandise. Not only was the general electorate snookered, people who likely fancy themselves informed and sophisticated observers of the political world (Brooks, Andrew Bacevich, Scott McClellan, Scott McConnell, Douglas Kmiec, Julie Eisenhower, David Friedman, John McWhorter) drank the Kool-Aid as well. To top it off, partisan Democrats (and Republican snot-noses like George Will) are wont to go on tears about the inadequacy of Sarah Palin, who has spent a dozen years of her life running public agencies. It is not just Brooks, it is a baffling collective addlement, the civic analogue to the housing bubble.

Anthony
Anthony
Sunday, April 25, AD 2010 8:56am

I’m sorry, why would anyone listen to David Brooks? He’s always given me the impression of a below par media personality desperate to be loved, especially in “respectable” circles.

He’s the male Peggy Noonan, if you ask me. People like that are only moderate because they don’t really believe in much if anything and would rather go back to sipping sangria on the roof of a midtown skyscrapper.

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