David Brooks: The Final Insult

I hereby affix my seal of hopelessness on David Brooks.

Here's a man who habitually gives witness to the glories of empirical, Burkean conservatism, yet this morning he foresees a tax-raising, reelection-unconcerned President Romney who'd be willing to defy his party's accelerating extremism and govern like an Eisenhower.

Everything, everything Mitt Romney has done over the last six years screams radical compliance. But Brooks says that ain't so. It wouldn't happen. The gutless, demagoguing chickenhawk of tireless tea party ass-kissing would, upon taking the presidential oath of office, suddenly recognize his profound responsibilities to a nation in need of bipartisan reforms--as opposed to the exigencies of his own reelection--and thus abruptly downshift ideologically.

Furthermore Brooks, the Times' greatest champion of greater civility and dignity in politics, brushes aside President Obama's extraordinary consistency in both and instead declares, seemingly from whole cloth, that "By running such a negative presidential campaign, Obama has won no mandate for a Grand Bargain." The gentle, moderate, subdued Mitt Romney will have.     

I don't know which was a more out-of-body experience: my reading David Brooks' column or his writing it. But either way, he has now poisoned his professed Burkean roots at least once too often. He's not at all a political thinker of a tender philosophical bent. He's just a hack.

Comments

[japa21]

I am beginning to thinks Brooks has stopped all his meds this year.

[Peter G]

He has always been a hack. His current fare is Romney and his job is to get Romney to his destination.

[Janicket]

Well put, Peter G. Truly terrifying to contemplate the hellish destination toward which that handbasket hurtles.

[nepat]

If Brooks is right, doesn't that just definitively prove that Romney really, truly, finally is what we've been saying he is all along: a liar?

[Robert Lipscomb]

All of this begs the question, "Why are they lying?" Reagan might have obfuscated the effects of what he intended to do, but he was usually unapologetically clear about what he wanted to do.

People lie when they know that they will be punished for telling the truth. Romney and Brooks knows that the truth would be a disaster.

That begs another question. "What do they think the response will be if they implement their secret intensions?"

[Turgidson]

Welcome to the club, PM.

No matter how reasonable Brooks tries to sound, no matter how many sociological studies he performs in his own head - studies that always vindicate some self-applied conservative virtue, no matter how many times he takes a whack at a big, soft conservative target like Palin...he will always, always ALWAYS, in the end, line up for the Republican cause. Always. If Brooks was even .0001% as thoughtful and principled as he believes himself to be in his beautiful, unsullied mind, he would simply not be able to express any support for Willard Mitt Romney. But here we are.

Brooks is a useful cog in the right-wing narrative machine, softening the hard, dull edges of their cruel, ignorant policies and politicians. Nothing more. Let's not forget, one of his stops on the path to his NY Times "reasonable conservative" perch was the Weekly.fucking.Standard.

[priscianus jr]

David Brooks is not stupid, but some important areas are missing from his brain.

[KBurns]

I believe that Brooks is unaware, as is most of the country, that the Massachuesetts bi-partisanship that Romney professes occured with his veto being overturned 844 times. From Factcheck.org.

No real bi-partisanship. More of a CEO. .. giving dictatorial orders. . .and then being told no.

And not a businessman but a vulture capitalists of the worst sort. See Josh Kosman's book - "THE BUYOUT OF AMERICA" (private equity) and Ellen Schultz's "RETIREMENT HEIST" (pension thefts).

We are not safe from these types. .. predatory capitalist. As for a missing intelligent media - Brooks, Friedman, Kristol - peas in a pod. Perhaps cloned?