I heart Glenn Greenwald

And he says this so much better than I could:

[V]irtually every column David Brooks writes is grounded in one of two highly misleading tactics and, on special occasions, like today, are grounded in both. That's all there is to him. He just re-cycles these same two themes over and over in different forms.

The first tactic is merely the most commonplace conceit of the standard Beltway pundit: Brooks takes whatever opinions he happens to hold on a topic, and then -- without citing a single piece of evidence -- repeatedly asserts that "most Americans" hold this view, and then bases his entire "argument" on this premise. Thus, the only way for Democrats to have any hope of winning elections is to repudiate their radical, rabid Leftist base and instead follow Brooks' beliefs, because that is "centrism"...

The other Brooks tactic is also a defining feature among pundits and a central prong in the Washington Establishment's orthodoxies. No matter what polls or elections show, Brooks' overriding goal is to "prove" that "most Americans" favor a "hawkish" foreign policy whereby America will rule the world by military force, most importantly in the Middle East... According to Brooks' most common claim, that the U.S. will continue to rule the world by military force is an unchallengeable belief spanning both parties, one that is so widely accepted that it is even beyond the reach of what can be debated.
Hence, the warmongering principles of Brooks and his former employer, The Weekly Standard, not only endure regardless of changes in party control, but they can never even be subject to examination in the mainstream. And that is the standard Beltway belief -- to be Serious, one must affirm America's right to rule the world by force. The only ones who reject that view are the Unserious -- the radical Leftist bloggers and, increasingly, the "isolationist" weirdos on the Right.

salt of the earth

David Brooks has a conversation with a "real person" (i.e. a trucker) and 1) uses this trucker to illustrate the sociological thesis of a book he's read and 2) concludes again that his insights into the "real world" show why liberals are generally wrong about everything.

Jackass.

david brooks on Bush

David Brooks' piece on Bush in today's NEW YORK TIMES is typical of his strategy these days: write from ABOVE the fray about Iraq, observe the personalities and sociological "facts" while ignoring the actual issues. In a column about how Bush is calm about Iraq even as his own party deserts him, Brooks never once bothers to talk about, or ask Bush about, the actual facts of Iraq: the lies to get the war, the shifting justifications for the war, the dishonest linking of Iraq to Al Qaeda both before the invasion and now, the strategy created with PR in mind rather than with actual success, the bullying and demonizing of anyone who dares oppose the administration's infinite wisdom. No, Brooks would rather talk about how Bush and Tolstoy (??? what the hell is that?) have different views of the power of the individual leader to shape history.

His last column was the same thing. In a piece purportedly examining--again, from on high, with a disengaged voice, never once granting that he was a fervent supporter of this bullshit war from day 1--the "endgame" debate in Congress.

At least Bill Kristol has the honesty to continue to advocate for his war, rather than, like Brooks, pretending he is just a disinterested observer.

david brooks on wolfie

David Brooks today: Wolfowitz's big mistake at the World Bank wasn't securing a raise for his girlfriend before shipping her off to State; it wasn't having his deputies eviscerate language about family planning and global warming in World Bank reports; and it certainly wasn't bringing the Bush administration philosophy of "we are in charge, you may not question us, nobody has oversight over us" to the bank.

No, it was not being nice enough to the Democrats who aren't going to like you anyway.

Brooks is ingesting more and more of the Kool-Aid coming out of the White House that says "the only reason people have to oppose what we do is that they are either implacable partisan enemies and friends-of-terrorists, or that we just aren't communicating well enough." I thought he was smarter than that.

greenwald on brooks and bush

Glenn Greenwald just posted a great piece on Salon.com making a very elegant argument about two of my favorite points: the Bush version of "conservatism" cloaks itself in the "Reagan-Goldwater" model (limited government intrusion in private citizens' lives) while explicitly working against that model in every way (as did, well, Reagan himself); and David Brooks and his insistence that he speaks for (in his own words) "normal, nonideological people" while at the same time he carries water for the most ideological administration any of us have seen in our lifetimes.

BOBOS IN PARADISE

I'm having a David Brooks problem. The problem? I can't dislike him, but I can't like him either. He is what I'd like conservatives to be: principled, intelligent, willing to listen. He doesn't join the dumbass Republican demagogueries like Terri Schiavo or the Swift Boaties or the "sanctity of marriage," and when he does the dueling-talking-heads thing with E.J. Dionne on NPR he seems absolutely reasonable. (Yes, I know it's NPR and he'd be thrown off otherwise.) In fact, he generally seems to take the "I'm embarrassed at what my fellow conservatives do and say, but we really do have a coherent and viable philosophy" tack. (Of course, that's not tough these days, what with the Bushies taking ever more bizarrely extreme and antidemocratic positions and demanding absolute loyalty from their Republican troops.) I like his NY TIMES columns ("like" in the sense of enjoy reading them, not in the sense of agreeing with them).

And now I'm reading his 2001 book BOBOS IN PARADISE, his anatomization of the new "bourgeois bohemians" who use their high income levels to commodity-fetishize the kinds of products that the upper classes of earlier days would have seen as garbage--peasant-inspired Italian food, butcher-block tables, natural fibers, etc. It's a damn smart book, engagingly if a bit smugly written, and Brooks wears his learning pretty lightly. He brings in the important sociological works of the 1950s and 1960s without seeming like a namedropper, and even provides the best short introduction to Pierre Bourdieu's ideas that I've seen. He's unashamed to point out that he's a charter member of this class while still maintaining his slightly superior detachment. And yet the book just doesn't work for me. I guess that no matter what a reasonable conservative he is, he's still a conservative, unwilling to grant that there might be genuinely serious problems with our society--problems stemming largely from the unequal allocation of resources. Yes, it's funny to see how the bohemian hippies of the 1960s became earnest shoppers at Anthropologie and Whole Foods and how radicals like Chomsky do the same green-room dance as Bob Novak and Pat Robertson and every other "public intellectual" who is willing to do TV.

But that just feels like a cheap argument to me, and I think that's really my problem with Brooks. It all feels cheap, and like he's just ignoring the elephant in the room. Because a conservative columnist has got to deal with the fact that the far right really has control of essentially everything, with the possible exception of academia, and that life just isn't getting better for most people besides these "bobos" (who really are living in paradise, at least a materialistic version of it). It just doesn't work for me to pretend that DeLay and Norquist and Perkins and Rove and Cheney and Santorum and Scalia and Thomas and Brownback and Coburn are the embarrassing black sheep of the party. David, these guys ARE your party.