Dissecting the Political Brain of David Brooks

If I hadn't known what to expect from the title ("Stop Making Sense"), I could guess from the well crafted first sentence, with all the resonance of the opening lines of a Dickens novel: "Between 2000 and 2006, a specter haunted the community of fundamentalist Democrats. Members of this community looked around and observed their moral and intellectual superiority."

By this point I could guess that "the worst of times" in this tale about my recently published book was not going to be preceded by "the best of times." In fact, the times only got worse: "Serious thinkers set to work, and produced a long shelf of books answering this question. Their answers tended to rely on similar themes. First, Democrats lose because they are too intelligent. Their arguments are too complicated for American voters. Second, Democrats lose because they are too tolerant. They refuse to cater to racism and hatred. Finally, Democrats lose because they are not good at the dark art of politics. Republicans, though they are knuckle-dragging simpletons when it comes to policy, are devilishly clever when it comes to electioneering."

So began conservative commentator David Brooks' review of my book, The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation. It was well suited, I thought, for the National Review and other humor magazines, but alas, it was in a different venue, the New York Times Book Review, which, under the direction of a right-wing book editor, is increasingly publishing reviews from conservative commentators of books written from the left, essentially jamming the radar of readers who can no long tell from reviews in the prestigious newspaper whether a book is not worth reading or a reviewer is not worth reading.

As Brooks tells it, my central thesis is that the way to win elections is through "crude emotional outbursts," which makes him wonder aloud how I might explain why Howard Dean didn't win the 2004 Democratic primary election against the more emotionally subdued John Kerry. Of course, he wouldn't have had to wonder if he'd gone to the index and found the cleverly-concealed entry under "Dean, Howard." (Perhaps he was confused when he didn't see it under the Hs.)

After caricaturing my argument (which actually has very little to do with the emotions politicians display, except to the extent that their facial displays affect the emotions they elicit), he offers a rhetorical question to make his own counter-argument: "[I]s it possible that substance has something to do with the political fortunes of parties? Could it be that Democrats won in the middle part of the 20th century because they were right about the big issues -- the New Deal and the civil rights movement? Is it possible Republicans won in the latter part of the century because they were right about economic growth and the cold war? Is it possible Democrats are winning now because they were right about whether to go to war in Iraq?

Brooks' simple counter-argument seems "fair and balanced" -- giving the left its due, giving the right its due, so now we can all play squash together. It seems that way, of course, until you think about it for a moment. His answer to a 400-plus-page empirical argument against precisely his thesis (the data for which he never mentions or refutes) is that Democrats won in the 1960s because they were right about civil rights (although that's that's not my recollection -- as I recall, their stance on civil rights cost them a few hundred electoral votes since the 1960s, with some help from a number of well-crafted Republican phrases such as "able bodied welfare loafers" and images of dashing young men like "Willie" Horton); that Democrats lost after an unrivaled period of prosperity and growth in the 2000 election because... (I'm not sure how to finish that sentence); and that they won in 2006 because suddenly the Iraq War took a turn for the worse after being such a smashing success in 2004. And just to set the record straight, under threat of being accused of "giving aid and comfort to the enemy," Democrats actually voted for the Iraq War Resolution in 2002, not against it.

But I thought it might be interesting to test my alternative theory -- that the words, imagery, and neural networks we activate in people's minds influence what they believe and feel and ultimately how they vote -- by examining Brooks' review itself. If clever rhetorical devices, particularly those that cross the line into deception, are irrelevant to people's judgments of the substance of an argument, we wouldn't expect to see them in a review designed to illuminate the substance of a book. So let's take a close look at Brooks lays out his argument and the kind of language he uses.

Consider the following passage:

Westen begins by noting that recent research has shot holes through the theory of the dispassionate rational mind that emerged from the 18th-century Enlightenment. People rely upon emotion to drive the decision-making process and reach conclusions that make them feel good.

Reason and rationality, therefore, play a limited role in political decisions. "The dispassionate mind of the 18th-century philosophers," Westen says, "allows us to predict somewhere between 0.5 and 3 percent of the most important political decisions people will make over the course of their lives."

"Westen says" here is an interesting word choice. It implies mere opinion, as if I were picking numbers out of the air. What Brooks doesn't mention is that I was summarizing the data from a series of scientific studies that actually allowed us to quantify the extent to which "objective facts" -- or "substance," as he would put it -- had influenced public opinion in some of the most politically important moments of our lifetimes, such as the impeachment of Bill Clinton and judgments about whether Al Gore or George Bush had won the 2000 election. In both of these cases, the vast majority of partisans -- both the everyday citizens we studied and members of Congress and the Supreme Court -- managed to reason to conclusions that exquisitely matched what they wanted to believe.

Brooks continues his account:

[Westen] then goes on to assert that Democrats have been losing because they have been appealing to the rational part of the mind. They issue laundry lists of policies and offer arguments with evidence. They don't realize how the images they are presenting set off emotional cues that undermine their own campaigns.

For example, the right side of John Edwards's mouth tends to curl up. "Humans innately dislike facial asymmetries," Westen observes, "and this should have caught the eye of his advisers." In Connecticut, Ned Lamont ran a commercial showing Joe Lieberman morphing into George Bush, but in the ad Lieberman was smiling. "Smiling faces innately activate parts of the brain (and facial mimicry on the part of the observer) that reinforce happiness, not distaste."

Well, that sounds pretty trivial, doesn't it? Curling asymmetries, smiling faces? And it probably would be trivial if it weren't part of a broader argument that included dozens of other examples of the complex ways our minds and brains are governed by networks of associations--thoughts, feelings, memories, and images that are woven together through experience -- and how evoking one network or another can change the way voters think and feel about an issue. For example, Brooks doesn't mention my dissection of the orchestrated campaign now-Senator Bob Corker and the Republic National Committee ran against black Congressman Harold Ford, Jr. in the Tennessee Senate race in 2006. In that campaign, an ad showing a scantily clad (or unclad -- you couldn't tell because of the way the image was -- accidentally? -- cropped) blonde sex kitten crowed, "I met Harold at the Playboy party!" All the while, Corker was on the stump, asking which of the two men was the "real Tennessean." The answer, by the way, was that they were both "real Tennesseans," one from Memphis and the other from Chattanooga. The goal, of course, was to get white voters to think about which of them was really "one of us." And funny how that ad just happened to activate latent networks about predatory, hypersexual black men who want our white women.

But Brooks himself offers a striking example of the activation of networks for the purpose of creating a false impression:

Westen urges Democratic candidates to go for the gut, and includes a number of speeches that he wishes Democratic candidates had given. He wishes, for example, Al Gore had hit George Bush harder for being a drunk. He wishes Gore had interrupted a presidential debate and barked at Bush, "If someone is going to restore dignity to the Oval Office, it isn't a man who drank his way through three decades of his life and got investigated by his father's own Securities and Exchange Commission for swindling people out of their retirement savings."

At another point, he imagines Gore exploding: "Why don't you tell us how many times you got behind the wheel of a car with a few drinks under your belt, endangering your neighbors' kids? Where I come from, we call that a drunk." If Democrats would go for people's primitive passions in this way, Westen argues, they'd win elections.

What Brooks knows as a writer is that the way you contextualize a passage has everything to do with the impression readers take away from it. Reading these quotes -- as woven together with colorful phrases such as "He wishes Gore had interrupted a presidential debate and barked at Bush [emphasis added], "he imagines Gore exploding [emphasis added], and later, "the sort of crude emotional outbursts Westen recommends" [emphasis added] -- the reader would have the distinct impression that I thought Gore should have repeatedly and viciously attacked Bush for his history of alcoholism. I happen to know that he was successful in leaving this impression in readers who hadn't read the book, because several of them emailed me to tell me why they thought attacking a recovered alcoholic would have been a terrible idea -- something no one who has read what I wrote in context -- including Bill Clinton, who found the same passages Brooks uses as negative examples particularly compelling -- came away thinking I was advocating.

So let's take a look at what I actually said. Here is the first passage, where I would, according to Brooks, have had Gore "interrupt a presidential debate" to "bark," seemingly unprovoked, about Bush's alcoholism:

In 2000, Gore faced what he and his advisors perceived to be a dilemma. The country had just gone through a year of scandals leading up to the impeachment trial of an otherwise very popular president...The question Gore and his advisors asked and answered to their own satisfaction reflected the kind of one-dimensional thinking we have seen repeatedly in Democratic campaigns. Is Clinton an asset or a liability to the Gore campaign? Is he a positive or a negative?

...The problem, though, was not the answer at which Gore and his advisors arrived but the question itself. Had they understood emotional associations, they would have asked a very different question: given that Clinton and Gore are inextricably linked in people's minds, how do we activate the positive associations people have formed to Bill Clinton over eight years and reinforce those links to Gore, and how do we inhibit the associations between Clinton's personal scandals and Gore's personal attributes?

Had they asked this question, they wouldn't have conceded all claims to the accomplishments of the Clinton-Gore years (and thus enjoyed none of the positive associations) while simultaneously tying their hands against all attacks for fear of invoking Clinton's name (accruing every negative association George W. Bush and Karl Rove threw at them).

Asked this way -- as a question about how to manage voters' ambivalence toward Bill Clinton the president and Bill Clinton the womanizer -- the answer is obvious. And the answer would have set Gore free at the start of the election or the first time Bush telegraphed that he intended to make the election a referendum on "character." The character charge made heavy use of guilt by association, essentially saying, "We need to restore integrity to the Oval Office" -- the room associated in people's minds with the Lewinsky scandal. Although Bush mentioned fund-raising "scandals" (such as the use of White House phone lines for campaign phone calls), those were just the conscious overlay, which had little emotional power on their own. The real message was that Clinton's sexual escapades had tarnished the dignity of the presidency, and what Bush-Rove hoped to do was to cast a wide associative net with "character" and "integrity" that would blur the lines between Clinton's personal indiscretion and Gore's integrity.

Unfortunately, blinded by his anger and feelings of betrayal, and surrounded by advisers either deaf to the rising character crescendo or unable to imagine a way to bring the concerto to a close, Gore let the charge fester. To answer it, he would have had to utter Clinton's name. He and his advisers seemed to think that if they just didn't talk about Clinton, the association would go away.

But as has been the case every time Democrats have turned to avoidance as a campaign strategy, the strategy backfired, for two very important reasons. First, whether Gore liked it or not, he was inextricably linked associatively to Clinton. He was Clinton's vice president for eight years, and their names appeared in two election cycles on bumper stickers as "Clinton-Gore." You can't get much more associated than that. Second, the other side was talking about Clinton, referring constantly to Clinton-Gore, and doing everything they could to create a network around "character" and "integrity" that made Clinton and Gore partners in crime.

Gore simply ceded the networks, allowing Bush to tell whatever stories he wanted about Clinton-Gore's integrity because Gore didn't want to mention that he had been Clinton's vice president. The irony is that although Clinton's poll numbers were low for personal integrity, his numbers were high for overall job performance -- remarkably high for a president who had spent eight years dealing with well-financed right-wing efforts to destroy him, supplemented by the Starr inquisition, financed handsomely by fifty million in American tax dollars.

So imagine if Gore had responded the first time Bush first uttered any words vaguely insinuating character issues with something like this:

George Bush wants to make character an issue in this election. Governor, I wouldn't go there if I were you because it's not exactly your strong suit.

But let me say something about Bill Clinton, so the American people know exactly where I stand.

No one in America, not you, not me, not Bill Clinton, is proud of what happened between him and Monica Lewinsky. A day doesn't go by that he doesn't think about the pain he caused his family, knowing that every time Chelsea turned on the television set for a year all she heard about was her father's affair. We are all well aware of the pain he and an out-of-control Republican Congress, determined to destroy the president no matter who they had to take down with him or how much filth they had to expose our children tfo on the evening news, caused this nation.

Am I proud of what Bill Clinton did with his personal life? Of course not. But I'll tell you what I am proud of.

I'm proud of what Bill Clinton and I have accomplished together over the last eight years. We began with an economy in disarray, left that way by Mr. Bush's father. We were deep into a recession that was costing Americans their jobs, with a federal government out of control, spending your grandchildren's money by the bushel, running up enormous deficits.

Now look where we are today. We've created millions of jobs, we've cut unemployment to historic lows, we've put a hundred thousand new police on our streets protecting our children, we've cut the number of people on welfare by more than half, and on top of that, we balanced the budget for the first time in thirty years. We've cut the numbers of abortions for the first time in twenty-five years, and we've given every woman in the United States the right to stay home for three months with her new baby without fear of losing her job. We've taken guns out of the hands of criminals while protecting the rights of hunters, and we've dramatically cut the crime rate.

If that isn't a record to be proud of, I don't know what is.

So Mr. Bush, let me give you a little word of advice. If I were you, I don't think I'd make integrity and values your campaign theme. If someone is going to restore dignity to the Oval Office, it isn't a man who drank his way through three decades of his life and got investigated by his father's own Securities and Exchange Commission for swindling people out of their retirement savings. If you want to be president, you're going to need to convince the American people that they should abandon everything Bill Clinton and I did that has made Americans safe, secure, and prosperous again, and instead vote for a man whose biggest concern seems to be that the yacht tax is too high.

Had Gore begun his campaign that way, he would have made clear that what united him and Clinton was not Clinton's handling of Monica Lewinsky but their administration's handling of the country. As importantly, he would have warned Bush and Rove that if they took off the gloves about character, so would Gore. The way you respond to your opponent's first attacks sends a crucial signal not just to the public but to the other campaign. A weak response does nothing but embolden the opposition. And a swift response to the character issue that included a brief reference to Bush's own moral failings would have prevented Bush, and ultimately the media, from framing the campaign as a contest between a man with questionable integrity and a man with questionable experience and intellect. Americans don't care much about experience and intellect, but they do care about integrity.

Unless Brooks is reading subliminal messages in my words that I can't see, I don't hear anything about interrupting a debate or barking. Nor do I hear anything about carping repeatedly on Bush's drinking. The comment about Bush's drinking is contextualized in a much broader story that has very little to do with his history of alcoholism.

It is difficult to see in Brooks' depiction of what I wrote anything other than the kind of deliberate deception we have seen repeatedly from the current administration, and precisely the kind of emotionally charged use of language (e.g., "interrupt," "bark") that, Brooks argues, has no sway on people's minds. If such language has no utility, it's odd that he chose to use it -- and to use it in precisely the deceptive ways I describe in the book as having no place in American political discourse.

I will not walk readers through the other example in which Brooks has me advising Gore to "explode" at Bush about his drunkenness, but will instead refer readers to the relevant passages (pp.125-131). I leave it to readers to judge whether they hear barking and carping about drunkenness as a central theme -- central enough that Brooks returns to it later in the review:

This thesis raises some interesting questions. First, why did someone with so little faith in rational inquiry go into academia, and what does he do to those who disagree with him at Emory faculty meetings, especially recovering alcoholics?

This is a beautifully constructed ad hominem attack (he comes back one more time to the Emory Psychology Department before the piece is over), because it uses humor to cover its ad hominem nature. Interestingly, this is just the kind of negative appeal I describe in the book that Brooks believes is inert. Yet clearly here the aim is to lead the reader, once again, to believe that my central argument is that Democrats should use crude, below-the-belt, unprovoked attacks to win elections, and that I lack both the scientific and the moral authority to be taken seriously. In this passage, he subtly suggests that I would advocate attacking people who are vulnerable (because now the alcoholics are recovering, not, like Bush, recovered -- activating a network suggesting a heartless person who would pick on someone trying to set himself on the right path -- not really the right analogy for Bush in either 2000 or 2004, who relentlessly attacked the character of both of his opponents) and would have no qualms about destroying anyone in my way in an academic argument.

Brooks' rhetorical question about why someone with so little faith in rational inquiry would go into academia is similarly designed to persuade readers that they know all they need to know about this book and have heard all they need to hear from this author, who is clearly some kind of crude Neanderthal who somehow missed not only the Enlightenment but the dawn of Homo sapiens. (Why he is asking a rhetorical question when the substance, not the rhetoric, is what matters is unclear.) Readers wouldn't know, from this description, that the book opens with a description of my research team's study of how the brain actually operates when partisans are presented with emotionally threatening information about their candidate, or that its pages are filled with descriptions of scientific studies -- among them, studies showing that the most important influences on voting behavior are emotional, studies Brooks neither mentions nor attempts to refute.

Let's take one final example:

The core problem with Westen's book is that he doesn't really make use of what we know about emotion. He builds on the work of Antonio Damasio, without applying Damasio's conception of how emotion emerges from and contributes to reason.

In this more sophisticated view, emotions are produced by learning. As we go through life, we learn what cause leads to what effect. When, later on, we face similar situations, the emotions highlight possible outcomes, drawing us toward some actions and steering us away from others.

I have to admit that I wasn't sure what to make of this criticism. As someone who has contributed to the scientific literature on emotion and its relation to cognition for over 20 years (which happened to be a central focus of my first book, Self and Society, published in 1985), I don't remember the last time a journalist told me that I should make use of what "we" know about emotion and that if I, too, just read an occasional book by Damasio, I could share Brooks' "more sophisticated view." But Brooks' admonition was perplexing in another sense, as it made me wonder again whether he'd even read the book or had instead just relied on the salon chatter of his conservative colleagues. It's difficult to imagine that he did, in fact, read the book in light of the following passage, which followed a chapter describing the co-evolution of reason and emotion in the brain and another describing how reason and emotion interact in the political brain:

The vision of mind, brain, and emotion I have presented in this chapter and the last is very different from the vision that has dominated much of Western thinking about judgment, decision making, and political behavior over the last three centuries. Emotions provide a "compass" that leads us toward and away from things, people, or actions associated with positive or negative states. Organisms survived for millions of years without consciousness and without the faculty philosophers have extolled for 2,500 years as "reason." They learned to avoid aversive stimuli and seek rewarding ones, and it is the ancestors of those primitive organisms--including ourselves--who survived, reproduced, and exist today. With the evolution of our most refined neural circuitry came not only our capacity for reason but also our capacity to be guided by rich, complex, emotional-laden networks...

If Brooks wants to write a snide, dismissive review of a book in the New York Times, I suggest next time he read it first, so that he can tailor his snideness to the substance. And next time he wants to undermine a book, I recommend that he not illustrate its central thesis through his own words.

Drew Westen, Ph.D., is professor of psychology and psychiatry at Emory University. He is the author of The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation.

Comments

[StillAmused]

What I'd like to know is why anyone pays ANY attention to a reading-room moron like Brooks who's gotten EVERYTHING wrong, post-9/11?

Same with hobby-horse wingnut scholars like Kristol and Gaffney.

'Stupid and verbose' is an unattractive and potentially lethal combination.

When, exactly, did America commit to celebrating demonstrable imbeciles?

[INQUIRER]

Good one, StillAmused. Westen totally refuted Brooks' moronic gibberish, and then you bitch-slapped him. Laughing Out Loud!

[accountability]

well put.
thanks for the smile.

[mamacat]

What you say makes sense. Remembering the Kennedy-Nixon debates, I especially admired the way Kennedy would not let Nixon get away with lies and spin.
Maybe it is why Senators and Congressmen so seldom succeed against Governors in elections -in Congress, elected officials have to constantly compromise, and generally get used to allowing compatriots to say whatever they want to say without pointing out that the emperor has no clothes. Perhaps Sen. Kennedy was the exception, and Governors Nixon, Carter, Reagan, Clinton, and Bush Jr. are the rule?
The anti-Rove sounds good. In the long run, Rove has driven the American people away from the Republican party in utter disgust. The anti-Rove, standing up strongly for traditional values of fairplay while being willing and able to face the bad guys, is something that we have always needed.

[rmreddicks]

But, Kennedy was lying and spinning. Not that I would have wanted Nixon to win.

[kdarrah]

Dear Dr. Westin,

Your response to Mr. Brooks review was a "slam dunk." I hope Mr. Brooks reads it. I find that it does not happen very often that the issue one is confronting is happening at the same time one is calling attention to it. But when it does, it is powerful. That is, it was wonderful to read some of Mr. Brooks review that was examined in your text as emotionally laden techniques used to influence others indirectly and I must say, dishonestly. Mr. Brooks owes you an apology. And what gall...to speak so down to an academic/scholar with your background and experience just shows how full of himself he is and how vacuous his opinions are. I was embarrassed for him. But he has not a clue. I enjoyed reading your post. Thank you.

Kathleen Darrah
Austin, Tx

[midtown]

Ooooooo. Siss. Smack down. Now I'm going to read this book.

And for all the Dem pols/consultants reading these comments, its death taxes not income taxes that keep so many people voting Republican. Boomers are counting on their parents' inheritances for their retirement. It's a highly emotional issue. Do the demographics on this. And start asking people when you're out on the stump. You'll be surprised if you ask the question earnestly.

The super-rich have foundations, spray trusts, and other instruments to avoid inheritance taxes. Be realistic.

[philistine]

Thanks, Mr. Westen, for reviewing the reviewer. Being the philistine that I am, I don't typically read NYT book reviews. However, your blog posting points out how far the right-wing smear campaign extends. Who would have thought that book reviews would be one of the fronts of the Culture Wars being fought by the NeoCons?

[julierb]

Who would have thought that anything was off limits for the neocon culture wars? That's the thing about culture wars - they infuse all of culture. It's not your father's politics any more.

[philistine]

You're right. I shouldn't have been surprised; disappointed and disillusioned, yes - surprised, no.

[elleng]

Thank you for your work, Mr. Westen. I must take issue, however, with something you have written here: 'the prestigious newspaper' is no longer, much to the disappointment of its erstwhile readers.

[calguy]

Brooks, as someone suggests above, is most definitely Cheneyesqe, sounding all reasonable as he puts forward lies and deceptive arguments. To wit:
1) Bob Woodward caught Brooks making stuff up in his appearance on MTP last month (ie, the numbers of casualties that would result per month should we leave Iraq) and forced Brooks to admit it on air.
2) The Philadelphia magazine famously caught Brooks stating many things false in one of his ``sociological'' tomes on the exurbs including the groaner when he said he could not find any restaurant in Franklin Co. PA that had an entree costing more than $20. The writer found no problem doing this at Red Lobster or Applebees in that environs.
3) Brooks wrote an article informing us last month how great the economy really is. It was a great act of cherry picking and head fakes as one can easily discern at Ezra Klein or Brad DeLong's blogs. Example-he cited a growth in real wages in 2006 without citing a plummet during the first 6 months of this year.

Mr. Reasonable is somehow worthy of a megaphone on the NYT oped page while such genuine and thoughtful intellects as yourself
are hacked by him on those very pages.

I would think if we can cite enough of such examples of hackery to the public editor of the NYT and remind them of the shame of Judith Miller and Jayson Blair perhaps they will reconsider their enamored placement of his oh-so-soothing prose?

[BobSF94117]

I haven't read the book, but it strikes me that Brooks' two examples of "successes" that led to the GOP dominance we suffer through today sort of prove the author's point.

"Is it possible Republicans won in the latter part of the century because they were right about economic growth and the cold war?"

The GOP made people FEEL good about taking aggressive stances on growth and the cold war, but were they really right about any of it?
Right about growth? The vast majority of Americans were better off in the 1970s. The growth we've had since then falls into two categories: that caused by the information revolution which the GOP didn't bring about and that caused by deregulation, lowered taxes, lax environmental law enforcement, out-sourcing, union-busting, etc., etc. That latter group of causes has left us in enormous debt, beholden to China, facing environmental catastrophy. It has benefited only the rich.

As for the Cold War, were Dems against fighting it? I don't remember any attempts to surrender. Granted, there was opposition to some of our actions in the many proxy wars we fought and the trillions spent on weapons systems that, it turns out, we didn't need to push, as the Russian economy would have collapsed of its own accord. Our actions in those proxy wars resulted in the deaths of thousands and thousands of people and set-backs for democracy in Central and South America, Africa, and Asia. Of course, on the bright side, they also led to rise of Osama bin-Laden and Islamic extremism.­.........

[alkamm]

Westin's thorough explication of Brooks's mischaracterization is clear and sound. Minds as committed to clarity and intellectual honesty as Westin's and Hendrick Hetzberg give contemporary American intellectual history words we will value for many years. Long after hacks like Brooks have retired from their privileged positions as pseudo-int­ellectuals and apologists for right wing fools, analyses such as Westin's will shine as beacons of critical thinking overshadowing the crude partisanship Brooks so cleverly disguises as disinterested journalism.

So many mouths to feed the poor rich, and so much pablum to feed the spoiled brats. Brooks and the Times do a disservice even to the rich to which they tailor their message because by sheltering the wealthy from genuine criticism, they weaken the substance of their politics and set them up for Humpty Dumpty-like falls. You live by fairy-tales, you die by fairy-tales, and not the kind where the good but innocent prevail--the kind where evil outs itself and is poetically, justly punished.

[vernonlee]

That Brooks 'review' sent me straight to cranky. I thought to myself: Did we read the same book? But of course Brooks didn't really read it.

Here's a bit on the review but am glad to have Westen's more thorough refutation.

http://vernonlee.blogspot.com/2007/08/defense-against-dark-arts.html

[darker]

Republican criminal activies in 2002, 2004 must be investigated. Americans DO NOT want rigged elections!

Bush-Cheney's Justice Dept. chaos under Gonzales must be investigated.
THERE MUST BE ACCOUNTABILITY.

ACCOUNTABILITY is the requirement of a Democracy. Bush-Chene­y-Gonzales served up a chaos of "smoke & mirrors" while behaving like CRIMINALS.

All of them must be investigated and held accountable.

[PaulRosenberg]

Brooks represents the mendacious extreme, but reviewers who don't read books are depressingly common, alas. I concentrated on book reviewing for several years as a freelancer, reviewed several hundred books, and on more than one occassion met an author at a booksigning who told me that my review was the only one that seemed to be written by someone who had actually read the book.

This is yet another reason why the blogosphere is so damn important. Newspapers in general gave up on serious book reviewing a long, long time ago. Even "prestigious" properties like the LA Times Book Review were more about their reviewers than about the books. But the NY Times? I don't know, maybe they think that mendacious book reviews will make people forget about all their mendacious reporting (WMDs, Whitewater, Wen Ho Lee...)

All that said, this is a totally BRILLIANT response. I'm thrilled that Westin is getting lots of attention from people who can actually think, and I hope to God that enough Democrats will pay heed to him so that we CRUSH the GOP in the 2008 elections at every level, from POTUS to dogcatcher.

[emjay1954]

Paul, you hit the problem on the head. The NY Times has shown a marked predilection for having the most conservative individuals review books by even moderate Democrats. That might be fine if they would just review the goddamn book instead of turning it into a platform for their own screeds, ad hominem attacks, and destruction of straw men as Brooks did.

[humbug]

Brooks presents as reasonable and compassionate and is as reasonable and compassionate as Bush. That ain't much. He lies like Dick Chaney and is as sneaky. What could anyone expect from a basically unreasoning apologist for the worst administration in American History? Like my grandmother used to say of people she regarded as congenial phonies, "butter wouldn't melt in his mouth."

Humbug

[PaulAbrams]

Drew,
The REAL question is why, despite being almost always wrong about almost everything, Brooks and his ilk (and I don't just mean the radical rightwingers, but also the "pundits" from the MSM) our system provides them the podium it does, whereas those who could provide some real punditry, i.e., insights deeper than the news itself, are ignored. One answer is celebrity, and another is certainly the "old-boy network". But, I think there is more to it than that---there is a certain safety in knowing what meets-and-bounds are for a person's likely opinion. Your research leads where it leads. Its outcome is unknown until the research is performed, and, if you faithfully report it, regardless of the consequences, could easily make those in power uncomfortable.

[accountability]

exactamundo.

[ThePoliticalBrain]

Thanks, all, for your comments. Regarding the last post re: responding to Brooks with the same kind of poison pen, you would have enjoyed the first draft of this post. :>

[accountability]

I wanna see! Though you did a remarkable job in this post and I enjoyed it immensely.­..
I have to admit after reading it and feeling good and positive and well informed..­. my other side now wants to see Brooks made into mince meat!

[FearlessFreep]

"Democrats lost after an unrivaled period of prosperity and growth in the 2000 election because... (I'm not sure how to finish that sentence).­.."

How about "...becaus­e Clinton was a mediocre president and Gore was a mediocre candidate.­" (But it's easier to scapegoat Nader.)

[flanardiente]

"Democrats lost after an unrivaled period of prosperity and growth in the 2000 election because...­(I'm not sure how to finish that sentence).­.." How about "...becaus­e the Republicans, aided by a partisan and corrupt Supreme Court, stole it."

[accountability]

Say it my friend, tell it like it is.
Doesn't it just gall you when you hear this crap... particularly when the pundits go on and on about Gore's loss, what he did wrong and blah blah blah... and skirt that hell, even though you can seeone or two believe it and they want to say it but...
I don't know how to finish that sentence.
One comes to mind, but I won't name names.

[ManhattanMC]

Let's review-eight years of relative peace and prosperity-even in the face of an 80 million dollar partisan, failed impeachment-and a "mediocre candidate" who won the popular vote handily only to have the election stolen.

Nader has became a compromised narcissistic spoiler in spite of the great things he did in his earlier incarnations.

Wake up and smell the caffeinated beverage.

[drkazmd65]

I am one of those (mostly) Dems that voted for Nader - in my defense, I was living in KS at the time, and it was an attempt to help get the Green party over the 'hump' for campaign finance recognition. That Bush was going to win Kansas was a foregone conclusion, so I don't feel I 'wasted' my vote in '00.

However, holding Nader up as a scapegoat is a red herring. If Gore had run a respectible, aggressive (note I did not say mud-flinging), campaign as Dr. Westen outlines, Bush would still be on his ranch in Crawford, and we would all be much better off.

Nader IS a narcissist, and that has become more obvious since '00. But Gore beat himself, and kept the election close enough for the cheating in FL (and other states) to push Bush over the top.

[accountability]

LOVE IT!
Say it, tell it!

Send some coffee, I'm too engrossed in this to get up and make some!
LOL

[realityrules]

The Naderites are like the Seinfeld group in the last episode where they stand by and do nothing as a mugger attacks a victim. Blame the mugger of course, and blame the victim for putting himself there, but do nothing to help.

[accountability]

AMEN.
Well said.

Very illustrative. (did I use that correctly? lol)

[Aristophanes]

How about this...Dem­ocrats lost in 2000 because Clinton was too arrogant to realize the game was over once the Lewinsky affair became public and world-wide news. He totally lost his moral authority, nevermind the impeachment and 'trial.'
He should have resigned, supported President Gore in 1998, and Gore, a sitting president in 2000, might well have beaten Jesus Christ incarnate.
But noooooo...­instead Clinton forced the Democrats to look like the craven toadies they were, supporting him even though he got caught leaving DNA on a dress. And people think he's intelligent.

[accountability]

oh dear... too much coffee this morning?
Not enough thorazine?

Please.
HE should have resigned?

no point in going further.

[accountability]

ahhhh a Nader voter no doubt, defending the indefensible as they survey the ruins from their high moral stance.