Against All Odds, David Brooks Hits A New Low.

Much like a Karl Rove interview, it is easy to be overwhelmed by the incompetency in a David Brooks "article." As your head swirls with wrong assertions, falsehoods and hyperbole, it occurs to you that this person actually gets paid to write crap like this and on top of that, there, somewhere is presumably an editor who has read it and 'approved.'

A few years ago, there wouldn't have been the ability to counter paid crap with free crap, but thank goodness for the Internet and sites like Huffington Post.

When faced with an overwhelming choice of falsehoods and errors in his article, "The Postwar Election" I decided to simply pull out sentences and together we can dissect them.

Let me say the overall 'theory' Mr. Brooks is espousing is that the world is now calm, so we aren't looking for a wartime leader but a peacetime president.

Here's the first nugget:

"In Washington, the National Intelligence Estimate was released, suggesting the next president will not face an imminent nuclear showdown with Iran."

Actually, no, what the NIE showed was that the president of the United States is either grossly incompetent for not knowing what was in an old NIE or lied about it. Iran is still an issue and the Middle East is hardly a garden of eden right now, especially with deaths in Gaza overnight suggesting that Mr. Brooks's comment:

"In the Middle East, the Arabs and Palestinians stumble toward some sort of peace process."

is insane.

He spreads the same level of commentary about Iraq -- noting another misguided midget of punditry, Peter Beinart:

"As Peter Beinart, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, has noted, the number of New Hampshirites who cite Iraq as their top concern has dropped 14 points among Republicans and 16 points among Democrats."

Unfortunately for both these mental minors, there is a a far more substantive Gallup poll out as well, allow me to quote:

"The Nov. 30-Dec. 2, 2007, poll asked Americans to name, in their own words, what will be the most important issues they will take into account when deciding whom to vote for in next year's presidential election. Thirty-six percent of Americans say Iraq, with the economy (16%), healthcare (15%), and illegal immigration (10%) mentioned next most often."

Seemingly, we are in a golden moment where the American people know what matters, Iraq, even if our politicians and our 'journalists' do not.

The American people know that when over 170,000 men and women are serving in uniform on the other side of the world and it's costing us $12,000,000,000 a month, it's an issue that impacts every part of our lives - if you are in Iowa and are concerned about the future, ponder this:

The Iraq War has cost the city of Ames $54 million to date.

Imagine what a city of just over 50,000 people could do with $54 million. Just imagine.

Mr. Brooks goes on and on. But as he notes, people are indeed frustrated about the war over the war.

Just as I am frustrated by people such as Mr. Brooks being seen as competent.

Comments

[Manx]

I used to read every column until the one about George W. Bush being a natural leader.
I've always thought that Bush has a tremendous inferiority complex and over-compensates for it by being stubborn and arrogant. David Brooks confused this with leadership.

And recently, Brooks waxed giddily about Mike Huckabee, describing him as the perfect Republican candidate. Not once did Brooks mention that Huckabee doesn't belive in evolution, which probably means he doesn't believe in science.

I could go on...

[Querent]

Brooks thinks that thinking differently than everyone else is some kind of badge of honor. His originality might actually have some value, except for the question of validity. He reminds me of refrigerator poetry. He seems to pick words randomly and then to try to defend the absurd constructions he produces as though they were logical propositions. "No, that means something," he earnestly insists. It could happen. But it's not happening.

[Janco54]

Brooks is a legend in his own mind. He's wrong so constantly I'm amazed his head hasn't exploded.
I email him fairly regularly to point out his "inaccuracies" and outright lies.
He doesn't like it very much.
It's fun.

[ajax2]

Mr. Brooks, the people who have been murdered in Iraq are no longer concerned about the occupation. Everyone else is big time.

[realpolitic]

Brooks believes his own theories as much as anyone ranting in a lunatic asylum. His former one was people were satisfied with their private lives, but not the public one or the political atmosphere at large. As he reached this conclusion, of course, Bush or Republicans were not to blame. Brooks will pull some odd data from some obscure place and construct some grand theme. His theme usually lets the Bush administration off completely for the state of affairs of the country. He is propbably as rabid as O'Reilly, he just couches his language in nicer terms.

It is amazing to me he still is a believer in the sanity and sanctity of the Bush administration. Nothing can shake Brooks faith in Bush- not the hapless war, enormous deficits, AWOL on Hurricane Katrina, torture policies, politicalization of the Justice Department... absolutely nothing.

[jhNY]

Brooks is, and has always been, as far as I am aware, a giggly apologist and flack for some of the creepiest authoritarians who have ever disgraced the White House, and for their facilitators in various conservative think tanks and Congress. He is naturally fearful of threats to the status quo as he sees it and becomes aggressive and dismissive with anybody and anything that might rock the boat of his betters, who after all, and good thing too, are in charge of everything and are unfairly targeted just for being so darn masterful and prescient.

Occasionally, and with an eye to confounding his detractors, he will aver that "the White House dropped the ball on this one" or that "the Republican Party is making a big mistake", or words to that affect, but in no time he's forgiven the objects of his criticism and returned to bask in their admiration of his devoted reasonings.

And he fears people. Regular, ordinary people. Just look at the vaguely insulting names, weird classifications and strata he introduces into his fretful theorizing about whither the middle class and what Americans are really all about nowadays as they wander around his co-worker Friedman's flat earth, etc. Not comfy among his fellows, exactly, is he?

My solution to Brooks is one I offer up to all interested readers: stop paying attention. Don't watch him get all flush and dewy as he rises to defend his sponsors against the kindly opinions of Mark Shields. Don't read anything he writes in the Times. After all, in almost every case, he's already written it before, so you won't really be missing anything new... Works for me.

[wldnswmmr]

Thanks for taking the time to slice up Our Mr. Brooks' latest roll of baloney. Or, by another analogy, doing the kind of work that Norton used to do on the Honeymooners. Ever since the NY Times got rid of its online comments section, we've been more or less at the mercy of these strange numbers from the Times's resident Bush-mole. Reading them, one knows instinctively that he has put together an inaccurate pastiche of quotes and poll numbers that bears no relationship to the real world we live in, whether he's talking about the booming American economy or "peace" in the Middle East. You did leave out the part about the Democrats being embarrassed to bring up Iraq because the surge "has worked," according to DB. But there's only so much of life one wants to devote, which is why I don't bother to check his sources or analyze what he says. The readers used to do such a magnificent job of destroying his nonsense. I suppose the Times had to choose between keeping DB or the comments feature; they made the wrong choice, as with so many things.