The never-say-die hypocrisy of the Bush apologists remains nearly as amusing as it is infuriating. When it comes from double-digit IQ apparatchiks like nearly anyone on Fox News, then we can all have a laugh. But when those like David Brooks, with both the imprimatur of the New York Times and a self-presentation as a reasonable and principled conservative, remain stubbornly focused on what's wrong with the Democrats, then silence is not an option. (My wife would tell you that silence is never an option with me.)
I sent the following screed off to the NY Times within minutes of reading his latest threadbare attempt to change the subject. Just remember, at last we've got them on the run. Don't let up for an instant!
To the New York Times:
How long does Mr. Brooks think he can get away with his ongoing quasi-intellectual game of three-card monte? His March 11th column is prima facie evidence of his understandable desire to avoid speaking the two words that underlie everything he writes--or at least that portion which isn't demonstrably false: George Bush. He thinks the Democratic party--and its journalistic fellow-travelers--have moved to the left? They have--along with the country--for one reason: George Bush.
In times past, the Republicans kept moving the goal posts to the right, and then insisting it was the ever more accommodating and reasonable Dems who had moved to the left. Did Clinton's centrism on nearly every issue--save Hillary's dalliance with health care--save him from being burned at the stake? Did Mr. Brooks find the "Al Gore of the 80's and 90's" quite such a moderate fellow as he now, by implication, paints him? I would ask him to point me to his contemporaneous writings that suggested so.
Now, after six years of the failed imposition of a Peronist-style government in the US--a thorough disregard for the constitution, massive debt-fueled spending, fake populism, and a weird version of the cult of personality--our Mr. Brooks is disgruntled because young interns at The New Republic have moved slightly to the left? Spare me this--from the man who only recently was drawing parallels between George Bush and Abraham Lincoln.
Mr. Brooks should consider himself lucky that there are not mass demonstrations in the streets and calls for one-day national work stoppages, given both the nature and the quality of the governance this country has had foisted on it. Although, come to think of it, it is probably because such has not occurred that the Bush apologists are semi-apoplectic, and they find themselves left with the pathetic option of trying to gin up the old cultural war stuff. All this to avoid what is desperately needed: a focus on first tying the hands of this bunch of ideologue/ miscreants, and then denying them any remaining vestiges of power for at least a generation. (Remember, in the 1960's Democrats could still get useful mileage out of the simple mention of Herbert Hoover's name.)
On March 10th, the following statement was made during a CNN interview: "Bush lied the country into an unnecessary and disastrous war--now what more than that is needed to constitute an impeachable 'high crime'?" That Mr. Bush has made Louis Farrakhan (!) into something approaching a model of civic rectitude should finally explain to Mr. Brooks the depth of the damage to our polity and to our society done by the people he first cheered, then lionized, then defended, and has now grown strangely silent about.