Posted on 10/08/2008 8:00:06 PM PDT by pissant
Does David Brooks even pretend to be a conservative anymore? Can we finally acknowledge that this man isn’t even remotely interested in what motivates outside the Beltway - or even inside the Beltway - conservatives? Here’s what Brooks had to say in a recent interview with Jeffrey Goldberg in the Atlantic:
[Sarah Palin] represents a fatal cancer to the Republican party. When I first started in journalism, I worked at the National Review for Bill Buckley. And Buckley famously said he’d rather be ruled by the first 2,000 names in the Boston phone book than by the Harvard faculty. But he didn’t think those were the only two options. He thought it was important to have people on the conservative side who celebrated ideas, who celebrated learning. And his whole life was based on that, and that was also true for a lot of the other conservatives in the Reagan era. Reagan had an immense faith in the power of ideas. But there has been a counter, more populist tradition, which is not only to scorn liberal ideas but to scorn ideas entirely. And I’m afraid that Sarah Palin has those prejudices. I think President Bush has those prejudices.
What evidence is there that Sarah Palin “rejects ideas?” This is unquestionably one of the most snobbish opinions I have ever heard expressed by Brooks, or really anyone for that matter. He displays an absolutely irrational scorn for Governor Palin based on little more than his disapproval of what she represents. I am sympathetic to Brooks’ disdain for populism, but it is Brooks himself who has been promoting what can properly be called political populism. After all, it is Brooks who has done nothing but kiss Douthat and Salam’s asses over their “Party of Sam’s Club” thesis. It is Brooks who has continually called for a watering down of conservative principles over the years to the point where the views he upholds are barely distinguishable from moderate liberalism. Palin, on the other hand, expresses traditional conservative values - the values of Reagan and Buckley - more than anyone else currently running for President or Vice President, and it isn’t even close. In fact, other than Fred Thompson and Duncan Hunter, she is arguably the most prominent traditional conservative to appear on the presidential scene in this cycle.
What’s even worse is that Brooks derides Palin’s lack of experience, and adds:
He explained, “The more I follow politicians, the more I think experience matters, the ability to have a template of things in your mind that you can refer to on the spot, because believe me, once in office there’s no time to think or make decisions.”
But yet he goes on to praise Barack Obama, who makes Sarah Palin look like Henry Clay in terms of experience. And why is Brooks so infatuated with Obama:
Obama has the great intellect. I was interviewing Obama a couple years ago, and I’m getting nowhere with the interview, it’s late in the night, he’s on the phone, walking off the Senate floor, he’s cranky. Out of the blue I say, ‘Ever read a guy named Reinhold Niebuhr?’ And he says, ‘Yeah.’ So i say, ‘What did Niebuhr mean to you?’ For the next 20 minutes, he gave me a perfect description of Reinhold Niebuhr’s thought, which is a very subtle thought process based on the idea that you have to use power while it corrupts you. And I was dazzled, I felt the tingle up my knee as Chris Matthews would say.
Yeah, that’s right: Obama can regurgitate what an obscure political philosopher thought. Sure he also wants to provide federal funding for abortion, has no desire to protect children who survive abortion, promotes a socialist economic agenda, and formulated his political ideas at the knees of radicals and domestic terrorists, but hey - he reads Reinhold Niebuhr. What a guy.
Excuse me if I don’t find this all that persuasive. Then again, Brooks is also a guy who earlier in the interview said that John McCain and Barack Obama were “the two best candidates we’ve had in a long time.” Really? These guys are the best that we’ve had to offer in a “long time?” If your definition of a “long time” is four years, then yeah, maybe Brooks has a point. Otherwise, he just may be senile.
Conservatives have often fretted that other conservatives who go to work for institutions like the New York Times might “go native.” I don’t think we have to wonder anymore about David Brooks.
whatta pos!
I guess people that believe she is better than the average GOP fare should be looking for another party.
Brooks is a jackass without a pasture.
Already posted....and I can’t read this trash again.
[Sarah Palin] represents a fatal cancer to the Republican party.”
Given what that party has come to represent, I fail to see the problem here.
Yeah. I think I read Reinhold Niebuhr while I was in college. Fortunately, I cannot remember a thing he said.
Who the hell is David Brooks?
Well, I just searched for the title again and only got this thread I posted.
Barack Obama represents a fatal cancer to the USA.
I gotta agree with you there.
No, that would be GWB and all other members of the Kennedy wing of the GOP.
Sarah Palin is the ONLY reason I will be casting a vote for McCain.
McCain and the left-loving liberal RINOs are the cancer in the GOP.
The New York Times is a fatal cancer in the body of journalism. What a herd of punch-pullers.
Brooks always has been a weasel, dating back to his early days with National Review. It’s just that, like everyone else, we’re more forgiving of weasels when they say things we like.
The guy wrote a book years ago about “bourgeois bohemians”, trying to come up with a neat little name for them (”bobo”). Unfortunately for Brooks, the term has since been superseded by the epithet “metrosexual”.
And that’s the best way to describe Brooks, an elitist twerp who has been desperately looking for a fellow metrosexual to worship. The majority of his columns on Obama this year have been as breathless as any coming from the MSM usual suspects. If McCain had selected someone other than Palin, Brooks would still be finding an excuse to question the pick.
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