The Spectacle Blog
David Brooks is surprised to find President Obama is not the centrist he imagined him to be.
I am flabbergasted.
How can it be that so many people of less prodigious intelligence (including me) clearly saw that the far left is Obama’s comfort zone and that he would govern from it while men like David Brooks and Christopher Buckley didn’t know better?
I mean, you would think that a lifetime of doing this stuff professionally would confer a little judgement.
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Crusader| 3.3.09 @ 10:23AM
He was all aboard the Hopenchange Express. Or USS Hopenchange.
In all fairness, a lot of so-called "conservatives" were. Seemed like there was some mass schizophrenia going on at that time. Reality is a beyotch though.
Admr. S.B.O Buniontow VI| 3.3.09 @ 10:31AM
I threw Brooks overboard years ago. As for his latest Hamlet quandary, anything new here?
John| 3.3.09 @ 10:37AM
My father, the combat veteran, once told me... "Never underestimate the stupidity of the intelligent."
The intelligent always suffer from the delusion that their attacker wouldn't dare punch them.. Smart people generally duck when a punch is thrown.
Smart and Intelligent don't necessarily fly on the same plane.
Regards,
John
Crusader| 3.3.09 @ 10:51AM
My first assignment I served in South Korea. A lot of my fellow younger troops (and a few older NCOs) got caught up with the "juicy girls" working the bars. To a man they would tell me their Juicy was "different." They were "in loooooooove." She's only doing it because she has to. All the goofy rationalizations we make when we try to deny reality.
So then they marry the Juicy.
Six months later they find out their Juicy is just like every other Juicy, usually by coming home early from work and finding a different pair of shoes outside the ol' house.
Kinda like we're finding out with Obama. Now we act astonished when he ramrods through massive communism? Haha! Only problem is we're stuck with him for 4 more years (prolly 8 though).
Teleprompter Messiah| 3.3.09 @ 10:57AM
Intellectual infatuation with one of their own; wilful blindness. If you read Lightworker's musings on race masquerading as his memoir, you can easily discern his Marxist view of the world. I mean, really, who but a far left person is an acolyte of Alinsky. No, what they wanted to see was an Ivy League pedigreed deep thinker ("one of us") in charge. By their thinking, his "obvious" intellectual curiosity would, of course, restrain his Leftist impulses and he would govern as a pragmatist.
Partly right on national security issues, but disastrously wrong on domestic policy. What did they think Change You Can Believe In meant?
Lightworker believes he is a world historical great man already and such men do not recognize limitations. Certainly not those urging "pragmatism" or "centricism" when the barriers to imposition of thirty years worth of Democrat longing are nonexistent.
Obama is trying to repeal Reagan, dummies.
Gramps| 3.3.09 @ 11:24AM
Not sure what it will take for people like this and many others to understand when the government says we are here to help, that it will be controlling help that is very expensive and it will require them to come back with more later to clean up the mess over and over and over. They screw up healthcare for decades and then offer plans to clean it up. They gave us welfare plans for generations and the result was a lot of broken homes and jails overflowing, trillions wasted, and still a lot of poverty. They gave low cost cigarettes to our troops for years when they were called coffin nails, and then come out against the tobacco industry. They are driven by those in the legal profession and we are drowning in litigation. Want to start to fix healthcare, fight idiotic lawsuits that force high cost for malpractice insurance and defensive medicine.
Bob Miller| 3.3.09 @ 12:52PM
Why complain now about the elected officials? Complain about the cluelessness of the voters who put them there.
james23| 3.3.09 @ 1:50PM
YOur colleague, The Real McCain, batted this particular hanging curve way out of the park this morning. linky
http://rsmccain.blogspot.com/2009/03/those-of-us-who-consider-ourselves.html
ruth| 3.3.09 @ 2:04PM
I think this is less about intelligence and more about lack of integrity. Brooks is a weak man, a weathervane, if you will.
Roy| 3.3.09 @ 4:02PM
yeah..but rsm is wrong about one thing, he says Brooks isn't even a useful idiot. This is false.
The way the media directs people to do something is by describing that something as "moderate". David Brooks is extremely useful for conveying the media's orders to people on the "right" side of things. Acting through David Brooks, the media directs people who have misgivings about Obamism that the "moderate" belief is that Rush Limbaugh is worse.
The question is how many servile lickspittles there are out there who will knuckle under to the media's directive.
Pingback| 3.4.09 @ 11:32AM
David Brooks Dismayed — But As For Me links to this page. Here’s an excerpt:
12312312| 5.28.09 @ 3:56AM
http://www.google.com/