The American Spectator

Spicy Joker| 8.31.09 @ 11:31AM

He's almost as loathsome and disgusting as David Frum.

Teflon93| 8.31.09 @ 11:39AM

This graf stuck out:

“David is a conservative who is motivated by a deep distrust of ideology,” former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson, a Brooks friend, says. “That is a strain of conservatism. It puts him in a position where he’s not taking views simply because they fit a party line.” Indeed, at Obama’s much-talked-about January dinner with conservative pundits--hosted by George Will and attended by CNBC’s Larry Kudlow, Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer, and Wall Street Journal editorial-page editor Paul Gigot, among others--the president greeted Brooks by asking, “What are you doing here?”

Indeed. Once you try in vain to unpack Gerson's statement, you realize that it is Brooks and Frum et al who are indeed toeing "the party line"---their loyalty---such as it is---is to the Republican Party, not to the conservative movement, which they neither understand nor support.

What are they doing here?

Robert Stacy McCain| 8.31.09 @ 12:51PM

Joe, I was dumbfounded by the David Brooks Perfect Pants-Crease Theory of Statesmanship.

It takes a particularly shallow mind to suppose that well-tailored clothing -- which anybody with money can buy -- signifies anything meaningful about the person in the suit.

Brooks exhibits the craven instincts of the socially insecure arriviste.

Real American| 8.31.09 @ 1:38PM

no one who voted for Obama could rightfully call themselves a conservative or a Republican w/o seriously recanting and apologizing. Brooks is such a loser.

BD57| 8.31.09 @ 1:40PM

Brooks comes off as extraordinarily shallow, with pretensions to being an intellectual.

Mary Louise| 8.31.09 @ 1:41PM

Back when Contentions was accepting comments I quoted Brooks and his take on Obama and Niebuhr. Brooks was relaying how impressed he was w/Obama’s familiarity and fondness for Niebuhr, made manifest by Obama’s confession that power and movement must proceed w/humilty. Leave aside the fact that he's not conducted himself with humility. That his idea of it is to confess the sins of his Nation before the world: he looks good, we look bad, and that's the point. No leader, worthy of the title, conducts himself as Obama has conducted himself. And he's en route toward spectacular failure.

But back to Contentions. I quoted Gibbon and The Decline and Fall and remarked that contrary to Obama’s take being anything fresh and new, "his take" had been known and expressed for thousands of years before. A commenter responded that Brooks was the "cheapest of cheap dates." And I think Joe was absolutely right.

Even with a rudimentary understanding of Burke, I think it's pretty easy to tell that he would not support what Obama stands for and what he’s trying to accomplish. I don't believe either he or Kirk would cotton to well to the thoughtless egalitarianism that is at the core of his philosophy.

From Burke's Reflections, page 66:

***But now all is to be changed. All the pleasing illusions which made power gentle and obedience liberal, which harmonized the different shades of life, and which, by a bland assimilation, incorporated into politics the sentiments which beautify and soften private society, are to be dissolved by this new conquering empire of light and reason. All the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off. All the superadded ideas furnished from the wardrobe of a moral imagination, which the heart owns, and the understanding ratifies as necessary to cover our naked, shivering nature, and to raise it to dignity in our own estimate, are to be exploded as ridiculous, absurd and antiquated fashion.***

For Brooks to deny the possibility of a Divine Spark is the mark of an inferior intellectual capacity and/or imagination. Is he that dead from the neck up and the waist down?

I think, like Obama, he doesn’t really understand America and by extension, Americans. Perhaps he even dislikes both, more than a little.

And for the United States to have a president who covers up the Monogram of the Name of Jesus is a sign of our self-doubt and maybe even our self-loathing. To use The Sermon On The Mount so cavalierly, pretending that his 2nd Personhood isn’t involved, is very difficult for me to put an adjective to.

If Brooks can't see that Obama is a very determined ideologue then he's either not really that smart or not that honest.

Bo Darville| 8.31.09 @ 5:22PM

Good gravy, that was tough to read, especially the part about the pants crease. Brooks is such an annoying pseudo-intellectual. By the way, when exactly did McCain return to "the loyal Republican fold?"

Deborah D| 9.1.09 @ 4:30AM

Brooks is just a "useful idiot" as far as the Obama administration is concerned. That he can't see that is obvious from the TNR article. That he's so thrilled that Obama has all of these graduates of ivy league schools surrounding him is a bit absurd...doesn't he remember Buckley's preference of the first 600 names in the phone book to the faculty of Harvard?

These people who live in their heads instead of in the real world really don't know the American people, and what they know of them, they don't like. That's why the capital of the United States should move to the middle of the country. That way folks like Brooks and folks making the laws would actually have to be surrounded by the real America instead of trapped in the NYC-DC bubble. They could really learn a lot from the American people.

Mr. Brooks, you need to get out more.

louis tully| 9.1.09 @ 9:02AM

Pseudo-intellectual fraud. If this is a man of ideas, then the market for ideas is in even worse shape than the market for vacation condos.