Jeri Thompson is right.
David Brooks' snobbery knows no bounds. Not only that, but he
treats facts as malleable assets to be re-massaged by his own
eminence without regard to their, well, actual factual-ness. For
instance, Brooks writes:" "Before long, South Carolina looms as
the crucial point of the race. The contest is effectively between
Romney and McCain."
Uh, well, no. Not even close. The South Carolina primary was
effectively a contest between McCain and HUCKABEE, not Romney.
Here are the results
of that primary: McCain 33%, Huckabee 30%, Fred Thompson 16%,
Romney 15%. Uh.... that sort of throws Brooks' whole convenient
narrative out the window. Fred Thompson, who had stumbled, still
was able to relegate Romney to 4th place. Romney did not become a
favorite of the talk radio until AFTER McCain became the clear
front-runner, and then only in reaction to McCain -- who already
by then was close to a lock. But in South Carolina, the race was
seen as one where McCain was the anti-conservative and the other
three were splitting various portions of the conservative
electorate (even though Huckabee really isn't a conservative, and
Romney is only partially one, but that's another story). The real
story was that McCain, coming off of his big win in New
Hampshire, was held to 33 percent while the "conservatives"
combined, with the backing of talk radio, garnered 61 percent.
There was a time when Brooks wasn't such a cultural snob. There
was a time when he liked Rush Limbaugh enough to include a piece
by him in an anthology that Brooks edited. I wish I had a link,
but here's the summary: Backward and Upward: The New
Conservative Writing, edited with an introduction by David Brooks
(Vintage, $ 13). Rush Limbaugh the Falstaff of conservatism?
And Brooks did not mean it as an insult; instead, to cite a
Wikipedia analysis of Falstaff, it was in the sense that
"Falstaff has a unique, and undeniable depth of character.
Beneath Falstaff’s contagious panache, he is a Homeric burlesque,
an iconoclast, a philosopher, and a paradox."
Brooks was APPROVINGLY reprinting this Limbaugh essay:
Why Libverals Fear Me. But that was before David Brooks got
high and mighty, hobnobbing with the House Organ of the Left, the
NYT. What a hypocrite.
Before I even saw Jeri Thompson's blog entry, I already was in a
rage at Brooks' snotty column. She's right: It ought to be
birdcaged.
