Why David Brooks Needs To Be Forced To Live In a Winnebago on a Wal-Mart Parking Lot:
The conservative columnists at the New York Times span the intellectual spectrum from John Tierney's outright fucktardery to David Brooks's flailing faux rationalism. Tierney is easily dismissed as an idiot - he spent an entire column last month on a "humorous" look at how men and women pack clothes for travel (no, really - be glad you don't have Times Select so you're not subjected to this toilet-level waste) because, you know, there's so little else to write about in the political world.

But Brooks is worth special note for his bizarre, pathetic efforts at cheerleading for the Bush administration. It's sad, really. Reading Brooks, you get nothing so much as the image of a weary old hooker trying to give her fat nude john a hard-on so they can just get it over with. When the best he can manage in his November 20 column, "The Importance of Staying With Iraq," is a lame "[A]lmost all the experts believe that after 18 months of incompetence, the U.S. is getting its act together," you know that Brooks has become a whipped cur, cowering whenever his master calls, unwilling to even remove his tail from between his legs.

Today, Brooks once again attempts a cock fluffing for George Bush and his mighty war. In "The Age of Skepticism," Brooks notes that the American public has become tired and, well, skeptical about the White House's ability to do a goddamn thing about, well, shit, anything: "The chief cultural effect of the Iraq war is that we are now entering a period of skepticism. Many Americans are going to be skeptical that their government can know enough to accomplish large tasks or be competent enough to execute ambitious policies. More people are going to be skeptical of plans to mold reality according to our designs or to solve the deep problems that are rooted in history and culture. They are going to be skeptical of our ability to engage with or understand faraway societies in the Middle East or Africa or elsewhere."

Other things that Brooks cites as results of the growing "skepticism" in America are that "Already the resolve to rebuild New Orleans and seize the post-Katrina moment has dissipated. The bipartisan desire to do something ambitious about energy policy is going nowhere. Even the problem of Darfur evokes little more than sad sighs and shrugs." Brooks tries, desperately, like a mad leprechaun trying to keep his gold in his pot, to make sure that Democrats share blame, citing the single poll where a majority of those questioned said that "criticism of the war" affects morale.

But it's a miserable failure of an argument, for every situation that Brooks mentions is directly traceable to the incompetence, lies, and inaction of the Republicans who are, as we know, we know, fuck, we know, in nearly complete power over everything in DC. If a bipartisan desire or a resolve to rebuild has gone away, then Republicans are reponsible for the breeze shifting. Earlier in the column Brooks says, "There has been a sharp decline in support for the United Nations. There has been a sharp rise in the number of people who say the U.S. should mind its own business when it comes to world affairs. Isolationist sentiment is about where it was just after Vietnam." And he seems to not connect to the reality here: conservatives made the UN into a target. Just as they made skepticism of the government's motives during the Clinton administration a major rhetorical goal. As the Rude Pundit's said before, reap what you sow, motherfuckers, reap what you sow.

So Brooks, in a flourish of sycophantic fervor that'd make Sean Hannity's jaw ache if he tried to attempt it, says that the solution is to win in Iraq: "What's at stake in Iraq is not only the future of that country, but the future of American self-confidence. We may have to endure a cycle of skepticism before we can enjoy another cycle of hope." See? Get it? We gotta stay the course so it can buck us up, little cowpokes. 'Cause, like, nothin' will say hope and sunshine like the constant parade of corpses, the scrolling mount of the body county on yer Fox "News," and an Iraq free to be an Islamic theocracy.