#rsrh David Brooks feels alone.

That’s the message of this Daily Beast article – apparently Brooks feels estranged from it all – but there’s another, hidden message: no-one on the Daily Beast knows any conservatives professionally. Seriously, take a gander at this passage:

“What’s interesting about David is the part that’s not on the right or the left,” says the liberal author Paul Berman. “He’s a social critic, with a talent for wry, fond criticism of the American bourgeoisie.” But he lacks “a kind of indignation,” Berman notes. He’s insufficiently shrill for Fox News, talk radio, and the conservative welfare state promoted by Washington think tanks—what the writer Andrew Sullivan refers to as “the financial-industrial complex.”

Sullivan goes on to blather about the Iraq liberation, but contemplate this: the best that the Daily Beast could do to find a balanced assessment of Brook’s philosophy was a liberal interventionist hawk and a brain-addled conspiracy theorist.  Don’t get me wrong: Berman’s sound on the essentially fascist nature of radical Islamist philosophy, and the guy did do his part on getting Michael Moore placed on a career path of making ineffective left-wing propaganda.  But surely the Daily Beast could have called up somebody who might have bothered to explain what their problem was with Brooks as a conservative, from the conservative point of view*?

Yes.  I am quite the comedian.

Moe Lane

*It’s very simple: Brooks is a tireless defender of conservative principles.  Right up to the point where the hostess of the dinner party he’s attending looks like she’s about to raise an eyebrow.