Quote of the Day, I Actually Agree With David Brooks About Something edition.

The rest of the interview is pap, of course – truth be told, I barely skimmed it – but this is 100% correct:

…getting rid of the earmarks, the little special interest spending legislation, was very bad for Washington.

Why, yes.  Yes, it was.  This is only a problem to people who think that “Washington” = “The United States of America,” though. For the rest of us, it’s a feature instead of a bug.

Concern Troll Watch: David Brooks is terrified that Ted Cruz (and Heritage) will succeed.

David Brooks is very upset at all those recalcitrant Republicans elected in 2010.

“What’s going on in the House, and a bit in the Senate, too, is what you might call the rise of Ted Cruz-ism,” Brooks said. “And Ted Cruz, the senator from Canada through Texas, is basically not a legislator in the normal sense, doesn’t have an idea that he’s going to Congress to create coalitions, make alliances, and he is going to pass a lot of legislation. He’s going in more as a media-protest person. And a lot of the House Republicans are in the same mode. They’re not normal members of Congress. They’re not legislators. They want to stop things. And so they’re just being — they just want to obstruct.”

Two things on this:

  1. David Brooks is apparently looking to build street cred among the Birther crowd. “Senator from Canada?” What’s next, arguing that the Moon landings were faked and that there are aliens on ice in Warehouse 23?
  2. …Yes, in fact, a critical number of Republicans in Congress “want to obstruct.”  And there’s a reason for that.  Let me show you a graph from 2011: Continue reading Concern Troll Watch: David Brooks is terrified that Ted Cruz (and Heritage) will succeed.

#rsrh Hi, David Brooks. Nice article.

However, it failed.  Nobody in a (hypothetical) Perry administration will still ever return your calls, for (justified) fear of their jobs.  The (hypothetical) Perry White House will visibly despise Washingtonian cocktail circuit insiders from the first day to the last; and you’re on their (hypothetical) PNG lists.  Right at the top.  How bad is it?  Let me put it this way: I will have a better shot than you at getting information out of the (hypothetical) Perry White House, and I’m a stay-at-home dad who just sort of… fell… into this political blogging stuff, and wonders sometimes just how that happened.

Have a nice day.

Moe Lane

#rsrh David Brooks defines ‘irony’ for us.

It goes like this.

  • Brooks presumes to give Mitt Romney advice on how to run a campaign.
  • By the way… Romney’s not my guy, but he – unlike Brooks – is an honest Republican, so let me give some helpful advice: do not trust David Brooks on anything.
  • Brooks’ passive-aggressive, deniable advice in part advises that Romney bring up the fact that twenty-three years ago Perry was a Democrat who ran Al Gore’s Texas campaign.
  • This despite the fact that Brooks – who, bizarrely, still defines himself as a conservative – three years ago went out and did everything that he could to get an urban Democratic elitist liberal elected President, short of a formal endorsement (‘perfectly creased pant’ probably doesn’t count).
  • You know what the difference is between Rick Perry & David Brooks is?
  • OK, OK, so there’s a list as long as my arm.  Do you know what the difference between Rick Perry & David Brooks that I was thinking of is?
  • Perry later admitted that he screwed up that particular judgement call.  Brooks has, to the best of my knowledge, never admitted that he acted like a callow, naive, and generally blithering idiot when it came to the 2008 Presidential election.

Hey, remember that advice that I gave Romney?  Now that I think of it… yeah, everybody should follow it.

Moe Lane

#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.

#rsrh QotD, Didn’t Know He Had It In Him edition.

David Brooks.  No, really:

The Democrats’ problem, as some senior officials have mentioned, is that they are so darn captivated by substance, it never occurs to them to look out for their own political self-interest. By [the] way, here’s a fun party game: Get a bottle of vodka and read Peter Baker’s article “The Education of President Obama” from The New York Times Magazine a few weeks ago. Take a shot every time a White House official is quoted blaming Republicans for the Democrats’ political plight. You’ll be unconscious by page three.

Credit where credit is due: that passage is the sort of thing that I would write.  And the whole article itself… isn’t so bad, once you get past Brooks’ quiet resentment that the GOP is more likely to listen to the average Tea Partier these days than it is likely to listen to, well, David Brooks.

But keep this kind of snark against the Democrats, David, and maybe we’ll reconsider.

Moe Lane

#rsrh David Brooks hates him some technocrats.

He’s very indignant about what’s happening with the Obamaspill right now.

If you talk to elected leaders from Louisiana to Florida, they fill your ears with tales of incompetence — of advice that was not heeded, of red tape stifling effective operations, of local knowledge that was cast aside and trampled.

He is so indignant about this, in fact, that if this was the only thing that David Brooks had ever wrote you would be forgiven for concluding that David Brooks did not spend the last election cycle helping to get elected President the man who is now busily mucking up coordinating the cleanup.  Which is, indeed, so mucked up that local governments are preemptively announcing that they’re not going to wait for the Feds to do to them what the Feds have done to Louisiana.

And, believe me, I can spend the next three paragraphs cataloging all the ways that the government has mucked and is mucking up up the Gulf recovery effort.  So it’d be nice if you mentioned from time to time just how big your lapse in judgment was in 2008, Brooks. Particularly since, if things had gone the other way, this crisis would have been a perfect match for THAT WOMAN’S skill set and experience.

And doesn’t experience matter, Brooks?

Moe Lane Continue reading #rsrh David Brooks hates him some technocrats.

‘Deem and Pass’ watch: Brooks on the ledge, Rubin on the sidewalk.

With regard to this despairing statement by David Brooks:

Deem and pass? Are you kidding me? Is this what the Revolutionary War was fought for? Is this what the boys on Normandy beach were trying to defend? Is this where we thought we would end up when Obama was speaking so beautifully in Iowa or promising to put away childish things?

…I do not say that Jen Rubin is sharpening her knife.

Maybe the rubes understand Obama fairly well, after all. They figured out quite some time ago that the entire campaign message — change, hope, post-partisanship, nonideological, fiscally sober — was a ruse. And they understand how immoderate both his methods and his aims are.

I personally am not out on a ledge. (But then I never bought the whole Obama campaign whoop-de-do.) Should this pass, I have infinite faith that the American people will deliver a mortal electoral blow to those politicians who thought they could shred anything to get their way. And then bit by bit — or in one fell swoop — the elected replacements for the shredders will rip out ObamaCare. So there’s no reason to be morose. Elections are great corrective exercises, and one is just around the corner.

That would imply that Jen would have been foolish enough to let the knife get dull in the first place.  She’s not the sort; and neither am I.  I still think that this bill will not pass – but at this point, we’ve got a fallback strategy in place, just in case.  And should quote-unquote ‘moderate’ Democrats really do decide to commit electoral suicide for the sake of their liberal leadership, I guess that we can accommodate them.

And relax about worrying about how we could possibly gut this next year.  The Democrats are doing us the favor of setting the procedural bar very, very, very low…

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.