By way of an item posted today on the blog PhuckPolitics.com, Crib From This is happy to find itself in the position of bringing to the reader's attention this week's (perhaps this month's) required reading: a piece -- unrelenting in its honesty and buttressed powerfully by a torrent of damning quotations -- exposé of the sophistic, tendentious, arrogant, and mendacious tactics and rhetoric of David Brooks.
Written by Glenn Greenwald, the piece, which appears in Salon.com, calls to our attention Brooks's repeated tendency suddenly to launch into a tough-guy routine whenever, according to his Realpolitik-style calculations, he senses the need to bully his readers his into supporting whatever military adventure it is that week serve the interests of his underlying, fanatical neoconservative interests.
But wait! you protest. David Brooks as nothing more than an arrogant neoconservative hack? David Brooks as a low-rent Joseph Goebbels?? But he's so polite. And those glasses he wears make him seem like a thoughtful person, an intellectual. Not an ideologue!
Greenwald, having noticed that Brooks is now bringing his tough guy game to the deadly, chaotic and increasingly unpopular American intervention in Afghanistan, reminds us that "Brooks was writing all the same things in late 2002 and early 2003 about Iraq -- though, back then, he did so from the pages of Rupert Murdoch and Bill Kristol's The Weekly Standard." Lest we forget all of the now-inconvenient statements that Brooks would prefer we forget about, Greenwald has come to our rescue:
In today's New York Times, the grizzled warrior David Brooks performs a chest-beating war dance over Afghanistan of the type he and his tough guy comrades perfected in the run-up to the Iraq War. It's filled with self-glorifying "war-is-hell" neocon platitudes that make the speaker feel tough and strong. No more hiding like cowards in our bases. It's time to send "small groups of American men and women [] outside the wire in dangerous places." Those opposing escalation are succumbing to the "illusion of the easy path." Chomping on a cigar in his war room, he roars: "all out or all in." The central question: will we "surrender the place to the Taliban?," etc. etc.You get one guess as to the the answer to this question. Seriously, though: read the whole piece. It gives you that creepy Orwellian feeling that you get when you notice that the people with power and influence in our country are lying to us not only about the present, but they are lying most of all about the past.
When I went back to read some of that this morning, I was -- as always -- struck by how extreme and noxious it all was: the snide, hubristic superiority combined with absolute wrongness about everything. What people like David Brooks were saying back then was so severe -- so severely wrong, pompous, blind, warmongering and, as it turns out, destructive -- that no matter how many times one reviews the record of the leading opinion-makers of that era, one will never be inured to how poisonous they are.
All of this would be a fascinating study for historians if the people responsible were figures of the past. But they're not. They're the opposite. The same people shaping our debates now are the same ones who did all of that, and they haven't changed at all. They're doing the same things now that they did then. When you go read what they said back then, that's what makes it so remarkable and noteworthy. David Brooks got promoted within our establishment commentariat to The New York Times after (one might say: because of) the ignorant bile and amoral idiocy he continuously spewed while at The Weekly Standard. According to National Journal's recently convened "panel of Congressional and Political Insiders," Brooks is now the commentator who "who most help[s] to shape their own opinion or worldview" -- second only to Tom "Suck On This" Friedman. Charles Krauthammer came in third. Ponder that for a minute.
Just read some of what Brooks wrote about Iraq. It's absolutely astounding that someone with this record doesn't refrain from prancing around as a war expert for the rest of their lives. In fact, in a society where honor and integrity were valued just a minimal amount, a record like this would likely cause any decent and honorable person, wallowing in shame, to seriously contemplate throwing themselves off a bridge:
David Brooks, Weekly Standard, February 6, 2003:
I MADE THE MISTAKE of watching French news the night of Colin Powell's presentation before the Security Council. . . . Then they brought on a single "expert" to analyze Powell's presentation. This fellow, who looked to be about 25 and quite pleased with himself, was completely dismissive. The Powell presentation was a mere TV show, he sniffed. It's impossible to trust any of the intelligence data Powell presented because the CIA is notorious for lying and manipulation. The presenter showed a photograph of a weapons plant, and then the same site after it had been sanitized and the soil scraped. The expert was unimpressed: The Americans could simply have lied about the dates when the pictures were taken. Maybe the clean site is actually the earlier picture, he said.David Brooks, Weekly Standard, March 7, 2003:
That was depressing enough. Then there were a series of interviews with French politicians of the left and right. They were worse. At least the TV expert had acknowledged that Powell did present some evidence, even if he thought it was fabricated. The politicians responded to Powell's address as if it had never taken place. They simply ignored what Powell said and repeated that there is no evidence that Saddam has weapons of mass destruction and that, in any case, the inspection system is effective.
This was not a response. It was simple obliviousness, a powerful unwillingness to confront the question honestly. This made the politicians seem impervious to argument, reason, evidence, or anything else. Maybe in the bowels of the French elite there are people rethinking their nation's position, but there was no hint of it on the evening news.
Which made me think that maybe we are being ethnocentric. As good, naive Americans, we think that if only we can show the world the seriousness of the threat Saddam poses, then they will embrace our response. In our good, innocent way, we assume that in persuading our allies we are confronted with a problem of understanding.
But suppose we are confronted with a problem of courage? Perhaps the French and the Germans are simply not brave enough to confront Saddam. . . .
Or suppose we are confronted with a problem of character? Perhaps the French and the Germans understand the risk Saddam poses to the world order. Perhaps they know that they are in danger as much as anybody. They simply would rather see American men and women--rather than French and German men and women--dying to preserve their safety. . . . Far better, from this cynical perspective, to signal that you will not take on the terrorists--so as to earn their good will amidst the uncertain times ahead.
I do suspect that the decision to pursue this confrontational course emerges from Bush's own nature. He is a man of his word. He expects others to be that way too. It is indisputably true that Saddam has not disarmed. If people are going to vote against a resolution saying Saddam has not disarmed then they are liars. Bush wants them to do it in public, where history can easily judge them. Needless to say, neither the French nor the Russians nor the Chinese believe that honesty has anything to do with diplomacy. They see the process through an entirely different lens.David Brooks, Weekly Standard, January 29, 2003:
This was speech as autobiography. President Bush once again revealed his character, and demonstrated why so many Americans, whether they agree with this or that policy proposal, basically trust him and feel he shares their values. Most Americans will not follow the details of this or that line in the address. But they will go about their day on Wednesday knowing that whatever comes in the next few months, they have a good leader at the helm.David Brooks, Weekly Standard, February 21, 2003:
I mentioned that I barely know Paul Wolfowitz, which is true. But I do admire him enormously, not only because he is both a genuine scholar and an effective policy practitioner, not only because he has been right on most of the major issues during his career, but because he is now the focus of world anti-Semitism. He carries the burden of their hatred, which emanates not only from the Arab world and France, but from some people in our own country, which I had so long underestimated.David Brooks, Weekly Standard, November 11, 2002:
In dealing with Saddam, then, we are not dealing with a normal thug or bully . . . The Baathist ideology requires continual conflict and bloodshed. . . . The CIA and the State Department might think otherwise, but we are not all game theorists. Human beings are not all rational actors carefully calculating their interests. Certain people--many people, in fact--are driven by goals, ideals, and beliefs. Saddam Hussein has taken such awful risks throughout his career not because he "miscalculated," as the game theorists assert, but because he was chasing his vision. He was following the dictates of the Baathist ideology, which calls for warfare, bloodshed, revolution, and conflict, on and on, against one and all, until the end of time.David Brooks, Weekly Standard, September 30, 2002:
EITHER SADDAM HUSSEIN will remain in power or he will be deposed. President Bush has suggested deposing him, but as the debate over that proposal has evolved, an interesting pattern has emerged. The people in the peace camp attack President Bush's plan, but they are unwilling to face the implications of their own. Almost nobody in the peace camp will stand up and say that Saddam Hussein is not a fundamental problem for the world. Almost nobody in that camp is willing even to describe what the world will look like if the peace camp's advice is taken and Saddam is permitted to remain in power in Baghdad, working away on his biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons programs . . .David Brooks, Weekly Standard, March 17, 2003:
You begin to realize that they are not arguing about Iraq. They are not arguing at all. They are just repeating the hatreds they cultivated in the 1960s, and during the Reagan years, and during the Florida imbroglio after the last presidential election. They are playing culture war, and they are disguising their eruptions as position-taking on Iraq, a country about which they haven't even taken the trouble to inform themselves. . . . For most in the peace camp, there is only the fog. The debate is dominated by people who don't seem to know about Iraq and don't care. Their positions are not influenced by the facts of world affairs.
So now we stand at an epochal moment. The debate is over. The case has gone to the jury, and the jury is history. Events will soon reveal who was right, Bush or Chirac. . . . But there are two nations whose destinies hang in the balance. The first, of course, is Iraq. Will Iraqis enjoy freedom, more of the same tyranny, or a new kind of tyranny? The second is the United States. If the effort to oust Saddam fails, we will be back in the 1970s. We will live in a nation crippled by self-doubt. If we succeed, we will be a nation infused with confidence. We will have done a great thing for the world, and other great things will await.Look at that last paragraph. He proclaimed that "events will soon reveal who was right, Bush or Chirac." On the eve of the war he cheered on, as he celebrated the fact that "the debate is over" and war was imminent and inevitable, he identically vowed: "Events will show who was right, George W. Bush or Jacques Chirac." Soon we would know.
Did Brooks ever tell his readers what we found out about that? [...]
Is it mere coincidence that the same militaristic and neoconservative goons who are lying to us about the past and -- as Greenwald points out -- unwilling to hold themselves to an ethical standard that demands telling the truth to the best of your ability at all times, is it any surprise that these are the same ideologues that espouse the trashing of the American public school system and the transfer of that system into the hands of private, for-profit businesses? Or that they are the same people who want to trash public television and who have removed any and all former laws against the consolidation of media?
It's really regrettable, but Greenwald has a damn good point when he asks: what does this stuff say about us as a society?
By nature, the present blogger tends to eschew defeatism as much as possible. He endeavors always to channel his outrage into some kind of rational thinking or reflection or -- in very rare instances -- action. He does this because dwelling on how screwed-up the world is can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Having said that, he also knows that he must nonetheless always continue to learn as much as he can about how screwed up the world is, because if he doesn't, that just makes him one of the hundreds of thousands of starving-artist-types who don't recognize that they're consigned to being culturally-bourgeois-as-hell hypocrites and that it's better simply to recognize this fact: the fact that pretty much anyone reading and I daresay writing a blog is by definition among an exceedingly lucky subsection of the world population which -- for all of its good intentions -- lives off of the past and present and -- in the case of our parents' generation -- future misery, death, misfortune and hopelessness of millions of others.
This poses an existential problem that we won't go into right now because frankly I need to eat lunch, and I'm sure that I'm sort of at low blood-sugar and am probably rambling incoherently.
But anyway, re: my cognizance of current deplorable political realities, I'm happy to say that I commented on the dark aspects of David Brooks previously, only in that case, I was main concerned with his views and writing on domestic policy/politics.
In an item posted approximately a year ago, Crib From This took to task the New York Times columnist and former Weekly Standard mainstay David Brooks for the mendacity, hypocrisy and tendentiousness of his putatively startled and dismayed response to the ascendancy of Sarah Palin, and the brand of hillbilly-resentment-populism espoused by the voters within the Republican Party whom she enthralled. To revisit these remarks briefly:
The subtext of [Brooks's] commentary is [...] that the GOP is being taken over by the pro-Sarah Palin 'grassroots' and all but ditched by its traditional (rich, suburban, etc.) base.Now, the present blogger must have been in an exceedingly generous mood when he made the preceding observations. That probably had something to do with Barack Obama's fresh victory in the presidential election, which -- despite the fact that I hate having to be reminded of how ineffectual, wooden, bought-off and ruthlessly supportive of sinister neoliberal policy agendae, Democratic politicians are when they actually hold positions of power -- I maintain to have been a result that is preferable by far than handing keys to the White House to John "Decrepit Tough Guy" McCain.
The columnist, conveniently, has failed to mention his own frequent and cloying forays into GOP-styled populism. In other words, Brooks could be said to deserve at least some of the blame for ushering in the party's new era. True, he is no Rush Limbaugh and has never sought actively to recruit the rural, anti-cosmopolitan, anti-elite, anti-intellectual, racist cadre, whose seeming ascendancy he now bemoans.
In contrast to the inbred hooliganism of Limbaugh/Hannity, Brooks -- to appropriate a device that appears in the concluding paragraphs of one of his recent columns -- commits a sin of omission. Until recent weeks -- around the time of the McCain/Palin rallies in which the GOP 'salt of the earth'-faithful screamed death threats intended for Obama, passed around an 'Obama'-labeled stuffed monkey toy and other racist knick-knacks, and called Obama a "terrorist," a "socialist," a "Muslim," and someone who "doesn't love this country the way you and I do" (oh wait, that last one was said repeatedly by Sarah Palin herself) -- I have never once seen Brooks point out that the GOP's cultivation of a mean-spirited, anti-intellectual, anti-urban, anti-elitism sentiment was beginning to lead down a slippery slope, which everyone could see in plain sight. Nope. Despite his supposed 'moderate' conservatism, not a single column inch. No, it took the advent of angry, racist mobs, televised and YouTubed for all to see, for David Brooks to level with his readers and finally admit that Palin was a cynical selection, condescending to the voters and dangerous for the country and to the office of the presidency. What gives, David?
To be fair, let's remember that for the last decade, Brooks has probably been too distracted to sound a note of caution regarding the GOP's ongoing brain drain and its inevitable consequences. Over the two terms of Bush/Cheney, Brooks has had a lot of neoconservative and neoliberal agenda-pushing to get through -- often by stealth, which eats up even more of a busy columnist's day. After all, the man's schedule was already so taxing as to include things like
Jeez, David: you've managed to express what all of us feel deep down in our hearts, but what none of us could find the words to say: the rightness of Bush's Big Idea! So that's wherein lies George W. Bush's secret; how he pulls off being such a great and beloved president!
- disseminating neoconservative and neoliberal ideology by masking it as snarky-but-lovable pop-sociology;
- applauding middle America for its unrefined taste (in more than one book whose title includes the word 'paradise'); [...]
- being sure to time his fully formed policy stances in such a way as to perpetuate the illusion that careful deliberation and the measured weighing-of-options precedes their articulation;
- kissing the asses of Catholic people;
- in effect if not by design, playing 'good cop' to William's (both Kristol and Bennett) 'bad cop' in the pushing of neoconservative foreign policy adventures and the continued scorched-earth defunding of the domestic public sector;
- lamenting the disappearance of 1950's middle-brow reading culture, and other (pre-Palin) instances of the shameless peddling of cheap nostalgia;
- and panegyrizing George W. Bush's "self-confident" and "committed," leadership of the Iraq War -- as recently as July 2007, while enthusing over Bush's "unconquerable faith in the rightness of his Big Idea."
Brooks never had a negative word to say about Bush's neo-McCarthyist electoral strategy. Nor did he bother to wince along with the rest of us thinking human beings as we watched Cheney, Rumsfeld, and their crack squad of war criminals falsify intelligence, engage in character assassination of any/all figures of opposition, and censor dissent in the run-up to the Iraq War.
But no matter. Brooks appears recently to have updated his appraisal of George W. Bush, right about the time (early October, 2008) at which he felt compelled finally to come out and admit that Sarah Palin is BAD NEWS.
Anyway, I put it to anyone who has stayed with this post all the way to the bottom: Which neoconservative political operative is more harmful to this country? The shrill and disingenuous William Kristol? Or the polite, bespectacled and occasionally shrill David Brooks?
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