Reading David Brooks

Digby calls them the "press corpse." Delong laments, "Why Oh Why Can't We Have a Better Press Corps?" As much as the conservatives accuse the media of liberal bias, the left has been highly critical of the press coverage especially in the run-up to the Iraq War. Both the NY Times and the Washington Post (and several other print publications) examined their own coverage after the fact and found themselves wanting. But even their mea culpas demonstrated they had not really learned their lessons. All this is particularly galling to those who opposed the Iraq War before it happened because they were simply dismissed as Bush haters. And they are still treated that way when in fact the anti-war people were right.

(For the record, I did not know for certain that Iraq was not a threat to us; I heard what our leaders and many other informed people said, and I did not know they were wrong. But: I also knew from paying attention to the Bush administration for two years that 1) I did not trust they were telling the truth, and 2) I did not trust that they were competent enough to pull it off; if you watched closely how they handled the Afghan war you could have seen that something was amiss. So I cannot claim to have been prescient, but by knowing a little bit of history and paying attention, I had my suspicions in the right place.)

Back to the press corps. Howard Kurtz's account of how the Washington Post got it all wrong was, like the Times' version, unsatisfactory. But a couple of quotes were especially shocking:
"People who were opposed to the war from the beginning and have been critical of the media's coverage in the period before the war have this belief that somehow the media should have crusaded against the war," [Executive Editor Leonard] Downie said. "They have the mistaken impression that somehow if the media's coverage had been different, there wouldn't have been a war." And: Reporter Karen Young, former assistant managing editor said, "We are inevitably the mouthpiece for whatever administration is in power."
I find it hard to even know what to say about these comments. I guess someone forgot to teach these folks what exactly is the point of having a free press.

But this post is supposed to be about David Brooks. He presents quite a different problem. He is the conservative that us liberals are supposed to like because he is pretty smart (not as smart as he thinks, but still not a dummie) and he writes well. In fact I have been meaning to read his article in the Times Magazine a couple weeks back on the future of conservatism, but I just can't get to it. I just don't trust him.

Today's column is a perfect example of his typical style which can be summed up in a word -- disingenuous. It is hard to believe he really believes what he is writing. Start with the first paragraph, regarding Bush: "if he's elected to a second term and acts on the words he uttered on Thursday night...." Well, the "if" should set your antennae up. Because what follows is Brooks' fantasy of what George Bush would do if he were not George Bush.

But Brooks is too smart to be that sloppy, so he takes on our skepticism:

The Bush agenda has been greeted with a wave of skepticism from my buddies in the press corps. How's he going to pay for all this? Why didn't he do more of this in his first term? Why was he so vague about the big things? Won't he sacrifice it all on the altar of tax cuts?

But, of course, he's not going to tell us at the peak of the campaign season about painful spending decisions. He's not going to specify who is going to get gored by tax simplification. No competent candidate has ever done that, and none ever will. That doesn't make the policy ideas bogus.

The "my buddies in the press corps" line is his typical smug disingenuousness, his standard rhetorical ploy to pull us onto his side.
And the part about the spending being a taboo subject during campaign season might work except that we have had four years of spending and no discussion of how to pay for them. Does Brooks really think that this administration will change its stripes after the election to all of a sudden become fiscally conservative? How WILL they pay for these policy ideas? If they cant talk about that, David, then do you have any ideas about how to pay for them? This is typical Brooks-style intellectual disingenousness. I don't have the patience to go on, but nearly every paragraph is filled with this type of sophistry. And I don't believe he really believes this stuff. Why he writes it, I don't know. That is another post.