Open Season on David Brooks

One post is never enough, is it? When you take up the habit of bashing David Brooks, it's like crack cocaine. One hit and you're hooked.

Michelle Malkin calls Brooks an "emetic," although I'm thinking he's actually a disorder affecting the other end of the alimentary canal. Honestly, what can you say about this kind of sloshy, malordorous, dysenteric discharge?

Brooks seems relieved to have an intellectual in the White House again. "I divide people into people who talk like us and who don't talk like us," he explains. "Of recent presidents, Clinton could sort of talk like us, but Obama is definitely -- you could see him as a New Republic writer. He can do the jurisprudence, he can do the political philosophy, and he can do the politics. I think he's more talented than anyone in my lifetime. . . ."

By "people who talk like us," Brooks means: Neurasthenic wimps who spent most of their school career getting beaten up on the playground.

I've heard Obama speak and I've heard Brooks speak and, except that they both speak English, they have nothing in common in that regard.

Brooks speaks for the testosterone-deficient, the effete, those who are by habit critics because they lack the capacity to actually do anything. To borrow Patton's description of such creatures, they know even less about fighting than they know about fornication, which is nothing at all.

And the funny thing is, Brooks cannot begin to imagine the contempt with which he is actually regarded by Obama, or the vicious ridicule which Obama's henchmen direct at him behind his back. You've got to know Rahm Emanuel's just busting a gut laughing at the ridiculous Brooks right now.

So the New Republic sends over a reporter to interview Brooks and it never even occurs to Brooks that he might embarrass himself by gushing so girlishly about Obama's pants-creases. It's this utter shamelessness that astonishes Craig Henry:

I was wrong.
I was certain that David Brooks could never equal the performance he turned in during the 2008 campaign. Flush with Obama-love he lost all restraint. Brooks put his arrogant knowingness, his ignorant fatuity, and his whining neediness on display for all the world to see.Even besotted old fools eventually regain their senses and cringe when they look back on what they said and did.
But not our Mr. Brooks. His passion has not run its course and he remains willing to be Barak’s clown. He will even brag about it to interviewers . . .

Paco is more merciful:

Yeah, I know, it’s like shooting a crippled bream in an aquarium, but the fishy Mr. Brooks keeps inviting ridicule . . .

Yet even Allahpundit recoils before the unmitigated Brooks:

As much as I hate the fetishization of populism, it’d be hard to find a more loathsome expression of intellectual elitism . . .

One more thing, however, I feel obligated to call to your attention:

“David is a conservative who is motivated by a deep distrust of ideology,” former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson, a Brooks friend, says. “That is a strain of conservatism. . . ."

Yes, it is a "strain," the sort of strain one feels when one has eaten too much cheese, but to attempt an analysis of constipationism would be to digress. Rather, what I wish to call to your attention is that Gerson and Brooks are described as "friends" when, in fact, they are peas in a pod.

Honestly, have you ever seen two faces so smugly similar? Merely look at them, and you comprehend at a glance that there are certain schools of political thought which are united not by any particular philosophical principle, but by the common experience of having been called "four-eyes" (and worse) as a child.

Their ideology might as well be called Mother-Wouldn't-Let-Me-Play-Footballism. It fails to persuade because there is nothing sturdy and red-blooded about it. It is not an idea that stands on its hind legs. Theirs is a "conservatism" that squats to pee.

We are not surprised to learn that one of Brooks' friends is Gerson, author of The Sentence That Shall Live In Infamy: "Herewith, a brief primer." Of course, a second-rate man would deserve such a third-rate admirer.

However much I disagree politically with our Kenyan Marxist progressive president, I'll grant him this: He smokes Marlboro Reds.

You've got to reserve some measure of respect for the daredevil who risks death by firing up a Marlboro Red -- a real tough-guy smoke. Marines and truck drivers and Nick Nolte smoke Marlboro Reds.

Take a look at Gerson and Brooks and try to picture them puffing Marlboro Reds. You can't. They don't have it in them. It would irritate their allergies.

Real men don't have allergies or, at least, none they will admit except when filling out a hospital admission form. But neurasthenics cherish their allergies the way Brooks cherishes a well-creased pants leg. Obama has nothing in common with such geldings. Obama smokes Marlboro Reds.

So when Brooks looks at Obama and claims to see a New Republic writer, what he is actually praising is his own Walter Mitty fantasy of himself, imagining that he, David Brooks, were a tough daredevil kind of guy, cool enough to smoke Marlboro Reds.

He's not. And never will be. And it eats him alive.