Quick, NPR needs a 'conservative' douchebag to badmouth Sarah Palin!

Guess who beat out the fierce competition from such right-wing stalwarts as David Brooks, Conor Friedersdorf and Andrew Sullivan? Rod Dreher:

Palin positions herself as a populist, but her populism is entirely cultural. . . .
A little of that goes a long way, and I wouldn't begrudge Palin a bit of it if her populism had any economic substance.

And I wouldn't begrudge Dreher his pompous douchebaggery quite so much if he actually knew anything about economics, but he doesn't.

(Hat-tips: Riehl World View; Memeorandum.)

Breitbart has more important things to worry about than Conor Friedersdorf

Nevertheless, he condescends to take notice:

Conor Friedersdorf refuses to interview me as he continues to be my unofficial biographer. (I’m VERY reachable, Conor.) He writes opinion pieces on me purporting to be journalism. He doesn’t quote or cite me, he simply assumes and pushes the point of view he thinks I have and makes an argument based on these alleged positions.

He even provides free copy for Andrew Sullivan:

I don't resent criticism. I embrace it. But I do resent self-superior journalists attempting to malign me and my vision without coming to me to get my thoughts.

Don't waste your time, Andrew. They are The Republicans Who Really Matter, and their ambitions have nothing to do with anything you're interested in. They claim to be "conservatives" only because, if they didn't, they'd be just more piranhas in the liberal pool.

(Via Memeorandum.)

UPDATE: Ed Driscoll also wastes too much thought on Conor Friedersdorf. Ed -- everybody -- let me sum it up: It's about Conor. His ambitions exceed his knowledge, and that explains everything. Whatever there may be of ideology in Conor's peregrinations is summarized by Dan Riehl:

He's gone from Right to post-Modernist to the Daily Beast in two months. That's someone embracing anything just to find a home. I don't think he even knows what he is at this point.

Right. Politically, he's a platypus.

David Brooks hates you

Just in case you didn't know it before, his snooty just-so story about talk-radio hosts raging in "spittle-flecked furor" ought to tell you what profound contempt David Brook has for conservatives. Here's his walk-off:

The rise of Beck, Hannity, Bill O’Reilly and the rest has correlated almost perfectly with the decline of the G.O.P. But it’s not because the talk jocks have real power. It’s because they have illusory power, because Republicans hear the media mythology and fall for it every time.

Speaking of mythology, Brooks' history of the 2008 primary campaign is spectacularly wrong. John McCain got just 33% of the South Carolina GOP primary vote. In that winner-take-all primary, McCain barely beat the evangelical populist Huckabee (30%). And that was only because:

1. McCain had name ID and had been organizing non-stop in the state since 2001;
2. The "Anybody But McCain" vote was badly divided;
3. Southerners respect military service;
4. Romney was hurt by his Mormonism and "flipflopper" reputation; and
5. Republican primary voters tend to be older, and McCain owned the Clueless GOP Geezer Vote.

None of this had anything to do with Rush Limbaugh, and had everything to do with the failure of Republican Party leadership. This was why, on Election Night 2008, I wrote "You Did Not Lose," attempting to explain to conservative voters that the defeat of John McCain was not a failure of conservatism. McCain finished with only 47% of the total GOP primary vote, and was never the choice of the party's conservative grassroots core:

While the Democratic struggle between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton captured all the headlines during the primary season, few pundits noticed the massive Republican resistance to McCain's nomination.
For example, on Super Tuesday, Feb. 5, McCain got 33 percent of the primary vote in Missouri, 32 percent in Tennessee and Georgia; in caucuses that day, he got 22 percent in Minnesota and 19 percent in Colorado. McCain's share of the total Republican primary vote through Super Tuesday was only 39 percent.
Nor did the resistance end after McCain's most formidable rival, Mitt Romney, called it quits Feb. 7. As late as May 20 -- by which time McCain had been the de facto nominee for more than two months -- 28 percent of voters in the Kentucky GOP primary cast their ballots for other candidates or voted "uncommitted."

Nov. 4, 2008, was Crazy Cousin John's personal defeat, as well as a decisive repudiation of the Republican Party's leaders, who had utterly abandoned the legacy of Ronald Reagan in favor of the "compassionate conservative" agenda of Bushism, which was nothing but Brooksian "National Greatness" in evangelical drag with a Texas drawl.

If I weren't working on a long article about my Kentucky trip, I could write 5,000 words about this perverse classic of Brooksian myth-making:

For no matter how often their hollowness is exposed, the jocks still reweave the myth of their own power. They still ride the airwaves claiming to speak for millions. They still confuse listeners with voters. And they are aided in this endeavor by their enablers. They are enabled by cynical Democrats, who love to claim that Rush Limbaugh controls the G.O.P. They are enabled by lazy pundits who find it easier to argue with showmen than with people whose opinions are based on knowledge. They are enabled by the slightly educated snobs who believe that Glenn Beck really is the voice of Middle America.

"Slightly educated snobs" -- exactly which graduate of Jacksonville (Ala.) State University do you have in mind there, Mr. Brooks?

This endless anti-"populist" crusade for Big Government Republicanism has been a constant of Brooksianism since the neurasthenic geek first started pushing his disastrously influential "National Greatness" idiocy in 1997. That blunderheaded misconception of misinformed thumbsucking earned Brooks membership in The Republicans Who Really Matter, and he's been toiling diligently to destroy the Party of Reagan ever since.

Read my lips: David Brooks is not a conservative! He never has been and never will be. His entire career has been devoted to using his influence over the Republican Party elite to prevent conservatives from exercising influence over the party's direction.

Meanwhile, speaking of Republicans who have never been conservative, Politico reports that "Sen. John McCain is working behind-the-scenes to reshape the Republican Party in his own center-right image." And it ain't going to happen.

If the GOP moves leftward -- which is what the phrase "center-right" means -- it will implode or become irrelevant as an electoral force, because a majority of Americans still want what Phyllis Schlafly described so eloquently in 1964: A Choice, Not an Echo.

The Tanenhaus Republicans and the Architecture of Intellectual Prestige

Should you wish to develop a critique of the conservative movement, yet are incapable of genuinely original thought, try to avoid borrowing your second-hand ideas from an avowed enemy of conservatism like Sam Tanenhaus of the New York Times. (Y'all reckon his Buckley bio will get a good review?)

The brilliant Dan Riehl observes Rachel Maddow's MSNBC guest host Ana Marie Cox (speaking of "sworn enemies") interviewing Tanenhaus "discussing how WND is the equivalent of the Birchers today? Detailing how the Birchers were shut down." Dan continues:

Going on about the lack of intellectuals in conservatism today? Questioning where the Republican leadership is?
Damn! Almost seems to me I heard precisely all that just recently.
Then going on to pull in NRO, claiming that NRO (wink wink) only pretended to reject, while bringing forth new evidence, in the Birther conspiracy? Calling today's conservative "mouthpieces" pseudo-intellectuals? Do they mean Talk Radio? I'd bet they do.
No point in reading The Next Right anymore, perhaps. I can just wait to catch the latest young conservative wisdom on MSNBC. . . .

Ouch. Here's the MSNBC video, so the reader may appreciate the extent to which the liberal Tanenhaus has influenced this species of "conservatism":

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

What astonishes me is that these Young Turks, who conceive of themselves as infinitely superior to their elders in terms of intellectual sophistication, fail to recognize that they are being played as suckers in a very familiar sort of hustle. I explained this four months ago in "The Republicans Who Really Matter":

The Republicans Who Really Matter can be relied on to reinforce liberal stereotypes of the GOP, and to pen op-ed columns offering "helpful" advice to the Republican Party which, if followed, would lead to certain electoral disaster. . . .
No Republican pundit is ever going to become influential by buddying up to Wayne LaPierre or right-to-lifers; make favorable mention of environmentalism, however, and MSNBC producers will flood your inbox with e-mail invitations to a 10-minute guest segment on "Hardball."
One reliable method for advancing to the pinnacle as a Republican commentator is to argue that the party is badly divided, and to blame this fragmentation on some constituency universally loathed by liberals. . . .

The inarguable fact that liberals dominate the publishing industry, academia and other such institutions of intellect means that liberalism and its advocates possess a prestige that no out-and-out conservative can ever enjoy.

The Monopolization of Prestige
Neither Joseph Farah nor Dan Riehl will ever be published by the New York Times, will they? If Michelle Malkin, Mark Levin or Ann Coulter wrote biographies of William F. Buckley Jr., would their books be praised in a feature NYT book review? Would they be excerpted by The New Republic?

Of course not. Liberals would never lend the prestige of their institutions to such avowed enemies of liberalism. And anyone who desires to research the career of Buckley may easily discover the vehemence with which he was once denounced by liberals -- up until such time as liberals discerned that they might use him as a weapon to attack other conservative targets.

To be the sort of conservative intellectual acceptable to liberals, one must never make a criticism of liberalism that is genuinely effective, an argument that undermines the prestige of liberal ideas and liberal heroes. Why? Because once an intelligent person comes to suspect that liberalism does not deserve its prestigious reputation -- well, the emperor has no clothes, you see? Therefore, Pinch Sulzberger hires a neurasthenic weakling like David Brooks, and not a vigorous, forthright and courageous advocate of conservative ideas.

At some level, the shrewd and ambitious young Republican-leaning writer perceives all this. He understands that he can gain an especial distinction by courting the praise of liberals, in quite the same way a junior varsity cheerleader can become "popular" by dating the defensive line of the varsity football team. And the analogy is all the more apt in that the JV cheerleader who seeks the easiest way to "popularity" so often condemns as ill-motivated hypocrites those more virtuous girls who eschew her ways.

'Boring' or Burkean?
When, in a symposium on Tanenhaus, Austin Bramwell declares that conservatism is "intellectually boring," he is in one sense quite correct. The basic principles of American conservatism -- the defense of constitutionally limited government, opposition to the welfare state, sympathy for tradition, foreign policy based on strength, sovereignty and national interest -- are so well-known that they offer no attraction to those who crave novelty in political thought.

The upstart who desires to gain a reputation as an "innovative" thinker is welcome to seek employment outside conservative politics, if he is not content to find new ways to celebrate old verities or new arguments with which to eviscerate liberals.

Instead, what we see over and over -- see Brooks' disastrously influential "National Greatness" as a textbook example -- is an enthusiastic race to get ahead of the Zeitgeist, to become the Promethean author of a new Welltanschauung, to establish one's place as the founder of Some Other Conservatism.

Wise men are not deceived by these pretentious intellectual hustlers. When a self-described conservative begins slinging around words like "creativity" and "progress" in political discourse, it is not generally taken as evidence of doughty resolve. Rather, it is wise to suspect such a person of being what the Brits would call a trimmer.

The Cruelty of Ambition
Conservatism is a philosophy of opposition. Excuse me for repeating myself, but some of our Young Turks do not seem to be paying attention to the lessons.

They invite chastisement, lest they become still more impudent (if such a thing were possible). I call them "Young Turks," but they rather remind me of certain Young Hegelians of yore, unwisely eager to hasten the historical synthesis. Their conceited trust in their own superiority is dangerous, perhaps more to them than to the hoary elders of the "movement" whom they seek to supplant, and I suspect there would be far less tolerance of dissent if these ambitious youngsters were mounted in the saddle and empowered to wield the whip.

We need no Nietzschean ubermensch nor Platonic archons to rule over us, to enlighten our supposed benightedness and soothe us with their tendentious myths about Olympian idols. This dishonest campaign to employ the aid of Tanenhaus to enlist the departed Buckley as a ghostly advocate of Pragmatism deserves to be rejected with extreme prejudice. And any Young Turks who desire to keep pursuing this approach will do so at peril to their own ambitions.

Whatever the Zeitgeist amongst the intelligentsia, the balance of power within the conservative movement does not favor "Pragmatism," which means that would-be leaders of Some Other Conservatism will suffer from a shortage of followers, and will find themselves isolated and ignored.

Even while I was writing this little essay, the brilliant Dan Riehl was busy discovering what sort of advice Sam Tanenhaus offered to his own party in 2003. The liberal Democrat urged Democrats to embrace their own radicals, while the same liberal Democrat's arguments are now being used to urge Republicans to purge Joseph Farah and WND.

"Maximize the contradictions," as Abby Hoffman said.

Not an Onion satire

Gabriel Sherman's article describing how David Brooks got his man-crush on Obama seems to have been pulled off the New Republic Web site, but you can still read it in Google cache:

"I don't want to sound like I'm bragging," Brooks recently told me, "but usually when I talk to senators, while they may know a policy area better than me, they generally don't know political philosophy better than me. I got the sense he knew both better than me."
That first encounter is still vivid in Brooks's mind. "I remember distinctly an image of--we were sitting on his couches, and I was looking at his pant leg and his perfectly creased pant," Brooks says, “and I'm thinking, a) he's going to be president and b) he'll be a very good president." In the fall of 2006, two days after Obama's The Audacity of Hope hit bookstores, Brooks published a glowing Times column. The headline was "Run, Barack, Run."

Vomit, reader, vomit. And be sure to give generously to the David Brooks Fisking Fund. Commenters should feel free to describe in their own words exactly what's wrong with the Perfect Pants-Crease Theory of statesmanship. I'll try to come back and take a stab at it myself later. Right now, though, I feel the need to take a shower . . . Ick. Shudder.

(Via Memeorandum.)

UPDATE: OK, inspired by one of the commenters ("Wipe your chin, Mr. Brooks"), I now have a two-word description of the Brooks-Obama relationship: Pearl necklace.

But readers fluent in Japanese could probably describe it in one word.

Every day, I check a blog called . .

. . . Memeorandum, which is not actually a blog, but an aggregation site. And when I logged on this morning, the item at the top right of the page was David Brooks' latest column:

Every day, I check a blog called Marginal Revolution, which is famous for its erudite authors, Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok, and its intelligent contributors. Last week, one of those contributors asked a question that is fantastical but thought-provoking: What would happen if a freak solar event sterilized the people on the half of the earth that happened to be facing the sun? . . .

You can read the rest, which only serves to highlight the "fantastical but thought-provoking" question that has haunted American journalism for years: "Why the hell is David Brooks getting paid to write a column?"

My pet theory is that Brooks has a cache of photos, acquired by nefarious and clandestine means, showing New York Times publisher Pinch Sulzberger in compromising situations with someone who is not Mrs. Sulzberger.

Casting no direct aspersions upon Tyler Cowen and the gang at Marginal Revolution -- it's certainly not their fault Brooks reads their blog -- theirs is hardly the most "thought-provoking" hypothetical ever entertained on a blog:

Swear to God, if they ever want a Gentile prime minister, my first order . . .

Just a thought experiment, you see. Whatever follows such a fantastical "if" is no more to be taken seriously than that Marginal Revolution question was to be considered a hopeful wish that half the earth's population would be sterilized.

Furthermore, if one is going to write a column on such a theme, the diffident, philosophical approach taken by Brooks is the least interesting way to go about it. No, by God, make it passionate and intensely personal:

When he was 16, Bill McCain told his mother, “You won’t ever have to worry about me again.” He left the family farm in rural Randolph County, Alabama, and moved 40 miles away to West Point, Georgia, where he went to work on the night shift in a cotton mill.
You’ve heard of people who worked their way through college? My father worked his way through high school. Most of his cotton-mill pay went for room and board and books -- in those days, public-school students in Georgia had to buy their own textbooks -- at the school where he became a football star. . . .

You can read the whole thing and, if you do, consider what was intended by the final sentence of that little essay. In an era when the newspaper industry is laying off newsroom personnel to the tune of a thousand people a month, David Brooks is paid a full-time salary by Sulzberger. In return for this salary -- his compensation package is rumored to be in the neighborhood $300,000 annually -- Brooks is required to produce only two 800-word columns per week.

Do the math, and this amounts to 104 columns per year, at nearly $3,000 per column, so that Brooks' rate is somewhere around $3.50 a word -- and yet he apparently cannot be bothered to do any actual reporting.

Byron York breaks news every time he files for the Washington Examiner, a tabloid that is distributed free on the streets of the nation's capital. Yet that ungrateful wretch Brooks is indulged as he wastes 804 words -- yes, I counted -- doing philosophy, rather than journalism. To borrow a phrase from Hunter S. Thompson, it's "enough to make a man wonder what newsprint is for."

My grievance with Brooks is not merely because, as Sister Toldjah says, he's a phony political chameleon. Politics aside, Brooks is a goddamned disgrace to the profession of journalism.

Last week, I filed 3,000 words about IG-Gate for the September print edition of The American Spectator (subscribe now) and readers can rest assured that Al Regnery isn't paying $3.50 a word or whatever preposterous sum Sulzberger pays David Brooks for his predictable expeditions into newsprint wastage.

Frankly, if it weren't for generous readers hitting the tip jar, I couldn't afford the gas to drive back and forth to D.C. for my "shoe leather" trips to Capitol Hill, to say nothing of such other necessary expenses as cigarettes, coffee and $1.29 chili cheese dogs. (Legitimate tax-deductible expenses, I hasten to add. The IRS may not understand the vital role that chili cheese dogs play in investigative journalism, but I've got witnesses. And receipts.)

Meanwhile, with the filthy lucre he receives from the Sulzberger empire, Brooks can actually afford to live a $12 cab fare away from the Capitol. Yet the only time Brooks can be bothered to do anything remotely resembling reporting is when he's sucking up to Obama administration hacks at those Atlantic Monthly salmon-and-risotto soirees.

Last week, SIGTARP Neil Barofsky raised hell in a House Oversight Committe hearing, but I suppose that Brooks was too busy pondering existential philosophy to bother grabbing a notebook and hailing a cab over to the Hill.

Me? My e-mail inbox is overflowing and my wife cleaned my desk so that I lost the paper on which I'd printed out Gerald Walpin's phone number. Therefore, in between everything else I had to do yesterday, I spent a couple hours plowing through my e-mail until I finally retreived that number.

Brooks isn't merely wasting his time, he's wasting mine, and I've got important work to do. Why expend more than 700 words on him today? Everything that needs to be said about that disgusting stain on the soul of American journalism was summed up three months ago by an award-winning blogger:

Fuck you, David Brooks.

Please hit the tip jar. I'm planning another trip to DC tomorrow, and I'll need more chili cheese dogs.

How to Blog?

I'd love to be asked that question, but instead they asked Felix Salmon of Reuters:

Blogs are a conversation. Remember that. They’re not a sermon, they’re not a news article, they’re much closer to a discussion in the pub, or sometimes a graduate seminar. They can be funny, or serious, or angry; they can be two words or 20,000 words long; they can be pretty much whatever you want them to be, including heavily reported. But they’re distinguished by having voice, which is one necessary part of a conversation.

Hmmm. I'm tempted to react to that, but then there's this:

Of course, having a good blog can get you hired, too: there are two sides to that coin, and right now the market in good bloggers is pretty hot, and the number of bloggers making six-figure incomes has never been higher.

Donald Douglas goes apeshit on that one:

I can't imagine anyone making $100,000 a year blogging . . . I want some names! Let's hear 'em: Who's making 100k?

What intrigues me more than the $100K number is Salmon's bland assertion that "having a good blog can get you hired" and that "the market in good bloggers is pretty hot," which I'm tempted to translate as: "Your blog sucks, otherwise somebody would be hiring you to do it."

Salmon, however, wrote his notes on blogging for the South Asian Journalists Association, and they are probably not perfectly applicable to the conservative blogosphere. I know conservatives who are getting paid to do political blogging of one form or another. But they aren't being paid for "voice." They're doing fee-for-service work, delivering an online product rather than personality.

'New Ideas' and Old Mistakes
Adding a personal perspective without becoming entirely personal, conservatives face a demand-side problem in the current blog market. The people who might have the wherewithal to provide $100K incomes for bloggers don't seem particularly interested in regular conservatism -- that is, conservatism of the sort that the average Republican voter wants.

Instead, the money people want "new ideas" from kids like The New Establismentarians or perhaps even, as Professor Douglas notes, Scott Payne's "Twenty-First Century Conservatism," which looks very much like a formula for re-making the GOP in the image of Susan Collins -- a conservatism that NARAL, AFSCME and the Sierra Club could love.

We see here a disconnect, a manifestation of the same problem that the Culture 11 disaster exemplified. Steve Forbes (and other investors whose identity we do not know) correctly believed that conservatism needed "something new," but they didn't have the slightest clue what that something should be. So they hired David Kuo and got Conor Friedersdorf and "The Conservative Case for Gay Marriage."

Mercifully, the investors had the good sense to pull the plug before Culture 11 could give us "The Conservative Case for Cap-and-Trade," "The Conservative Case for Keynesianism," "The Conservative Case for Infanticide" . . .

Steve Forbes has been a free-marketeer his entire life, and yet where was the free-market voice at Culture 11? Where was there anything remotely like the cheerful Reaganesque sensibility -- "Hope, Growth and Opportunity," to borrow Forbes' 1996 presidential campaign slogan?

Why is it that whenever someone like Steve Forbes gets the urge to give somebody a wad of money to generate "new conservative ideas," the money never ends up in the hands of actual conservatives? It's like watching a cable channel whose programming consists entirely of reruns of the David Brooks biopic: The Republicans Who Really Matter.

Lather, Rinse, Repeat
Immediately after the election, I warned against exactly the problems that are now affecting the conservative movement. Defeat inevitably induces doubt, and when the GOP gets its ass kicked, the experience characteristically induces in some Republicans a desire to emulate the liberal victors -- ergo, "new ideas."

In "You Did Not Lose," I argued against the tendency to see election results as an ideological referendum, a rejection not only of conservatism as an idea, but of conservatives as people. In "Don't Overthink It," I argued against the tendency to make an electoral debacle an occasion for the sort of intellectual navel-gazing which predictably leads some to conclude that Republicans could win if only they were more like Democrats.

The reason I warned against these tendencies was because I'd seen them displayed after the Bob Dole debacle in 1996, when both David Brooks in The Weekly Standard and Christopher Caldwell in The Atlantic Monthly launched vicious attacks on the red-state conservative grassroots.

My warnings evidently went unnoticed by anyone important, for once again we see the same gormless quest for "new ideas" we saw 12 years ago, a quest that produced George W. Bush and "compassionate conservatism" and -- eventually -- brought us full circle, right back to Square One. Except that this Square One is not 1997 (when at least the GOP still held its congressional majority) but more like 1965, 1977 or 1993, when the liberal Colossus bestrode the world triumphant, scornful of any restraint.

What the Official Conservative Movement really needs now, as in the wake of those previous electoral catastrophes, is not "new ideas," but rather courage and confidence in some very old ideas -- cf., "How to Think About Liberalism (If You Must)."

However, because my blog sucks, nobody's offering to pay me $100K to promote those ideas, so please hit the tip jar.

Oh, this is good!

David Frum is Moe Green and Mark Levin is Michael Corleone, and it's time to settle old scores:

David Frum was never much of a thinker. Try as he might, he just can't seem to attract interest, let alone a following, even when stabbing his old boss, President George W. Bush, in the back with a rambling screed. Profiting from a confidential relationship with a president is about as low as it gets. But Frum, the ex-speech-writer turned self-hating blogger, isn't done descending. Now he spends his lonely days and nights at his keyboard trying to settle personal scores and demonizing those who dare to dismiss his ramblings as the work of an emotional wreck.
Go read every blood-drenched word. See why I like Levin? He is perfectly happy to spend his days going after Democrats and ignore the occasional insult. But if you ever really piss him off . . .

(Via Protein Wisdom.) Go read the whole thing, but check back here in an hour or so, because I'll have an update I think you'll want to read.

UPDATE: Believe it or not, I consider David Frum a friend. He did me a favor once when I needed it, and I try not to forget a favor.

Nothing hurts me worse than to see two friends at daggers drawn, as with Frum and Levin, but Levin is clearly the injured party here. As I sometimes say when somebody gets cross-ways with me, "Buddy, you done pissed off the wrong redneck."

Frum wrote a truly excellent book about the 1970s, How We Got Here, and his wife, Danielle Crittenden, wrote a truly excellent book about feminism, What Our Mothers Never Told Us. I do not hesitate to recommend either book, even if you don't like David Frum.

So, what happened to Frum? He made the mistake of joining the Bush speechwriting team without thinking of what he was getting himself into. As Matthew Scully has explained, Bush made the mistake of assigning his speechwriting shop to Michael Gerson, a worthless, self-serving, two-faced, second-rate scoundrel.

There is something about working for a mediocrity like Gerson that injures a man's pride, which is why it is always dangerous to entrust managerial or supervisory duties to mediocrities. Gerson was a disloyal glory hog who was always leaking to the press. The rest of the speechwriting staff knew who was doing the leaking, they resented the hell out of it, and it destroyed morale.

That kind of stuff happens all the time in D.C.. When I showed up for my first day of work at The Washington Times in November 1997, I got talking to a guy named Michael Rust, a brilliant writer who died a few years ago of diabetes. Michael said, "Welcome to Washington, a town where people advance" -- and here he made a motion with his hands, as if climbing a ladder -- "on the knives stuck in the backs of their former friends."

Ah, would that I had heeded Michael's warning more closely! It was not until about 2006 that I began to understand what he meant. The specifics are irrelevant here, but the lesson that you must understand is that most feuds like this in Washington are not really about ideology, they're about ambition.

There is another excellent book you should read by -- surprise! -- David Brooks. Bobos in Paradise (2000) includes a chapter describing the means by which political intellectuals ascend the ranks of the punditocracy. It's a shrewd and devastatingly accurate analysis of how things work inside the Beltway, and the insightful reader realizes that Brooks followed his own cunning advice. ("Brooks, you brilliant bastard! I read your book!")

When I write about The Republicans Who Really Matter, I'm trying to explain how ambition accounts for the bizarre peregrinations of so many "conservative" operatives in Washington. It isn't that they don't have principles or that they don't have any core beliefs. Rather, it is that they stay in the game long enough to see how the game is played by the "winners" -- e.g. , David Gergen -- and decide to start playing that same game.

This is why I so admire Robert Novak. An excellent reporter who was originally a liberal Republican, Novak followed the facts wherever they led him -- which is why he became a conservative. But if a Republican was doing the wrong thing, he always had to worry about Novak, because Novak was fearless and independent, and he would blow the whistle in a heartbeat if he found out someone was running a scam.

In his ill-advised article "Unpatriotic Conservatives," Frum unjustly attacked Novak, and Rich Lowry should have been fired immediately for having had the bad taste to publish such a thing on the cover of National Review. (What did Ann Coulter call Lowry, a "girly man"?)

I've got friends on both sides of the paleoconservative/neoconservative divide. My paleo friends are laughing their asses off to see Levin and Frum going at one another. And half my family is Democrats, so you can imagine how they're enjoying this internecine Republican bloodletting.

It's just like when Charles Johnson goes after Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot? Who assigned Charles as the Torquemada to lead the Blogospheric Inquisition? In any large collaborative enterprise, these kinds of feuds and schisms are to be expected, but sooner or later somebody has got to say, "Hey, knock it off with this Urge to Purge power trip." I've got no personal beef with Charles, but at the point he accused Geller of being a pawn of Euro-fascism, he jumped the shark.

Same thing with Frum or Dreher or anyone else who wants to arrogate to themselves the right to say who is or is not a legitimate conservative spokesman. Like Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin and Laura Ingraham, Mark Levin has earned what he's got by honest toil.

Levin's independence is a function of his hard-earned success, and he speaks to an audience that is always free to turn the station. Even if I don't always agree with him -- even if I sometimes think, "Hey, Mark, could you maybe turn it down to 11?" -- Levin is honest, and does not fawn or flatter or backstab.

If Levin's got a problem with you, he's going to come right at you. That's just the way the bad boys roll. Either roll with them, or get out of the way, Moe Green.

My advice to David Frum would be to admit his error and try to make amends, because like I said, "Buddy, you done pissed off the wrong redneck."

UPDATE II: Now linked at Memeorandum, and speaking of pissing off the wrong redneckCanadian, Kathy Shaidle jumps in and predicts the trench warfare will continue all week.
BTW, Kathy perfectly illustrates what I'm trying to say about trying to bridge the paleo/neo divide. Kathy is pro-Israel, which would normally make her neo, but she's so bold in her political incorrectness, it's as if Sam Francis had been reincarnated as a sawed-off Canadian girl. (NTTAWWT.)

And, by God, she fights. That's what really counts with me. I admire conservatives who hate and despise liberalism with a primal ferocity, so that the minute the Left comes after one of our guys . . .

When you're Jet,
You're a Jet all the way,
From your first cigarette
To your last dying day.

Heaven help any fool who thinks he's going to cross Kathy Shaidle and walk away unscathed.

UPDATE III: Just updated the right-sidebar headlines to link this post by Tigerhawk:

Sadly, it is fashionable among certain righty intellectuals to make a point of distancing themselves from Ann Coulter. . . .
The offensive reason, of course, is to establish their bona fides as "reasonable" conservatives so that they do not destroy their social lives. . . .
The more legitimate reason is that Ann, along with Rush, has been so successful promoting a sort of "low brow" conservatism (see John Derbyshire on this taxonomic classification and Rush Limbaugh's impact on it) that the middle-brow version has been terribly diminished by comparison.

Like I said in the headline, "Watch it with that 'lowbrow' stuff, cracker." Coulter and Limbaugh are obviously quite intelligent, and I credit them with knowing exactly what they're doing. (See also: Dreher, Levin, and the Craft of Talk Radio.)

Some people like to imagine that they're more sophisticated than Rush, more sensitive than Coulter, more civil than Levin. And anyone who thinks like that is an arrogant son of bitch, in my book.

When someone is very successful at what they do, they must be given credit for knowing what they're doing. Don't try to tell Jimmy Page how to play guitar and don't tell Tiger Woods how to swing a three iron.

This is not to say that Page never misses a note, or that Tiger never shanks a drive, nor is it to say that Rush or Ann or Mark is immune to criticism. Rather, they have earned, by their demonstrable success, a certain level of respect for their judgment, and ought not be lectured self-righteously by some wannabe "expert" who never played the game. And I will repeat what I said before:

"One of the basic principles of military strategy is to reinforce success. If you see a man who fights and wins, give him reinforcements, and bid others to emulate his success."

Conservatives who want to derogate successful leadership really need to ask themselves whether David Brooks, Kathleen Parker, Rod Dreher et al., have what it takes to inspire and lead conservatives to success. Evidence for such a proposition is lacking.

If Republicans had listened to Rush, John McCain never would have been the GOP nominee and Barack Obama would not have been the Democratic nominee. So if the Republican Party is in disarray, whose fault is that? It ain't the fault of us "lowbrow" conservatives, is it?

Tigerhawk, you're still a Jet in good standing, as far as I'm concerned. I've always liked John Derbyshire, but that was an article he never should have published. And if Rush or Ann see you quoting that kind of stuff, don't say I didn't try to warn you.

Oh, this is good . . .

Red Eye's Andy Levy on David Frum:

I'd seen the Kathy Shaidle post, but hadn't actually played the video until I saw it linked by Paco.

Perhaps this would be a good occasion to explain why I have been reluctant to go all Rule 4 on David Frum, despite his anti-Rush cover story in Newsweek and his infamous "Unpatriotic Conservatives" National Review cover, which included Robert Novak, Pat Buchanan and other worthies in a vicious "anti-Semite" smear worthy of Ezra Klein.

When Frum first published How We Got Here, the best history of the 1970s ever written, I attended an American Enterprise Institute book event where Frum spoke, did a feature story about him and his book in The Washington Times. I'd already read his 1995 book, Dead Right, and so was familiar with him. I was also familiar with his wife, Danielle Crittenden, whose 1998 book, What Our Mothers Didn't Tell Us, is a fascinating and eminently readable indictment of the feminist/careerist worldview.

Which is to say, my acquaintance with Frum goes back to the days before he became a Bush administration speechwriter. I know him to be capable of good work, and his subsequent excursions into RINO-land have been a disappointment.

However, I would contrast Frum's errors to the case of David Brooks, who has in recent years only confirmed what shrewd observers have known ever since his 1997 "National Greatness" cover story in The Weekly Standard: That Brooks is an un-conservative, or better yet, an anti-conservative, whose every instinct and impulse is in opposition to the philosophical tradition of Edmund Burke, Richard Weaver, Friedrich Hayek, Russell Kirk, et al.

Furthermore, from Matthew Scully's 2007 Atlantic Monthly article about the inner workings of the Bush speechwriting shop, I have deep sympathy for Frum -- a successful journalist and author long before he signed up with the Bushies -- having had to toil anonymously in an operation run by that towering monument of uselessness, Michael Gerson. (See, "Separated at birth?")

Like Luke Skywalker insisting that there is still some spark of good in Darth Vader, I choose to believe that Frum's grievous errors do not mean that he is as evil as Brooks or as useless as Gerson. Indeed, his New Majority Web site has offered publishing opportunities for some young conservatives of my acquaintance, including Tom Qualtere and Joe Marier. Thus it cannot be said that Frum does not continue to do good, despite his manifestations of RINOcity.

What I wish Frum would consider is that, by so assiduously aligning himself with the elite Establishment -- "The Republicans Who Really Matter," as one of our guestbloggers dubbed them -- he undermines his potential for influence among the grassroots conservative activists who remain the heart and soul of the Republican Party.

When you're a jet, you're a jet all the way. Allying yourself with the grassroots won't get you funding from foundations and deep-pocket RINO donors, it won't get your a cover story in Newsweek, but being a well-paid backstabbing Brooksian crapweasel is really not the kind of thing you want in the first paragraph of your obituary.

A wise man lives as if life is short and tomorrow is not promised. Thus, I would do a dishonor to my children if I accursed the family name by becoming a vile creature like David Gergen who, if he were run over by a bus today, would deserve no notice from conservatives except, "Good riddance." Let us pray that David Frum grows wise, considers his errors, and amends his ways.

It's David Brooks Fisking Day Again!

Elegant falsehood:

It has been odd, over the past six months, not to have the gospel of success as part of the normal background music of life. You go about your day, taking in the news and the new movies, books and songs, and only gradually do you become aware that there is an absence. There are no aspirational stories of rags-to-riches success floating around. There are no new how-to-get-rich enthusiasms. There are few magazine covers breathlessly telling readers that some new possibility -- biotechnology, nanotechnology -- is about to change everything. That part of American culture that stokes ambition and encourages risk has gone silent.

The clever trick of this paragraph is the invisible poisonous gas of the second-person plural: "You go about your day . . ." Which is to say, he goes about his day in such a manner. The rhetorical "you" posited by David Brooks in fact means, "people like us." The reader is invited to imagine himself a member of the Brooksian intellectual class whose chief activities consist of "taking in the news and the new movies, books and songs."

Brooks's "you" might include Kathleen Parker or Meghan McCain or any number of other influential, respectable and sophisticated people who occupy those comfortable sinecures where nobody has to hustle for a dollar. But the Brooksian "you" does not encompass Wally Onakoya, driving Fairway Cab No. 1 nights and weekends, paying for his daughter's college tuition. His "you" does not include my older brother, the truck driver. "You" are not my wife, the school cafeteria lady. "You" are not Frequent Commenter Smitty, ex-Navy IT geek slammin' the Cthulhu-fu just for fun.

The actual "you" -- the Ordinary American -- still works as hard as ever in hope of success, still gets up every morning thinking of some new way to make life better for you and your family. You are all right with me, but quite frankly, you don't care any more for my opinion than you care for David Brooks's opinion. The Ordinary American lives his life in the real world, where "image" is not everything, where no one is impressed by the intellectual's ability to write elegant nonsense, where a Harvard diploma and $1.29 will get you a medium regular coffee at Sheetz.

David Brooks thinks you are too stupid to see through his clever little word games, the signifying jive of the privileged elite. But he's not actually talking to you, he's talking to The Republicans Who Really Matter, a private club that you will never be invited to join.

David Brooks gets paid $300,000 a year to tell the snobs what they want to hear: Ignore those barbarians, those hell-raisers and holy rollers. Don't worry about the "revolt of the kulaks" and those silly Tea Party protesters.

How much do I get paid to point out the fact that David Brooks is so full of crap his eyes are brown? That depends on you. If 150,000 people hit my tip jar with $20 this year, I'll be even with Brooks. But I'll never stop punk-smacking his smirky little face. Every Tuesday until the Brooksian delusion is vanquished, the punk-smacking will continue. So hit the tip jar, you cheapskate bastards.

Fisk me harder, you savage beast!

"My throat was dry from too much vodka, and her breasts, spilling out of pink pajamas, threatened my ability to. I was supposed to be excited, but I was bored and somewhat disgusted with myself, with her, with the whole business... and then whatever residual enthusiasm I felt for the venture dissipated, with shocking speed, as she nibbled at my ear and whispered -- 'You know, I'm on the pill...' "

(Cynthia Yockey informs me that Lenten vows don't forbid mere quotations. Andy recoils in reflexive gynophobia. And make sure you have plenty of brain bleach handy before you confront Dan Collins and the Mental Imagery From Hell.)

'McCain's right, of course . . .'

". . . and the Brookses and Meghan McCains of the party might as well join up with the Democrats, for if we adopt the 'moderate' programs these folks are pushing, we might as well have a one-party Democratic state."
-- Donald Douglas, on "Core Values Conservatism," agreeing with me and Charles Murray (I think)

Professor Douglas is taking issue with Ross Douthat's critique of Murray's Thursday lecture at the American Enterprise Institute (yet another event to which I was not invited).

Not being a member of the intellectual leisure class -- hit the tip jar, people -- I have no time for fucking around with the fine points on this one, nor is there any need for that. We need not agree on the ideal size of government in order to agree on three major points:

• Government is too big. It's too expensive, too powerful, and too meddlesome. Even if we could get this much government at half the price, it's still more government than is good for us.
• Bush and Republicans were wrong to expand government. No Child Left Behind and Medicare Part D were giant steps in the wrong direction which, by blurring partisan distinctions, made it more difficult for the GOP to present itself as the party of limited government.
• Democrats want government to be even bigger. Government can never be too big, too expensive, too wasteful or too intrusive to satisfy The Evil Coalition of Liars and Fools.

You need not agree with Grover Norquist on the desireability of shrinking the federal government until it's small enough to drown in the bathtub. With government as big as it is now and rapidly growing much bigger, the current situation creates a clear line of demarcation. You are either a small-government conservative or you are not a conservative, period.

Murray, Douthat and the Professor are welcome to engage in a three-way intellectual Jello-wrestling match over the fine points of philosophy or policy on all this. As politics, however, the choice is clear: The Republican Party can either (a) try to reclaim its limited-government credibility by going all-in against Obama's neo-Keynesian economic plan, or (b) employ the approach favored by The Republicans Who Really Matter by nitpicking the small change.

My hunch is that (b) is a one-way non-stop ticket to Republican irrelevance. Jennifer Rubin is right: The opposition party must oppose. This is that 4 a.m. call, and if my answer lacks nuance and sophistication, it at least has the merit of simplicity: WOLVERINES!

UPDATE: Not directly related, but one of The Republicans Who Really Matters weighs in:

Drive-by pundits . . . are non-journalists who have been demonizing the media for the past 20 years or so and who blame the current news crisis on bias.

Fuck you, Kathleen Parker. I started out in the news business making $4.50 an hour in 1986, and I'll take no lectures from the overprivileged likes of you. What journalism has become is a disgrace, and the unwillingness of people in the news business to say "fuck you" to useless idiots like you is one of the reasons why. (H/T: Tim Graham.)

UPDATE II: Kevin Williamson weighs in with a more thorough fisking of Parker's column, as opposed to my outraged punk-smacking. The outrage is that someone who has for so long been a mere opinion columnist -- as opposed to working in the actual news end of the operation -- should be lecturing anyone about what's wrong with the news business.

"Newspaper columnist" used to be a gig that you had to work a long time in the news business to get. The late, great Lewis Grizzard, for example, started out as a brilliant young sports reporter, and nonetheless was past 30 -- and had already served as executive sports editor of the Chicago Tribune -- before he became a columnist for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 1977.

Then in the 1980s and '90s, as cable news and USA Today started encroaching on the turf of the metropolitan dailies, there was this big push for "diversity" and "youth," the chief result of which was a lot of Clever Girl Columnists wasting newsprint. (Hello, Rheta Grimsley Johnson! Hello, Maureen Dowd!)

Kathleen Parker was one of the better Clever Girl Columnists who got the affirmative-action leg up in that manner. But she succumbed to the Elite Media Syndrome of thinking that working in the news business makes you somehow superior to the guy who drops 50 cents in the newsbox, and her insufferable elitism is an apt metaphor for what went wrong with the business.

It's still possible to make a profit on a newspaper, but to do it, you've got to have a small staff of people who work their butts off. You've got to have do-everything staffers, rather than having specialists who won't lift a finger to help outside their job description. And one of the luxuries that profitable newspapers can no longer afford is the overpaid op-ed columnist who never gets her shoes dirty.

Good-bye to bad rubbish.

Ross Douthat, porn expert?

"Forget 'normalizing homosexuality' -- something the Right has been worrying over since the advent of gay liberation. Today, the Internet and DirecTV are normalizing everything, from group sex to bestiality to darker things that decency forbids mentioning. And as for pedophilia -- why, any erotic website worth its salt promises links to images of the 'barely legal,' 'young teen sluts,' and all the rest. Today, Nabokov's Humbert would need not be a tragic figure; instead, he could have spent his years ensconced in front of a glowing computer screen, with a thousand Lolitas for his delectation."

* * *

"Over the past three decades, the VCR, on-demand cable service, and the Internet have completely overhauled the ways in which people interact with porn. Innovation has piled on innovation, making modern pornography a more immediate, visceral, and personalized experience. Nothing in the long history of erotica compares with the way millions of Americans experience porn today, and our moral intuitions are struggling to catch up."

* * * *

A Catholic friend advises me that Lenten vows are not enforced on Sunday. Or, as we call it around here, Rule 5 Sunday.

Michelle Malkin brings the Mother Of All Punk-Smackings down on BBW Meghan

Just go read every brutal word of it. Michelle Malkin reminds me of my wife in this sense: You never want her mad at you.

Others have taken their turns punk-smacking Meghan: Jimmie Duncan, Donald Douglas, Monique Stuart and me. But just consider that Saturday night, while Meghan was doing whatever she was doing -- hanging out with The Republicans Who Really Matter, perhaps -- Malkin was at home, writing up that brutal punk-smacking, which Meghan didn't even know was coming.

Pity the fool. That Rule 4's gonna leave a mark on her chubby caboose.

UPDATE: Dan Riehl notes that Meghan's got a fat head: Cellulite of the mind! And from Paleo Pat: "Memo to Meghan McCain: You don’t speak for me, bitch"

UPDATE II: Welcome Pandagon readers! Perhaps you will also enjoy my recent 2,400-word treatise, "How to Hate Feminism (As You Must)."

UPDATE III: The chubby caboose gets kicked by Kyle Smith in his latest New York Post column, with a Kathy Shaidle assist helping Ed Driscoll to declare: "I Never Sold Out Because Nobody Asked Me."

UPDATE IV: Mike at Cold Fury deems Kyle Smith's column "some of the tastiest snark ever," while Don Surber of the Charleston (W.Va.) Daily Mail calls it "a terrific little column." (Don't worry, Don. I'm sure Tina Brown will be in touch with you any day now.)

UPDATE V: Conservatives4Palin:

A few days ago, I got another SPAM email from Sen. McCain's PAC asking for money. My reply was short and simple, "Dear Sen. McCain, every time your daughter shows up on television shooting her mouth off about things she knows nothing of, I donate to SarahPAC. I don't have any time or money left for you."

Give to SarahPAC. Or hit my tip jar. Either way, it's a good cause. It's almost Tuesday, you know. As I recently explained to a Texan who hit the tip jar for $10: "Another 29,999 like that, and I'll be even with David Brooks."

Lesbian war cry: "WOLVERINES!"

Conservative lesbian Cynthia Yockey declares herself part of the guerrilla resistance. One of the amazing things about Obamaism is how it has clarified allegiances so starkly. You are either a butt boy for The One, or else you will inevitably find yourself in the wilderness bunker with all the other outlaws whose names appear on Patriot Rock.

Jed Eckert: Well, who is on our side?
Col. Andy Tanner: Six hundred million screaming Chinamen.
Darryl Bates: Last I heard, there were a billion screaming Chinamen.
Col. Andy Tanner: There were.

The oft-repeated saying "9/11 changed everything," is not literally true. Yet if 9/11 didn't really change everything, it definitely changed some things, and the rise of the Pelosi/Reid/Obama hegemon has changed a few more. As I recently told my friend Tito Perdue, the past few years have been like watching a geological upheaval, as political alliances shift like tectonic plates.

You're either with the Evil Coalition of Liars and Fools, or you're against them , and if you're against them, let me hear you scream: WOLVERINES!

(The Revolution Will Not Be Televised. However, the Apocalypse Will Be Blogged.)

A few years ago, Phyllis Chesler sent me her book The Death of Feminism, and when I got home with it and started reading, I was shocked to see her citing Jean Raspail's notorious novel, The Camp of the Saints. (That passage is substantially excerpted in an online essay at her Web site.)

For years, Raspail's 1973 French novel enjoyed a sort of samizdat cult following among critics of multiculturalism and opponents of open-borders immigration policy (which would be more properly termed a non-policy, but let us not digress.) Raspail himself has said that Le Camp Des Saints could not be published in France today because of the "human rights" nonsense that is slowly strangling free speech in Europe (and Canada). And the book's reputation as a hateful expression of xenophobic nativism makes it one of those Books You're Not Supposed to Read.

Thus, I was startled to see Chesler, a liberal feminist all her life, citing Raspail's book as prophetic. Yet Chesler had been able to see past the superficial text of the novel to comprehend its deeper significance as a metaphor for the demoralization of the West. In this sense, Raspail was describing the same larger phenomenon that Shelby Steele describes in White Guilt, that Pat Buchanan describes in The Death of the West, that Michelle Malkin describes in Invasion, that Thomas Sowell describes in The Vision of the Anointed, and that Peter Brimelow describes in Alien Nation.

These are all very different writers, with different interests, different aims, and different philosophies. However, they all share the fundamental understanding that liberalism is a soul-destroying disease, a sort of intellectual anti-virus that exposes its host to destruction by weakening the individual cells of the national immune system. To the extent that your mind is cluttered with the glittering generalities of modern liberalism -- "social justice," etc. -- you will be unable to resist and will inevitably succumb to the agonizing spiritual death that beckons at the end of that road.

In war, few things are more important to an army than morale. And it breaks my heart to see the discouragement and demoralization when the enemy is seemingly triumphant and when all the glory and honor of this world accrues to so-called "conservatives" who do everything in their power to undermine actual conservatism, while genuine conservatives are fighting their hearts out in obscurity. Dan Riehl:

I'm mostly sick of it and hard-pressed to find good reason for good conservatives not to simply go off the grid. If the day ever comes for conservatives to have a serious voice again, I'm unconvinced it will be through the GOP and I know for a fact, it'll never be through the New York Times.

(H/T: Cold Fury.) To quote Jed Eckert again: "Let it turn." Let them choke on their ill-gotten gains. Let them have their 30 pieces of silver. Let your rage and resentment toward them turn to something useful: The savage fury of the warrior.

Resolve to fight that much harder. Train your mind so that when you are not fighting, your constant object of contemplation is how to fight smarter. Excuse the martial metaphors, but a War of Ideas is a war nonetheless.

When you're in a fight, the only things that really matter are the fight itself, your own willingness to fight like hell, and knowing who's on your side. (IFF: Identity Friend or Foe.) Those who join up with The Republicans Who Really Matter like Coddy Voorhees and Brooksie Frumdreher are de facto allies of the Evil Coalition of Liars and Fools. You who live on scanty cold rations, huddled in the wilderness, short on supplies and wondering how much longer you can hold out -- you, the soldiers in this Army of Davids, will one day proudly recall that you served with heroes in the Camp of the Saints.

Courageous new recruits like Cynthia Yockey are coming into camp every day. Whatever their histories, whatever their reasons for hating the Evil Coalition of Liars and Fools, their willingness to join a seemingly hopeless cause in combat against an evidently invulnerable opponent tells us that they are real fighters. These recruits need training and leadership. As this army grows stronger, we know that victory awaits us, but we don't need to wait for Election Day to cheer.

Every time another soldier joins the ranks, this is a victory in its own right and should inspire the troops to scream out the battle cry: WOLVERINES!

UPDATE: Linked as "Quote of the Day" by Ed Driscoll.

The re-education of David Brooks

P.J. Gladnick at Newsbusters has the story of how the White House dispatched a team of four operatives to persuade David Brooks to back off his threat to lead an army of moderates to oppose the Obama agenda. Gladnick observes:

So either the four overseers of the White House were masters of manipulation or they had extremely pliable material to work with . . .

Indeed. And now the useless idiot has returned with a new column singing paeans to Obama's education "reform" plan. The Toady-in-Chief's latest column includes this:

Thanks in part to No Child Left Behind, we're a lot better at measuring each student's progress. . . .
Most districts don't use data to reward good teachers. States have watered down their proficiency standards so parents think their own schools are much better than they are.
As Education Secretary Arne Duncan told me, "We've seen a race to the bottom. States are lying to children. They are lying to parents. They're ignoring failure, and that's unacceptable. We have to be fierce."

Oh, those "fierce" reformers! Like President Clinton before him, President Obama sends his kids to private schools. Public schools are for Other People's Children, and the endless promises of "reform" have never been fulfilled, nor will they ever. America's schools are arguably worse now than they were when No Child Left Behind was passed in 2001, and they are certainly no better.

Obama's "reform" plan will not improve the schools, either. To a Democrat, the policy object of school "reform" is full employment and higher pay for members of the teachers' unions. Hire more teachers, pay them more money -- it's a constituent-service model of policy. The Democrat who says anything else is lying, and yet Brooks takes Obama's professions of "caring" at face value:

The Obama approach would make it more likely that young Americans grow up in relationships with teaching adults. It would expand nurse visits to disorganized homes. It would improve early education. It would extend the school year. Most important, it would increase merit pay for good teachers (the ones who develop emotional bonds with students) and dismiss bad teachers (the ones who treat students like cattle to be processed).

Of course, "merit pay for good teachers" is just code meaning, "higher pay, period." Whatever standards are used to measure "merit" will be manipulated by administrators to reward their favorites. Just as the chief result of the student-testing requirements of No Child Left Behind was wholesale fraud in standardized testing, so will the lure of "merit pay" result in bogus attempts to fake "merit."

One wonders if the White House's favorite columnist even believes what he writes anymore. Certainly no one familiar with the bureaucratic reality of how American schools actually operate can believe Obama's plan will produce genuine "reform."

Becoming one of The Republicans Who Really Matter -- of whom Brooks is a leading example -- requires acceptance of a fundamentally false premise, namely, that Democratic politicians act in good faith. This is the Big Lie to which all other liberal lies are ancillary.

The Democratic Party is a conspiracy whereby liars advance the cause of evil with the assistance of fools. Republicans who "reach across the aisle" to cooperate in the implementation of the Democratic agenda are therefore agents of evil. (Whether Republican enthusiasts for "bipartisan compromise" are conscious of their agency in the cause of evil is moot, but they don't call them The Stupid Party for nothing.)

The reason David Brooks is the White House's favorite columnist is because, by the fraudulent pretense that he is a "conservative," Brooks provides key assistance in the Democrats' most essential mission: Obscuring truth.

Hit the tip jar.

UPDATE: Let's have a contest: Describe the Democratic Party in 20 Words or Less.

UPDATE II: A 'Lanche this way comes. Thank you, Professor, and welcome Instapundit readers. While you're here, feel free to poke around and check out the links -- it's Full Metal Jacket Saturday, and Monique Stuart would appreciate your traffic. You can also add me on Twitter or Facebook or your RSS feed. And, of course, your generous contributions to the David Brooks Fisking Fund are deeply appreciated. (It's For The Children!)

UPDATE III: When it rains, it pours: Also linked at RedState RedHot, Liberty Papers, Right, Wing Nut, Tom Maguire at Just One Minute, Ed Drisoll, Little Miss Attila and Moe Lane. Welcome all! And please give generously to the David Brooks Fisking Fund, because I don't know how much longer the ACORN protesters can keep the repo man away from my 2004 KIA.

Hawkie! Old boy!

Guest post by Brooks Rossington Frumdreher III

Damn swell to see you again, fellow! Do you know . . .? Well, yes, of course, you and Kathleen are old friends, aren't you? How silly of me to forget! Kat, remember when you told me how you, Hawkie and Coddy met at the Newport Junior League Regata Cotillion? . . . Yes, now, you be a darling and go get us a couple of gin and tonics, Kat, while I catch up with your old flame, the Burgemeister. . . .

Splendid soiree they've thrown for you here, Hawkie. Sorry Kat and I couldn't make it earlier. Fashionably late and all that. Let the riff-raff arrivistes clear out first, she said. Is that nice young Collins fellow here? He invited us. . . .

Well, actually, one of Kat's assistants saw it on that Facebook thing and told her about it and . . . Andy! Andy Rosenthal! Yes, yes, that's right. . . . No, no hard feelings at all, Andy. I appreciate your letting me know. That nasty man I hired to shovel our walk at the pied-a-terre must have let himself into the house and gotten onto the computer my major domo uses, and . . . .

Oh, absolutely, Andy! Fired him on the spot! Let him and those snotty-faced urchins of his go starve in the street. He'll be causing no more trouble for you and our friend David, I assure you. . . .

But congratulations on the new hire, Andy. A Harvard man! Of course, you know, my people have always been Yale, but I understand your new lad grew up in New Haven, so it isn't as if he were some sort of barbarian rabble. . . . Yes, well, someone told me he is a regular whiz with research. Used to spend hours and hours on the intertubes at the Crimson office, they say. . . . Same thing when he was at the Topsider, I hear. The boy was always on the computer researching all the time, Coddy tells me. Not so much for the writing, but lots of research. Coddy said they had to buy a new computer for him because he filled his up with so much research. . . .

Oh, of course, Andy, pal! Muffy and I would love to have you down at the club. Any day you like, just let me . . . Tuesday? Oh, Tuesday's bad for me, but give me a call and we'll try to set it up, OK? Well, Hawkie and I have some catching up to do Andy, so if you'll excuse us . . . Right. Wednesday might be better, but call, OK? . . .

Ah. . . . Yes, Andy's fine, but . . . so pushy, those people, aren't they? Like I was telling young Collins the other day, I said, "Dan, if you think this blogging business is what you want to do, I understand. All the young people are doing it, but must you work for that Steingold fellow?" . . .

Meghan! So glad you could make it! Saw that piece you did for Tina, darling. Excellent! That Coulter woman is just so tacky, isn't she? . . . Oops, careful there, you've spilled your drink! Fetch a boy to clean it up, Meg. Run along now, and if you see Kat while you're at the bar, please tell her to hurry back with my gin and tonic. . . .

Too bad for little Meg, Hawkie. She's drunk again, and the luncheon's just started. John and Cin have had such a time with her, you know. . . . Yes, right. . . .

Well, I'm glad to hear you are doing well with the innertubes thing, Hawkie, and I'd love to invest in your little project but . . . Honestly? We've been hit hard by this thing, Hawkie. Really bad. I've even had to let go some of the help at the pied-a-terre. As a matter of fact, that's why I rode up here with Kat, because we had to let go our weekend chauffeur, and Muffy couldn't make it, so Kat offered to drive. . . .

What? Oh, Muffy! Yes, yes, I was about to tell you why Muffy couldn't make it. Trust me, I know she'd love to see the old Hawkster, but we were heavily invested in Citibank and GE and AIG, and . . . Muffy's taking it hard. Taking it real hard. Especially when I said we'd have to cut loose the pool boy, Matt. You should have seen the tears well up, Hawkie. It almost broke my heart to see it . . .

Muffy's always been so patriotic and this pool boy of ours, he used to be a Marine. So after Muffy met him at the Republican Ladies Youth Outreach Conference in Santa Barbara, she insisted that we hire this Matt fellow as our pool boy. And he's certainly kept busy with that job. Muffy says he's really good at working the deep end . . .

What, Hawkie? . . . Yes, that's him, Sanchez, Matt Sanchez -- did Muffy tell you? . . . Ah, coincidence, I suppose. But now the market's so bad we finally had to let Matt go, and Muffy insisted that she tell it to him in person. She said, "These Puerto Ricans are so emotional, Brooksie! Matt might take it hard." And I said, "Well, Muffy, sugar-dumpling, I know it's going to be hard on him," and she said, "You can say that again."

So Muffy's back at the pied-a-terre today, handling the business with Matt. He's got other contracts to service, so he'll be OK, I hope. And he's got another one of his Puerto Rican friends who's volunteered to help Muffy with the pool. Nice young fellow, and a Republican, too. Very convenient for us, because when I told Muffy we'd have to let Matt go, she insisted we must have another Puerto Rican to replace him. Only a Puerto Rican would do, because Muffy told me, "Brooksie, once you've had Puerto Rican, you never go back!" . . .

Kat! About time you brought me that gin and tonic, girl! Did Megan find you? . . . Ugh! Did she, really? Did any of the vomit get on you? . . .

Never mind, Kat, I was just telling Hawkie about Matt and Muffy . . . Yes, Kat, very good with the deep end, that's exactly what I was telling old Burge here. See, Hawksie, young Matt's been cleaning Kat's pool, too. . . .

UPDATE (RSM): Thanks to Mr. Frumdreher for his contribution. (Young Dan says: "Really, the chap’s incorrigible!") Some of you young people may not know it, but Mr. Frumdreher -- "Brooksie," as he is known to his small circle of influential friends -- has long been a mentor to The Republicans Who Really, Really Matter:

• In 1951, Mr. Frumdreher catapulted to fame as a recent Yale grad with his book, Things Are Just Swell in New Haven, Thank You, a carefully reasoned rejoinder to a disrespectful screed by an impudent new-money Catholic arriviste. This earned Brooksie the "Young Alumni of the Year" award from his alma mater. The faculty, who had voted him Most Promising Senior in the Class of '51, appreciated Mr. Frumdreher's advocacy of a modern curriculum emphasizing Freudian psychology, abstract-impressionist art, anthropology, jazz criticism, and other "relevant" topics, as opposed to tedious drillwork in obsolete so-called "classics."
• In 1952, Brooksie led the "Stop Taft" Committee, gallantly fighting to ensure that notorious right-winger Bob Taft did not get the Republican presidential nomination.
• In 1953, he published an op-ed column in the Washington Evening Star, "Really, Who Is This McCarthy Fellow, Anyway?" This column was widely credited with bolstering GOP opposition to irresponsible Red-baiting smearmongers.
• From 1954-60, Mr. Frumdreher served as ambassador plenipotentiary to the Organization of American States, where he sought to promote international harmony by undermining Latin American support for the brutal Batista regime in Cuba. . . .

Those are just a few of the early milestones in Brooksie's legendary career, as he has striven tirelessly to ensure that only well-bred and sophisticated intellectuals who went to The Right Schools excercise influence in the Grand Old Party.

Among The Republicans Who Really, Really Matter whom Mr. Frumdreher mentored during his recent Young Centrist Leadership Conference is a young cyberspace activist rapidly gaining prominence on the Internet with his blog, Moderates for Mitt (motto: "We Can Go Either Way On That Issue").