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McCain standard bearer and “conservative” columnist David Brooks launched his own salvo at actual conservative Sarah Palin on ABC’s This Week, joining other bitter RINOs who have attacked the former Alaska governor in recent days. If I may channel Chandler Bing for a moment: “Can he be any more elitist?” Perhaps Brooks hasn’t seen the Amazon sales lists, the thousands attending her book signings, or, for that matter, the book sales list published by his own worthless rag. Remember, folks, this is the same guy who talked about how great John McCain was as a candidate and the very same...

Here is video of David Brooks on ABC's "This Week" saying Sarah Palin is a "joke" and calling her a "potential talk show host." Brooks said "I just can't take her seriously" and said "the idea that this potential talk show host is considered seriously for the Republican nomination, believe me it will never happen." (Video)

Liberals and conservatives each have their own intellectual food chains. They have their own think tanks to provide arguments, politicians and pundits to amplify them, and news media outlets to deliver streams of prejudice-affirming stories. Independents, who are the largest group in the electorate, don’t have any of this... --snip-- The most telling races this year were the suburban rebellions across the country. For example, in Westchester and Nassau counties in New York, Republican candidates came from nowhere to defeat entrenched Democratic county officials. In blue Pennsylvania, the G.O.P. won six out of seven statewide offices... --snip-- The percentage of...

The next time you read or hear a member of the mainstream media complaining about how much of the blogosphere engages in lurid sensationalism and is not to be taken seriously, then just point them today's New York Times column, Cellphones, Texts, and Lovers, written by house "conservative" David Brooks. Yes, today is election day in several parts of the country but Brooks shuns any analysis of these races in favor of delving into the lurid world of cellphone sex from the pages of the Times opinion section which, with his column, reads more like something lifted from a sleazy...

Britain has hit its reality moment. The Brits are ahead of us when it comes to public indebtedness and national irresponsibility. Spending has been out of control for longer and in a more sustained way. But in that country, the climate of opinion has turned. There, voters are ready for a politician willing to face reality. And George Osborne, who would become the chancellor of the Exchequer in the likely event that his Conservative Party wins the next election, has aggressively seized the moment. In a party conference address earlier this month, Osborne gave the speech that an American politician...

Though he would be loathe to admit it, David Brooks agrees with Glenn Beck. Consider the opening of his op-ed today, Brooks writes: That which can’t continue doesn’t. A nation can spend and spend, pile debt upon debt, but eventually there comes a reality moment when some leader emerges to say enough is enough and when decent people, looking around at themselves and their own best nature, respond by demanding a return to responsibility. Now consider the portion of the Glenn Beck show yesterday the left is having a bit of fun laughing at:

David Brooks ruins a good argument with this: Back in 2006, they [talk radio hosts] threatened to build a new majority on anti-immigration fervor. Republicans like J.D. Hayworth and Randy Graf, both of Arizona, built their House election campaigns under that banner. But these two didn’t march to glory. Both lost their campaigns. This is at best misleading. It remains true that immigration restriction will never win elections on its own, and it is also true that candidates who present themselves as nothing other than restrictionists are not going to win in the absence of any other compelling message. Hayworth...

NYtimes wizard of smart David Brooks on Meet the Press can't help himself, he goes after Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Mark Levin as "Loons, harmful to America"....what a disgrace

Allow me to cut past the prologue and skip to the climax: we are ignored because we have allowed ourselves to be ignored. We are ignored because we have bought into the lie that our total civic duty is fulfilled on election day. We are ignored because we have allowed our ire to disperse through a radiator of infotainment and token political involvement which do nothing to slow the gears of despotism. We are ignored because we are too busy, too cynical, or too lazy to get involved in a meaningful way. We are now seeing the results. My challenge...

...First, Brooks gets a lot right. Talk radio, like every other form of media, has lots of influence and very little actual power. We can and do make the phones ring, and we can and do sometimes help stop legislation like the ill-fated and poorly drafted immigration bill of 2007, but moments like that are very rare. We certainly cannot nominate GOP presidential candidates, as almost none of us supported Seantor McCain, but that may reflect only that we lack decisive influence in the course of a fractured long campaign, or that we were ourselves fractured or uncommitted in our...

If you want to become a house "conservative" for the New York Times, the prime rule is that you must treat Rush Limbaugh as well as other talk radio conservatives with utter disdain. In fact it is pretty much a job requirement at the Times as the other house "conservative" there, the conspicuously inconspicuous Ross (Whothat?) Douthat, knows full well when he slammed Limbaugh at the Atlantic magazine a few months before enduring obscurity at the Gray Whale. The main house "conservative" at the Times, David Brooks, took time from from his "bromantic" stares at Barack Obama's finely creased pant...

You wouldn't know it to look at me, but I go running several times a week. My favorite route, because it's so flat, is from the Lincoln Memorial to the U.S. Capitol and back. I was there last Saturday and found myself plodding through tens of thousands of anti-government “tea party” protesters. They were carrying “Don't Tread on Me” flags and signs condemning big government, Barack Obama, socialist health care and various elite institutions. Then, as I got to where the Smithsonian museums start, I came across another rally, the Black Family Reunion Celebration. Several thousand people had gathered to...

"Obama delivered the finest speech of his presidency," Brooks begins. "Best of all for those who admire the political craft," he continues, "was the speech's seductive nature and careful ambiguity. Obama threw out enough rhetorical chum to keep the liberals happy, yet he subtly staked out ground in the center on nearly every substantive issue in order to win over the moderates needed to get anything passed." In other words, Obama's speech was bookended by lies and phony concern for the uninsured and the elderly, while the substance was thoroughly right-wing. "First, Obama rested the credibility of his presidency on...

What do the liberal Jones and conservative Virginia statehouse candidate Bob McDonnell have in common? Ideas—and that's costing them their careers. Plus, Glenn Beck's next targets. My guess is that Van Jones and Bob McDonnell aren't the closest of friends. One is an African-American activist from the progressive left, who's spent much of his adult life in inner-city Oakland fighting The Man; the other is a white middle-aged pro-life Catholic Republican, who has long represented The Man in the deep-red Sunbelt suburbs of Virginia. But I'd recommend that Jones and McDonnell get in touch. Over the past few weeks, both...

This is a love story that has inspired a paean. In fact, to call it mere "love" does not do justice to it. It is a special political love so intense that The New Republic has called it a "bromance" in a story titled, "The Courtship: The story behind the Obama-Brooks bromance" by Gabriel Sherman. Watch how the hot sparks instantly fly at their first meeting: In the spring of 2005, New York Times columnist David Brooks arrived at then-Senator Barack Obama’s office for a chat. Brooks, a conservative writer who joined the Times in 2003 from The Weekly Standard,...

Two tides swept over American politics last winter. The first was the Obama tide. Barack Obama came into office with an impressive 70 percent approval rating. The second was the independent tide. Over the first months of this year, the number of people who called themselves either Democrats or Republicans declined, while the number who called themselves independents surged ahead. Obama’s challenge was to push his agenda through a Democratic-controlled government while retaining the affection of the 39 percent of Americans in the middle. The administration hasn’t been able to pull it off. From the stimulus to health care, it...

If it’s not Frum and Bruce Bartlett demanding greater outreach from Republicans while sneering at them at every turn, it’s Brooks breaking his arms patting himself on the back for being an intellectual … who happens to find political portent in how well Barack Obama irons his pants. 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.”...

Saw this article on supposed conservative intelletcual David Brooks and it was nauseating. This guy is the chief conservative columnist at the NYT and he makes Chris Matthews look like an amateur in his love for all things Obama. Among his greatest hits: 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,...

All of this morning's television news talk shows focused on health care. On Meet the Press, David Gregory interviewed a panel that included David Brooks....Here is part of the dialogue that ensued: MR. GREGORY: Republicans in office and on the airwaves insist the anger is real, reflecting real fears about a government takeover of the healthcare system. But the rhetoric has become extreme. (Videotape, Thursday) MR. RUSH LIMBAUGH: There are far more similarities between Nancy Pelosi and Adolph Hitler than between these people showing up at town halls to protest a Hitler-like policy. (End videotape) MR. GREGORY:....And we're joined now...

Nytimes columnist and resident jackass David Brooks smears all the Town Hall protesters voicing their concern against Gov. Run health care as "crazies" then lets MTP quote Rush out of context and calls him insane....What a JA this clown is...

Almost every week at the New York Times, house "conservative" David Brooks and liberal columnist Gail Collins have a public conversation. This week Brooks made a startling admission in The Conversation which really wasn't so surprising when one actually reads his columns. Here is the money quote: At the moment, I feel politically closer to Barack Obama than to House Minority Leader John Boehner (and that’s even while being greatly exercised about the current health care bills).

... It’s not that interesting to watch the Democrats lose touch with America. That’s because the plotline is exactly the same. The party is led by insular liberals from big cities and the coasts, who neither understand nor sympathize with moderates. They have their own cherry-picking pollsters, their own media and activist cocoon, their own plans to lavishly spend borrowed money to buy votes. This ideological overreach won’t be any more successful than the last one. A Washington Post-ABC News poll released Monday confirms what other polls have found. Most Americans love Barack Obama personally, but support for Democratic policies...

Times columnist David Brooks says he has first-hand knowledge of senatorial libidos — referencing an unnamed, presumably male Republican Senator who planted a hand near his personal no-fly zone. Brooks had MSNBC's John Harwood leaping out of his seat earlier today: BROOKS: You know, all three of us spend a lot of time covering politicians and I don’t know about you guys, but in my view, they’re all emotional freaks of one sort or another. They’re guaranteed to invade your personal space, touch you. I sat next to a Republican senator once at dinner and he had his hand on...

In today's "That's WAY Too Much Information" segment, New York Times columnist David Brooks claims that while he was dining with a Republican senator, the guy had his hand on Brooks's inner thigh the whole time.

Let’s say that you are President Obama. You’ve inherited a health care system that is the insane spawn of a team of evil geniuses from an alien power. Pay is divorced from performance. Users are separated from costs. Rising costs threaten to destroy your nation and everything you hold dear. Because you have a lofty perspective on things, you know there are basically two ways to fix this mess. There is the liberal way, in which the government takes over the health care system and decides who gets what. And then there is the conservative way, in which cost-conscious consumers...

... G.M.’s core problem is its corporate and workplace culture — the unquantifiable but essential attitudes, mind-sets and relationship patterns that are passed down, year after year. Over the last five decades, this company has progressively lost touch with car buyers, especially the educated car buyers who flock to European and Japanese brands. Over five decades, this company has tolerated labor practices that seem insane to outsiders. Over these decades, it has tolerated bureaucratic structures that repel top talent. [...] As a result, G.M. has steadily lost U.S. market share, from 54 to 19 percent. Consumer Reports now recommends 70...

Imagine if you had read a column written by a victim of Bernard Madoff's ponzi scheme mocking people who had also fallen prey to the same financier. That was the feeling your humble correspondent had while reading the column of the New York Times "house conservative" David Brooks making fun of how the Obama Administration arm twists corporations to go along with his economic plans. So let us now watch how Obama's prime journalistic victim has himself a good ol' time laughing at how the administration uses "enhanced negotiating techniques" on corporate victims:

President Obama and Dick Cheney conspired on Thursday to propagate a myth. The myth is that we lived through an eight-year period of Bush-Cheney anti-terror policy and now we have entered a very different period called the Obama-Biden anti-terror policy. As both Obama and Cheney understand, this is a completely bogus distortion of history.

... Obama inherited a $1.2 trillion deficit and has quickly pushed it up to $1.8 trillion, a whopping 13 percent of G.D.P. The new debt will continue to mount after the economy recovers. The national debt will nearly double over the next decade. Annual deficits will still hover around 5 percent or 6 percent of G.D.P. in 2019. By that year, interest payments alone on the debt are projected to be $806 billion annually, according to the Congressional Budget Office. ... Unlike just about every other Democrat on the planet, he emphasizes cost control as much as expanding health coverage....

The fight against poverty produces great programs but disappointing results. You go visit an inner-city school, job-training program or community youth center and you meet incredible people doing wonderful things. Then you look at the results from the serious evaluations and you find that these inspiring places are only producing incremental gains. That’s why I was startled when I received an e-mail message from Roland Fryer, a meticulous Harvard economist. It included this sentence: “The attached study has changed my life as a scientist.” Fryer and his colleague Will Dobbie have just finished a rigorous assessment of the charter schools...

In an op-ed yesterday, David Brooks — The New York Times’ alleged conservative columnist — claims Republicans’ downward trajectory is due to their devotion to rugged individualism and their neglect of community. ... It seems The New York Times’ conservative lapdog has found his ideal Republican — Barack Hussein Obama.

Republicans generally like Westerns. They generally admire John Wayne-style heroes who are rugged, individualistic and brave. They like leaders — from Goldwater to Reagan to Bush to Palin — who play up their Western heritage. Republicans like the way Westerns seem to celebrate their core themes — freedom, individualism, opportunity and moral clarity. But the greatest of all Western directors, John Ford, actually used Westerns to tell a different story. Ford’s movies didn’t really celebrate the rugged individual. They celebrated civic order.... Today, if Republicans had learned the right lessons from the Westerns, or at least John Ford Westerns, they...

Let us give the Barack Obama administration credit. They have run a "professional, smoothly running operation" in setting David Brooks' mind right. Back in early March, Brooks demonstrated a bit of independence from the liberal party line in his role as "house conservative" for the New York Times with this outburst: Those of us who consider ourselves moderates — moderate-conservative, in my case — are forced to confront the reality that Barack Obama is not who we thought he was. His words are responsible; his character is inspiring. But his actions betray a transformational liberalism that should put every centrist...

First of all, I know this column isn't going to be popular with all the mouth breathing, troglodytic, primitive dittoheads out there. But, facts are facts: conservatives are NEVER, EVER, EVER going to get back into power again. The mainstream media says so, legendary conservative icons like David Frum, Meghan McCain, and David Brooks say so -- and, yes, Democrats in Congress who we should remember soundly beat us in November, say so. So, I think it's time to point out what even completely unbiased political luminaries like Chuck Schumer and Keith Olbermann have been saying since Barack Obama was...

The End of Morality ... Like the Marxist who claims that everything is determined by socio-economic forces (except for himslef who, of course, has no class interest), and the Freudian with his determinant sexual urges and primal psychological forces (except for himself who somehow developed rational psychological theories), the Darwinist is a man at war with himself. For he is engaged in mortal combat with rationality itself...

you gotta love the way this "dumb" old southerner set Mr. Brooks up for this.

David Brooks: Gail, have you noticed how many time bombs Barack Obama is laying for himself? He’s dived into all these different policy areas filled with firm resolution, but in case after case, the really hard decisions are postponed until this summer or beyond. For example, the tough calls on the auto bailout will have to be made this summer, after the latest restructuring phase comes to an end. The Afghan war is going to heat up and get much more unpopular this summer with the surge of troops and the run-up to the elections. The health care project will...

You’d think if some tiger were lunging at your neck, your attention would be riveted on the tiger. But that’s apparently not how it works in the age of global A.D.D. As a tiger sinks its teeth into the world’s neck, we focus on the dust bunnies under the bed and the floorboards that need replacing on the deck. We live in the world of Perverse Cosmic Myopia, an inability to focus attention on the most perilous... --snip-- But now the short term is really confusing, so leaders take refuge in projects that are years or decades away. The president...

Over the centuries, the United States has been most conspicuous for one trait: manic energy. Americans work longer hours than any other people. We switch jobs more frequently, move more often, earn more and consume more. This energy was first aroused by abundance, by the tantalizing sense that dazzling wealth was available just over the next hill. But it has also been sustained by a popular culture that celebrates commercial ambition. From Benjamin Franklin and Alexander Hamilton, through Horatio Alger and Norman Vincent Peale, up until Donald Trump and Jim Cramer, popular figures have always emerged to champion the American...

It has been only ten days since the New York Times house conservative, David Brooks, suddenly discovered that "Barack Obama is not who we thought he was." As a result, the White House sent out a special team of four high level officials to get Brooks' "mind right." They sure did a terrific job because Brooks, after declaring himself ready to lead a "moderate" army to oppose Obama, performed a sudden U-Turn. The earlier urge to challenge the Obama administration was replaced by strange new respect, especially since David was given his very own talisman chart by his overseers which...

"General" David Brooks, the very compliant house conservative of the New York Times, after just three days of bravely volunteering to lead a mighty "moderate" army against the "ideological outrages" of the Barack Obama administration, has now called a hasty retreat with a column that borders on outright apology for daring to oppose the very liberal budget. First let us take trip down memory lane to three days in the past to take a look the battle plan presented by General Brooks following his astounding revelation that most of the non-house conservatives discovered long, long ago:

Perhaps it is time to award the New York Times house conservative, David Brooks, a kewpie doll for having at long last a very brief moment of mental clarity. Brooks, who has been making a habit lately of bashing conservative Republicans such as Sarah Palin, emerged ever so slightly from his comfortable conventional wisdom cocoon, and discovered that (gasp) "Barack Obama is not who we thought he was." If Brooks had been listening to Rush Limbaugh, whom he continues to detest, on a regular basis he would have made this "astounding discovery" long ago. Brooks begins his op-ed "discovery" by...

A few days ago I published a column by David Brooks, the NY Times token conservative (only the Times would consider Brooks a real conservative) in which he basically lamented that Obama and his people really couldn’t achieve what they have set out to achieve – and we would all be the worse for their failures. In his next column, reprinted below, he goes much farther – becoming distraught because he has perceived that Obama basically lied to the American people in order to fool them into thinking that he was a moderate. Where were you, Mr. Brooks during the...

You wouldn’t know it some days, but there are moderates in this country — moderate conservatives, moderate liberals, just plain moderates. We sympathize with a lot of the things that President Obama is trying to do. We like his investments in education and energy innovation. We support health care reform that expands coverage while reducing costs. But the Obama budget is more than just the sum of its parts. There is, entailed in it, a promiscuous unwillingness to set priorities and accept trade-offs. There is evidence of a party swept up in its own revolutionary fervor — caught up in...

Please stop telling us what is wrong with… well, US. Seriously, I just cannot take it any more. It’s like Yankees who come South because it’s generally such a nice place to live and then tell us we’re all a bunch of idiots and that we need to “do it like they used to do it back in Detroit.” Spare me – move back to Detroit and leave me alone. We all recognize the problems we face as a nation, and as a Party. You want a frigging medal because you, too, can read polls and recognize that we need...

The Gang System Barack Obama is a potentially transformational figure. In political style and intellectual outlook, he is unlike anything that has come before. On matters of policy substance, however, he’s been pretty conventional. The policies he offered during the campaign matched those of just about every other Democrat. So an important question for the Obama presidency is this: Will his transformational style eventually lead to transformational policies, or will his conventional policies eventually force him to shelve his transformational style?

Throughout 2008, Larry Summers, the Harvard economist, built the case for a big but surgical stimulus package. Summers warned that a “poorly provided fiscal stimulus can have worse side effects than the disease that is to be cured.” So his proposal had three clear guidelines...

A few years ago, a faculty committee at Harvard produced a report on the purpose of education. “The aim of a liberal education” the report declared, “is to unsettle presumptions, to defamiliarize the familiar, to reveal what is going on beneath and behind appearances, to disorient young people and to help them to find ways to reorient themselves.” The report implied an entire way of living. Individuals should learn to think for themselves. They should be skeptical of pre-existing arrangements. They should break free from the way they were raised, examine life from the outside and discover their own values....

In 2005, Ryne Sandberg was inducted into the baseball Hall of Fame. Heclo cites his speech as an example of how people talk when they are defined by their devotion to an institution: “I was in awe every time I walked onto the field. That’s respect. I was taught you never, ever disrespect your opponents or your teammates or your organization or your manager and never, ever your uniform. You make a great play, act like you’ve done it before; get a big hit, look for the third base coach and get ready to run the bases.” Sandberg motioned to...

There is a strong case to be made for a short, sharp stimulus package to restrain the collapse of the American economy .... There’s also a very strong case to be made for long-term government reform ... But the stimulus bill emerging in the House of Representatives does neither of these things. The bill marked up Wednesday in the Appropriations Committee is a muddled mixture of short-term stimulus haste and long-term spending commitments. It is an unholy marriage that manages to combine the worst of each approach — rushed short-term planning with expensive long-term fiscal impact. The bill has three...