Free Republic

Among the many issues we focus on within the pages of this blog are the worthiness – or lack thereof – of the elites here in America and elsewhere in the Western world. It is our contention here at the Hayride that elite status must be maintained through merit and quality; if elites do not reflect the best values and traditions of a society then either they aren’t actually the elites or the society as a whole is in the process of rejecting its best values and traditions – with steep decline an inevitable result.

Mr. BROOKS: Well, we did have Afghanistan, which is sort of bipartisan. I do think when he gets his substantive policy grounds correct, you can actually create bipartisanship. I probably am the squishiest conservative on the face of the earth, but even I couldn't stomach the stimulus bill or the health-care bill. So, the policy just wasn't there for any kind of centrist alternative.

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,...