The New York Times has been gradually lowering
its standards for years, a recent proof being
allowing David Brooks to continue as a regular
columnist. He recently gave Playboy an interview,
wherein he blithely stated an impossibility
as a certainty. I found this nugget yesterday in
The Chicago Sun-Times, (April 23): according
to Michael Sneed, David Brooks claims "Dubya"
is 60 IQ points smarter in private than in public.
Bush II never wants anyone to think he's smarter
than someone else, hence the "dumb Texan" routine.
It's impossible for Brooks to know, or even make an
educated guess about Bush's IQ.(--Did he test him?)
This is the admiring, uncritical blind loyalty of a friend
talking. Objectivity's out the window here, evidently.
Even more troubling, if true, is any accurate description
of guile by Bush. He didn't want people to know how
smart he is? I for one have always wanted a U.S.
President to be smarter than me, and smarter than most
of the rest of us as well. The idea of electing a president
because he'd be fun to have a beer with is just too stupid
for words, but I'll try anyway. We need a highly intelligent,
very good, very caring, knowledgeable and effortful person
to effectively run a large nation like the U.S. (That's the best
prescription for any country's leader as well.)
Just when I thought David Brooks was moderating his
conservatism, I see this quote. After all the needless
sturm und drang of Bush II's eight years, the policy flaws,
foreign and domestic, failed to illuminate him.
David Brooks, not one whit wiser.
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DFB is touted as the centrist Rethuglican voice of reason. Everything he writes SOUNDS so reasonable. He frames a premise, backstops it with his past premises and thus reaches his reasonabley conclusion that unless he was full of shit then, what he's now spewing MUST be perfectly reasonable. Each new DFB exercise is its own WTF moment. In which he redoubles his unwillingness to consider any error on his part compounded by thirty years of his redoublings. For to do so would jeopardize his livelihood.
ReplyDeleteYes, DFB is a preening hack, but the media village to which he belongs consists of identical preening hacks who, cannot, will not, call him on his bullshit for fear of having their own patented bullshit called to account.
Now that's nothing if not reasonable.
-Witty and convoluted as usual, R! But that only makes a reader delve a bit more, and isn't that what it's all about?
DeleteBest, A.
What follows is off the subject, except for one observation: Big Guy the cat is the sweetest, most "authentic" and patient "boy" I have known.
ReplyDelete(Very different from Mr. Not Particularly Authentic, aka David Brooks....)
My daughter and her husband will have to put him down soon due to cancer, which will be hard for the three of us indeed. They took really good care of the stray that came to stay. Maybe that thought can help.