The David Brooks circus act, sustained by a lie

Reader Sam H. in the Netherlands sent me a long piece in The New Republic, “The Courtship: The story behind the Obama-Brooks bromance.” I wrote back to him:

I respectfully believe that it’s not worth the trouble to put that much time and thought into understanding David Brooks. He’s not a significant intellectual figure. He’s an intellectual whore, whose entire “importance” is due to the continuing, transparent lie maintained by the mainstream media and by Brooks himself that he’s a conservative, a notion that makes it a matter of great interest why a “conservative” supports Obama. But the premise is false; Brooks is not a conservative, he’s a liberal. Once the false premise that he’s a conservative is dispensed with, the notion that there’s something particularly interesting and intriguing about his support for Obama is dissipated.

Even the late Richard John Neuhaus, after previously evading the issue when I had pressed him on it, finally admitted in 2007, in a column called “David Brooks Adrift,” that Brooks was no longer a conservative. As I said at the time:

Neuhaus doesn’t come right come out and use the words, but when he writes that Brooks “has ‘grown,’ as it said by those of a leftward bent,” that is his gentle way of saying that Brooks is no longer a conservative.

- end of initial entry -

September 3

Sam H. replies to LA:

OK. But maybe you don’t read far enough to catch this titillating bit:

“That first encounter [with Obama] 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.”

I thought it was interesting in light of the anecdote you discussed about Brooks at the dinner table with an unnamed Republican senator…

LA replies:

Weird, he keeps publicly stating these odd, quasi-homoerotic moments of his.

And given the flack he received for his bizarre statement about sitting through an entire dinner with a senator’s hand on his thigh [see this and this], for him to repeat a similar “experience” is just too bizarre.

Sam H. replies:

Yes. He must be repressing something interesting.

LA replies:

But we all wish that he would repress it. :-)

Posted by Lawrence Auster at September 02, 2009 12:38 PM | Send