Seriously, does anybody want it? I'm going to eat it if nobody wants it. Michelle? You've had two already. Okay, we'll cut it in half.
Don’t get me wrong: I like David Brooks as much as the next guy. I realize I sound like I’m about to tell a David Brooks-ist joke—and if my grandpa asks you how you keep David Brooks out of your watermelon patch, just don’t respond—but I really do think that he provides sober, interesting analysis on a fairly consistent basis, provided that basis does not occur during campaign season, when he becomes insane. Generally, though, he’s a reasonable man. He employs logic and persuasive rhetoric in his columns, as if he were addressing people who did not necessarily agree with him before they started reading, which makes him something of a rarity among commentators on the right. As a result, his lucidity affords a valuable insight into the reasoning behind contemporary conservative thinking—a reasoning that is often obscured in the provocative (read: insane) rhetoric of a Beck, a Limbaugh or a Malkin.
Still, just because it’s valuable insight doesn’t mean it won’t be sad. Brooks’s column in today’s New York Times, in which he criticizes the Obama administration’s decision to limit executive compensation at banks and investment firms that received federal bailout money, exposes the nihilism at the heart of contemporary conservatism. Worse yet, it contradicts what he was saying one year ago at this time.
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about it, progressivism is just radical communism by another name, the same way your uncle is just your aunt with testicles. We can forgive Glenn Beck for confusing an established political idea with its complement, or for decrying the abuses of progressivism even as he praises his local library, since he is speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference, where up is down, black is white, white is also white, and conservatism—that age-old defender of institutions and tradition—has finally become the counterculture.