tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-100961382024-03-08T07:42:14.480-05:00David Brooks is a moron.Ed.http://www.blogger.com/profile/04990848325946181273noreply@blogger.comBlogger91125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10096138.post-4003147523247218472007-10-10T17:41:00.000-04:002007-10-10T17:47:37.575-04:00David Brooks, still not too brightWell, after almost a year of no Brooks, it turns out that he's still a moron. Though I have to give him some credit for sticking to observing social trends rather than using them to draw extremely tenuous inferences about politics. And there is at least some data present, and 2 whole references. Though I must admit to skepticism about this data point:<br /><br />"People who were born before 1964 tend to define adulthood by certain accomplishments — moving away from home, becoming financially independent, getting married and starting a family.<br /><br />In 1960, roughly 70 percent of 30-year-olds had achieved these things. By 2000, fewer than 40 percent of 30-year-olds had done the same."<br /><br />What qualifies as becoming financially independent? Are 30-year-olds equally unlikely to have done all of those 4 things, or is just one skewing the data? And how about the 30-year-olds of 1960? Without this information it's unclear just how much this information actually tells us.<br /><br />One problem (a common Brooks problem) is that his language is extremely general -- there is no suggestion that the "odyssey years" are only for the college educated -- yet something like this:<br /><br />"The job market is fluid. Graduating seniors don’t find corporations offering them jobs that will guide them all the way to retirement. Instead they find a vast menu of information economy options, few of which they have heard of or prepared for."<br /><br />Suggests that the "odyssey years" he is describing apply only to the children of the upper middle class and up. And while we're here, this paragraph would seem to conflict with one of Brooks's main definitions of the "odyssey years", that people in them are "delaying permanent employment." Well, one reason for that might be that permanent employment is hard to find these days, as Brooks makes abundantly clear in that paragraph i quoted above. For the poor, of course, permanent employment has always been difficult to find.<br /><br />The main problem with this article, though, is that Brooks ignores or largely ignores at least two extremely important factors. The first one, which he at least acknowledges, is that the education level of women is rising. More educated women have fewer children, generally by having them later. This in turn pushes back the age of marriage (note that in 1960, the <a href="http://www.census.gov/population/socdemo/hh-fam/ms2.csv">median age of first marriage</a> was 22.8 for men and 20.3 for women: now it's 27.5 and 25.5). And since people get married later, they have more time in which they are not burdened by family responsibilities. Instead, they can try different careers, because they don't need to worry about the impact quitting their job has on their kids, or move around without having to discuss each movement with a spouse, etc., etc., etc. This is especially true for those from families in the upper middle and upper classes, as they are in no danger of serious financial problems. (In this vein, it's probably worth noting that the 30-year-olds in 1960 grew up during the Great Depression and WWII, which might have influenced their outlook to a certain extent).<br /><br />Then there is the question of financial independence. First, consider <a href="http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=77">this chart</a>. Note that the average salary of a 25-34 year old male with a bachelor's degree has been roughly the same since 1980, and the average salary of a 25-34 year old female with a bachelor's degree has been roughly the same since 1990, with variations in both cases of about 10% max. Meanwhile, <a href="http://www.wsws.org/articles/2002/apr2002/debt-a22.shtml">the cost of college</a> has risen considerably: from 1992-2002, 40% at private colleges and 33% at public universities (ok, I'm not entirely certain if i trust wsws.org, but this isn't exactly a controversial point). So naturally people in their twenties are becoming more financially dependent on their parents to pay off increasingly burdensome college loans. Strangely, Brooks doesn't mention this phenomenon at all.<br /><br />Instead, Brooks prefers to concentrate on some nebulous "spirit of fluidity" that is apparently suffusing these times, which leads him to some unfortunate writing. For instance, what does this mean: "Young people grow up in tightly structured childhoods, Wuthnow observes, but then graduate into a world characterized by uncertainty, diversity, searching and tinkering. Old success recipes don’t apply, new norms have not been established and everything seems to give way to a less permanent version of itself." As far as i can tell, the first sentence tells nobody anything they didn't already know (wow, childhood is different from adulthood!), and the second one is pretty much meaningless ("everything seems to give way to a less permanent version of itself"? please). Sometimes i think that part of Brooks's problem is that this format is too short for him. Here, he wants to explore not only changes in the behavior of young adults from 1960-2007, but also the causes of those changes. This requires more than a few-hundred-word column. But mostly, i think that he's just not that bright.Ed.http://www.blogger.com/profile/04990848325946181273noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10096138.post-1161748386388858312006-10-24T23:49:00.000-04:002006-10-24T23:53:06.406-04:00Google-bomb the election!Yes, I'm a lazy bastard who should post more often. However, for now you're going to have to be satisfied with this attempt at google-bombing (via digby) taken from <a href="http://www.mydd.com/story/2006/10/24/121757/70">here</a>. It is, literally, the least I could do.<br /><br />-AZ-Sen: <a href="http://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/Issues/2006-04-13/news/feature_full.html">Jon Kyl</a><br /><br />--AZ-01: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Rick_Renzi&printable=yes#Controversies">Rick Renzi</a><br /><br />--AZ-05: <a href="http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/local/articles/1022hayworth1022.html">J.D. Hayworth</a><br /><br />--CA-04: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Doolittle#Controversies">John Doolittle</a><br /><br />--CA-11: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Pombo#Controversies_and_criticisms">Richard Pombo</a><br /><br />--CA-50: <a href="http://www.kfmb.com/story.php?id=66505">Brian Bilbray</a><br /><br />--CO-04: <a href="http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/12054520/the_10_worst_congressmen/10">Marilyn Musgrave</a><br /><br />--CO-05: <a href="http://www.gazette.com/display.php?id=1322626&amp;secid=1">Doug Lamborn</a><br /><br />--CO-07: <a href="http://www.rockymountainnews.com/drmn/elections/article/0,2808,DRMN_24736_5063243,00.html">Rick O'Donnell</a><br /><br />--CT-04: <a href="http://www.connpost.com/news/ci_4509567">Christopher Shays</a><br /><br />--FL-13: <a href="http://www.bradenton.com/mld/bradenton/news/local/15422371.htm?source=rss&channel=bradenton_local">Vernon Buchanan</a><br /><br />--FL-16: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Foley_scandal">Joe Negron</a><br /><br />--FL-22: <a href="http://www.usnews.com/usnews/politics/campaign_diary/florida/archive/2006/10/the_foley_scandal_affects_the.htm">Clay Shaw</a><br /><br />--ID-01: <a href="http://www.summitdaily.com/article/20060923/NEWS/60923003">Bill Sali</a><br /><br />--IL-06: <a href="http://msnbc.msn.com/id/14988252/">Peter Roskam</a><br /><br />--IL-10: <a href="http://cbs2chicago.com/video/?id=25835@wbbm.dayport.com">Mark Kirk</a><br /><br />--IL-14: <a href="http://www.kcci.com/politics/10062284/detail.html">Dennis Hastert</a><br /><br />--IN-02: <a href="http://www.southbendtribune.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060811/NEWS07/608110314">Chris Chocola</a><br /><br />--IN-08: <a href="http://www.courier-journal.com/localnews/2004/04/21ky/B1-host0421i0-7412.html">John Hostettler</a><br /><br />--IA-01: <a href="http://www.qctimes.net/articles/2005/12/09/news/local/doc439930283db6c088625962.txt">Mike Whalen</a><br /><br />--KS-02: <a href="http://cjonline.com/stories/102306/loc_ryunboyda1.shtml">Jim Ryun</a><br /><br />--KY-03: <a href="http://www.courier-journal.com/localnews/2002/08/29/ke082902s267079.htm">Anne Northup</a><br /><br />--KY-04: <a href="http://www.kentucky.com/mld/kentucky/news/15533221.htm">Geoff Davis</a><br /><br />--MD-Sen: <a href="http://www.gazette.net/stories/021006/montsta130223_31925.shtml">Michael Steele</a><br /><br />--MN-01: <a href="http://www.hometown-pages.com/main.asp?SectionID=26&SubSectionID=186&ArticleID=12951&TM=48834.09">Gil Gutknecht</a><br /><br />--MN-06: <a href="http://citypages.com/databank/27/1348/article14760.asp">Michele Bachmann</a><br /><br />--MO-Sen: <a href="http://www.contracostatimes.com/mld/cctimes/news/politics/15174500.htm">Jim Talent</a><br /><br />--MT-Sen: <a href="http://www.billingsgazette.net/articles/2006/07/28/news/state/20-burns.txt">Conrad Burns</a><br /><br />--NV-03: <a href="http://www.lasvegassun.com/sunbin/stories/sun/2006/oct/22/566689009.html?porter">Jon Porter</a><br /><br />--NH-02: <a href="http://www.unionleader.com/article.aspx?headline=Top+aide+to+Bass+resigns&amp;articleId=b65bcd02-f478-4a6d-801a-9a12761c3786">Charlie Bass</a><br /><br />--NJ-07: <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A23714-2003Apr3?language=printer">Mike Ferguson</a><br /><br />--NM-01: <a href="http://www.rawstory.com/news/2006/Congresswoman_on_page_board_buried_file_1019.html">Heather Wilson</a><br /><br />--NY-03: <a href="http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/ny-usking0817,0,6911475,print.story?coll=ny-top-headlines">Peter King</a><br /><br />--NY-20: <a href="http://blogs.timesunion.com/capitol/?p=983">John Sweeney</a><br /><br />--NY-26: <a href="http://www.democratandchronicle.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20061004/NEWS01/61004020/1002/NEWS">Tom Reynolds</a><br /><br />--NY-29: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randy_Kuhl#Personal">Randy Kuhl</a><br /><br />--NC-08: <a href="http://www.newsobserver.com/291/story/254053.html">Robin Hayes</a><br /><br />--NC-11: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_H._Taylor#Controversies">Charles Taylor</a><br /><br />--OH-01: <a href="http://www.thehill.com/thehill/export/TheHill/News/Frontpage/091906/chabot.html">Steve Chabot</a><br /><br />--OH-02: <a href="http://www.wcpo.com/news/2006/local/10/11/murtha_schmidt.html">Jean Schmidt</a><br /><br />--OH-15: <a href="http://www.columbusdispatch.com/?story=217625">Deborah Pryce</a><br /><br />--OH-18: <a href="http://www.cleveland.com/news/plaindealer/index.ssf?/base/news/1161257895268090.xml&coll=2">Joy Padgett</a><br /><br />--PA-04: <a href="http://www.sharonherald.com/local/local_story_263230124.html?start:int=0">Melissa Hart</a><br /><br />--PA-07: <a href="http://www.phillyburbs.com/pb-dyn/news/28-10162006-727801.html">Curt Weldon</a><br /><br />--PA-08: <a href="http://www.phillyburbs.com/pb-dyn/news/111-01222006-601349.html">Mike Fitzpatrick</a><br /><br />--PA-10: <a href="http://www.timesleader.com/mld/timesleader/15646184.htm">Don Sherwood</a><br /><br />--RI-Sen: <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/05/AR2006080500823.html">Lincoln Chafee</a><br /><br />--TN-Sen: <a href="http://www.knoxnews.com/kns/election/article/0,1406,KNS_630_5057450,00.html">Bob Corker</a><br /><br />--VA-Sen: <a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2006/09/26/politics/main2039589.shtml">George Allen</a><br /><br />--VA-10: <a href="http://www.nationalcenter.org/PRJTHGWolfEarmark1006.html">Frank Wolf</a><br /><br />--WA-Sen: <a href="http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/283622_mcgavick02.html">Mike McGavick</a><br /><br />--WA-08: <a href="http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/287797_reichertsideweb06.html">Dave Reichert</a><br /><br />williehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16145062507112173102noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10096138.post-1150599722496878552006-06-17T19:51:00.000-04:002006-06-17T23:14:13.223-04:00Special non-Brooks edition: SusanG at Daily KosI may be throwing in more non-Brooksiana as I get back on track with this thing: Brooks is just not easy to read on a regular basis. Back when I started, I was used to reading Brooks on a regular basis, in newspapers at home or online. But since I stopped updating this website, I have also stopped reading Brooks: I only see the print Times when I'm at home and Brooks's online columns are behind a pay wall. So it appears that over the last 9 months I've lost my Brooks tolerance: I read two deeply stupid Brooks columns and simply lose my desire to read any more. So I'll be taking this slowly as my ability to tolerate Brooks slowly builds back to its old levels. In the meantime, there is certainly no shortage of stupidity on the web, and today's effort, which has been bothering me ever since I read it, comes from SusanG at Daily Kos, and is entitled <a href="http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2006/6/16/132818/945">"Money is to Liberals as Sex is to Conservatives"</a>.<br /><br />SusanG's hypothesis is that, well, liberals respond to money the way that conservatives respond to sex, that both groups are being stupid, and that there's nothing whatsoever wrong with liberal figures making lots of money. How does SusanG know that there's nothing wrong? Well, that part is not really explained. "I trust them, you see, to use their time and money wisely," she says, referring to various liberal bloggers who are making serious money now. " Liberals <i>can</i> handle money and its accompanying temptation, I'm certain." Why is she certain? Because liberals are perfect and infallible, I guess. Maybe SusanG looked into Kos's eyes and read his soul. At any rate, this line of reasoning should immediately dismissed as profoundly opposed to liberalism (and comes laden with hypocrisy given all the liberal mockery of the Bush administration's declarations that we should just trust them to do the right thing when confronted with questions about the Iraq war or their phone surveillance program), which ought to recognize that anyone, even a liberal, can be corrupted by power. And make no mistake, power is the real question here, not money or sex, and the failure to recognise that is the biggest problem with SusanG's screed.<br /><br />SusanG doesn't try to actually determine why conservatives are so worried about people having sex outside of a traditional marriage, which is a shame because such an analysis actually reinforces her analogy (though it rather damages her conclusion). Conservatives are often anti-sex because of their religion: Christianity, as they see it, forbids such goings-on. But why should they care about other people doing things they are opposed to? "Because they are outrageous busybodies" is not an acceptable answer. What it comes down to is a question of power: deeply religious Christians believe that all power should lie with God and, of course, God's representatives on earth. By violating God's rules for conduct, including sexual conduct, people are aggregating to themselves power that should belong to God, and this misappropriation of power is deeply dangerous (since power that is not controlled by God will naturally fall to Satan). Thus what seems to outsiders to be a very disproportianate reaction to the idea of gay people having sex follows naturally from a philosophy about the proper distribution of power in society.<br /><br />On the other hand, the liberal political philosophy holds that power should be equally distributed among the people. Recognizing the practical difficulties of doing this, however, it eschews the easy libertarian answer of simply taking power away from the government with the idea that the people will somehow get hold of it and instead opts for a twofold program of making the government more responsive to the people and then giving more power to the government. For liberals, then, a dangerous imbalance in the distribution of power in society occurs when an individual acquires far more power than other individuals, and the government is given power in order to prevent that. In the real world, this amounts to higher taxes on the rich, with the money being spent on programs to help the poor. Conservatives decry this is as redistributionist, but that is exactly the point: while conservatives only see money as money, liberals see it as power, and are attempting to ensure that the power is equally distributed. That is why liberals are wary of activists who become wealthy: they begin to acquire power for themselves and so have a tendency to lose sight of the goal of power for the people. It's certainly true that this wariness can be taken to extremes: as SusanG says, "But too often in progressive circles, an individual living anywhere above the federal poverty guideline is dismissed as "selling out" or being co-opted." (although, to be fair, SusanG is also exaggerating here). However, to attack these fears as baseless and worse, motivated by a belief on the part of the criticizer that given money, the criticizer would be unable to handle it and succumb to all his worse impulses betrays a lack of understanding that would make David Brooks proud. And to say "The fact is, money is a tool. In and of itself, it is absolutely neutral" is almost inexcusably foolish. Does SusanG also think that guns don't kill people, people kill people? If she can't see that this is ridiculously naive and facile, one wonders just what qualifies her to be a front page diarist at Daily Kos. It's important to remember that idiocy is not confined to one side of the political spectrum or to the "old media": anyone can be a moron if they work at it hard enough, and while SusanG is not in Brooks's class yet, she's clearly trying.williehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16145062507112173102noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10096138.post-1150258550882580162006-06-13T23:08:00.000-04:002006-06-14T23:45:46.420-04:00God, Brooks drives me crazyBrooks's latest column is all about how the brains of males and females are fundamentally different, as seen through the prism of their different literary choices, and that therefore feminism is wrong. However, what drives me crazy about this column is not its idiotic premise but the combination of Brooks's fundamental dishonesty and complete inability to construct an argument that makes sense. So for today's piece, I'm going to completely ignore the question of whether or not feminism is wrong -- or, more specifically, whether teaching girly books to boys is driving them away from education -- and focus purely on the basic dishonesties and idiocies of Brooks's argument.<br /><br />Brooks starts off by talking about how airport bookstores are divided between men's and women's sections, leading nicely to a segue into how 400 accomplished women and 500 accomplished men in Britain were asked what their favorite novels were. The men's list was topped by <span style="font-style: italic;">The Stranger</span>, <span style="font-style: italic;">Catcher in the Rye</span> and <span style="font-style: italic;">Slaughterhouse-Five</span>, while the women preferred <span style="font-style: italic;">Jane Eyre</span>, <span style="font-style: italic;">Wuthering Heights</span>, <span style="font-style: italic;">The Handmaid's Tale</span>, <span style="font-style: italic;">Middlemarch</span>, <span style="font-style: italic;">Pride and Prejudice</span> and <span style="font-style: italic;">Beloved</span>. First of all, Brooks claims that the two lists diverge "starkly". Of course, it helps that he provides twice as many books from the women's list as the men's. Three titles is hardly enough to establish a pattern, and one wonders what the next few books on the men's list were, and for that matter on the women's list as well. Of course, since Brooks fails to mention where this study of the favorite books of accomplished people was published, it's impossible to check. (Brooks also claims that the books on the women's list are better than those on the men's list, a contention that a) largely a matter of taste (has he ever <span style="font-style: italic;">read</span> "Middlemarch"?); and b) would seem to undercut the whole point of his column, inasmuch as he is, I suppose, an accomplished man, or at any rate the kind of guy who could easily end up in a survey like this, but would not be putting up stereotypically male novels). It would also be nice to know what kind of criteria define the people on this list and how they were chosen, not to mention how many novels each was allowed to select and whether the mentioned works won out by large or small margins (and if they form a large or small percentage of the total number of selections) but this kind of detail, which would allow us to evaluate just how accurate this list actually is as a basis for sociological criticism, is clearly not something that Brooks would even think of offering.<br /><br />Having given us a datum that is essentially meaningless and possibly cherry-picked, Brooks then presents several explanations: "It could be men are insensitive dolts who don't appreciate subtle human connections and good literature. Or, it could be that the part of the brain where men experience negative emotion, the amygdala, is not well connected to the part of the brain where verbal processing happens, whereas the part of the brain where women experience negative emotion, the cerebral cortex, is well connected. It could be that women are better at processing emotion through words." Somehow, Brooks fails to mention any social explanations, even though there are two obvious ones. All the novels given by women are by women authors, but it hardly seems unusual that "accomplished" women would see prominent female authors as potential role models and also be attracted to novels featuring female characters in a society where sexism has hardly been eliminated (note, for example, that 100 fewer accomplished women than men were interviewed for this survey). Again, it would also be nice to know what these women are accomplished at, how old they are, etc., etc., to determine the likelihood of this explanation: if they're female athletes, for instance, we would probably dismiss it. It also seems rather likely that social pressures would tend to force women to give a list of "womanly" books as their favorites. I'm not even going to comment on potential explanations for the male list, as three works is far too small a sample size.<br /><br />Brooks follows up with this: "Over the past two decades, there has been a steady accumulation of evidence that male and female brains work differently. Women use both sides of their brain more symmetrically than men. Men and women hear and smell differently (women are much more sensitive). Boys and girls process colors differently (young girls enjoy an array of red, green and orange crayons whereas young boys generally stick to black, gray and blue). Men and women experience risk differently (men enjoy it more)." Now, the first sentence here may well be true, but there is absolutely no way to tell from the rest of the paragraph. "Women use both sides of their brain more symmetrically than men": this is so vague as to be almost meaningless. Differences in hearing and smelling may well exist, but it's unclear what connection this has to intellectual/emotional questions. Boys and girls may well process colors differently, but again, what is the connection to questions of intellect and emotion, and why should I believe that young girls enjoying bright, girlish colors while boys prefer sober, manly ones has nothing to do with social conditioning? And finally, with the amazing revelation that men enjoy risk more, something which is certainly strongly connected to social conditioning, we have essentially abandoned any pretence of presenting evidence that the brains of men and women are structured differently. There is, in fact, exactly one piece of real evidence in this entire article: "Women who have congenital adrenal hyperplasia, which leads to high male hormone secretions, are more likely to choose violent stories than other women." And even this doesn't tell us much: how much more likely? Is it significant? Can we have a citation? This being a rhetorical question, of course: this is a Brooks column, after all.<br /><br />Next, watch this rhetorical sleight of hand: we start one paragraph with "It could be, in short, that biological factors influence reading tastes, even after accounting for culture." Then suddenly we move to "This wouldn't be a problem if we all understood these biological factors and if teachers devised different curriculums to instill an equal love of reading in both boys and girls." Note how the "could" in the first sentence has been dropped: all of a sudden, this conclusion is no longer questionable, and we wonder instead why teachers are so reluctant to use this obvious fact. The problem, according to Brooks, is that "there is still intense social pressure not to talk about biological differences between boys and girls" and "resistance, especially in the educational world, to the findings of brain researchers" (as well as an obligatory shoutout to Larry Summers). This may be true, but there's no way to know: Brooks presents no data to suggest that such is the case, or even that the findings of brain researchers have direct classroom applicability. Essentially, he is asserting that genetics forces men and women to have fundamentally different tastes in literature based on his survey of airport bookstores, a survey of 900 people in England, and one scientific result from an uncited paper.<br />And it gets worse. "Despite some innovations here and there, in most classrooms boys and girls are taught the same books in the same ways." Brooks tantalizes us with the suggestion that teaching different works of literature to boys and girls has been tried. Did it work? If not, why not? These questions are obvious ones to explore, but apparently they never occurred to Brooks.<br /><br />Having made his contempt for the idea of supporting one's argument with data very clear, Brooks goes suddenly changes topics. "Young boys are compelled to sit still in schools that have sacrificed recess for test prep." Where is the connection between what books males are wired to prefer and the absence or presence of recess? Luckily, the next sentence makes it all clear: "Many are told in a thousand subtle ways they are not really good students." What this means is that Brooks is not really worried about whether schools are considering innate genetic preference for certain types of books: he is afraid that feminism has taken over the public schools. When he is unable to prevent his real worries from emerging, the result is even more intellectual incoherence than usual. Brooks manages to wrench himself back to the topic at hand by complaining about "new-wave young adult problem novels". Personally, I'm not a fan of these either. But Brooks makes no attempt to really address them, dismissing them by saying that they "all seem to be about introspectively morose young women whose parents are either suicidal drug addicts or fatally ill manic depressives." This is nice and cutting, but hardly counts as evidence: Brooks can't even supply one measly title. It's also worth noting that this attempt to get back on track just further amplifies the incoherence, as Brooks begins the paragraph complaining about a lack of recess and therefore elementary schools, while he ends by bemoaning education at the middle school level or above (unless Brooks's high school had recess: that might explain a lot, actually).<br /><br />Now we move beyond school: "It shouldn't be any surprise that according to a National Endowment for the Arts study, the percentage of young men who read has plummeted over the past 14 years. Reading rates are falling three times as fast among young men as among young women." So says Brooks. (Note that he doesn't say whether this refers to fiction, books, or all reading, but for the sake of simplicity I'll assume that it does mean that young men don't read much fiction any more.) I say, what about video games and computers? I have, admittedly, no evidence (which puts me on par with Brooks), but it seems to me that there is a good chance that consumer electronics take up far more of the average young man's time than they did in 1992. Meanwhile, that young women don't play video games is practically a truism, and although the computer=nerd=not womanly equation is no longer really true, using computers a lot is still considered more of a male thing. And, of course, gender roles have always pushed boys away from reading books, as anyone who was a bookish boy can probably testify. There is further bad news: "men are drifting away from occupations that involve reading and school." Well, make that occupation, as Brooks only mentions teaching: "Men now make up a smaller share of teachers than at any time in the past 40 years." This particular piece of data is relatively meaningless: what we really want to know is a trend. After all, if the percentage of teachers who are male has been essentially constant over the past 40 years with just one dip now, it is impossible to infer anything (I could look it up, but I'm not the one who's worried about this, Brooks is).<br /><br />Next, we bring up one Dr. Leonard Sax and his book <span style="font-style: italic;">Why Gender Matters</span>. Incidentally, this brings us to the root of the column: Brooks read Sax's book and decided to write a column about it. Most likely, the various facts presented here without citations are simply blindly copied from the book. Sax is a <a href="http://www.nsba.org/site/view.asp?DID=11221&CID=448">"family physician and psychologist from Maryland"</a>, strangely enough, rather than a neuroscientist and brain expert, as one would expect from Brooks's talking up of "brain studies". Someone has probably debunked him somewhere, but I'm too lazy to check. Sax is apparently also big on single-sex schools: they'd be separate but equal! Well, his actual argument (according to Brooks) is that they would allow students to break free from gender stereotypes. This may be the case, but it seems a little strange given that his reading recommendations for boys appear to be dictated strictly by gender stereotypes.<br /><br />Those reading recommendations propose that boys (presumably in high school) be given more Hemingway, Tolstoy, Homer, and Twain. I imagine that many high-school age boys would disagree. It's also worth noting that my parents made me read all these AND Jane Austen, George Eliot, and the Bronte sisters, and I somehow managed to enjoy all of them (well, not <span style="font-style: italic;">Middlemarch</span> so much, or Hemingway either). It's a wonder my poor male brain didn't melt down. Also, Tolstoy seems a little out of place here: <span style="font-style: italic;">Anna Karenina</span>, for instance, is all about relationships and emotions and all of those touchy-feely things that boys hate, and so is <span style="font-style: italic;">War and Peace</span>, really, though there is a war going on in the background. It's also worth noting that my ultra-progressive public high school in the People's Republic of Cambridge had me read the <span style="font-style: italic;">Iliad</span> (or possibly the <span style="font-style: italic;">Odyssey</span>: it was freshman year), <span style="font-style: italic;">The Stranger</span>, and also <span style="font-style: italic;">Moby-Dick</span> (which probably should be in there instead of Tolstoy). Brooks's head would probably explode. Anyway, I enjoyed those books, but I don't recall the other boys in my classes giving hosannas of praise for their long-awaited deliverance from the tyranny of <span style="font-style: italic;">Pride and Prejudice</span> to the sweet embrace of the poetry of the ancient Greeks and 800-page novels about a man chasing a whale.<br /><br />Also, there is more to school than reading fiction, as I recall. There is, for starters, math and science and history and foreign languages, none of which involve reading fiction (except for foreign languages, but there the books that are read are dictated by readability more than anything else). Perhaps there are significant male-female differences here too, but if so, it would be nice if Brooks mentions them: it seems a bit much to believe that boys are being driven from schools in droves simply because they find the fiction assigned in English class boring. Even English class also contains writing, grammar, and reading non-fiction and poetry. And, while Brooks probably doesn't remember high school that well, I only graduated six years ago, and I can assure him that most of the class, male and female, thought that all the assigned books were boring, with <span style="font-style: italic;">Jane Eyre</span> bringing the exact same amount of revulsion, with essentially the same gender breakdown, as <span style="font-style: italic;">The Return of the Native</span> or <span style="font-style: italic;">Native Son. </span>This last is, of course, of no evidentiary value -- anecdotes of my high school experience are not data points -- but Brooks has this unfortunate tendency to drag others down to his level.<br /><br />Finally, Brooks finishes up with a jab at feminism and "consciousness-raising". The connection between feminism and consciousness-raising and the schools has not been established, making the value of this last paragraph somewhat questionable, but at least it confirms what we earlier surmised: Brooks's main concern is attacking feminism, not providing an objective study of how different brain types in different genders affect preferences in literature. One can only wonder why Brooks neglected to attack multiculturalism and the teachers union in an effort to hit for the conservative bemoaning-the-state-of-modern-education cycle.<br /><br />It could be argued that I'm not being entirely fair to Brooks here. After all, he only has a 900-word column: how can he fit in all the details, citations, and statistics that I demand? The answer is, of course, that if he can't fit them in, he should drop the points that require their support. He could then replace the lost claims with more details about his other claims, or simply allow his columns to shrink, possibly to haiku form, in which case there's a slight chance they might be worth reading. But I doubt it.williehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16145062507112173102noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10096138.post-1150025055099076152006-06-11T05:12:00.000-04:002006-06-12T07:02:24.763-04:00Aaaaand . . . We're Back!Lately, there's been an upsurge of popular demand -- ok, so it was only one person, but it was not my mother and one person is about 50% of my readers -- for more DBIAM. Intrigued by the idea that someone actually wanted more from this website, I took advantage of an idle moment to read Brooks's latest column and see if I could recapture the fervor of the early days. Well, let's just say that I have been forcibly reminded of just why I thought Ted's idea of starting this website was so brilliant. I don't know if it would be correct to say that this column plumbs new depths for Brooks -- as I believe I've mentioned before here, such is probably not possible, or at least not until Brooks throws off all restraint and begins openly calling for all true patriots to begin purging liberals -- but it's pretty damn low.<br /><br />Brooks begins by saying that, as we all learned from the stories we were brought up on -- Brooks has apparently taken to heart those posters that say "Everything I need to know, I learned in kindergarten" -- evil contains the seeds of its own destruction. He then laments that in Iraq such is not the case: instead, the insurgents are winning precisely because they're so savage. Leaving aside Brooks's willingness to base his interpretation of world politics on the stories his parents told him when he was a child (and the fact that, while evil does contain the seeds of its own destruction, it often manages to be victorious for quite a while anyway, even in children's stories), there's another obvious story here that fits all the facts. In this story, a group of powerful people decide that the U.S. needs to invade Iraq. They have a number of different reasons -- some want to do it to help out Israel, some because of the oil, some because they think that the U.S. needs a bigger presence in the Middle East, some simply because they believe that a show of force is necessary to remind the world who's boss, and some because they are so stupid and naive that they think that democracy can imposed at the point of the gun and that once so imposed it will spread across the Middle East like, well, like something, but NOT like a bunch of falling dominoes, ok? We do NOT want to hear the d word, got it? Not to mention the one who is desperate to do something better than his daddy. Oh, and the ruler of Iraq is a bad guy who the American public is already conditioned to hate from the first Gulf War. And when 9/11 happens, they see their chance, and using a combination of lies, insinuations, and creative stretching of the truth, make many Americans believe that Saddam was at the very least involved with, if not directly responsible for, 9/11, and that he's getting ready to do it again, only with nukes. Alas for them, the same arrogance and overconfidence that creates a mindset that believes in American empire and lying to the public to make the case for war (not to mention causing the deaths of innocent civilians and American soldiers for no good reason) proves to be their downfall: after an initially victorious stage, it becomes clear that preparations for anything beyond the invasion were essentially nonexistent and that they were wrong in almost all of their assumptions about the war and its aftermath, and their project of creating a peaceful, democratic, and America- and Israel-loving Iraq that sells cheap oil collapses into civil war between religious and ethnic militias.<br /><br />In this story, the vicious insurgency is the natural consequence of the American invasion. The hubris of the invaders leads them to believe that the Iraqis will become approximately the only country in history not to form some sort of resistance movement when invaded. Their incompetence leads them to completely ignore this possibility and Iraq's ethnic and religious fault lines, making the situation even worse. And their lies and rhetoric compound the error: conflating the war on Iraq with the so-called war on terror, they invite Iraqis to see Al Qaeda as friends and natural allies; larding their speeches with words like "crusade", they give ammunition the jihadis can use to claim that the war in Iraq is a war against all Muslims, further radicalising the population; <a href="http://www.usatoday.com/educate/war28-article.htm">telling the American people</a> that the war "could last six days, six weeks. I doubt six months" and "The Iraqi people . . . view us as their hoped-for liberators" sets up the subsequent collapse of support for the war when, as any idiot could have predicted, both of these claims are demonstrated to be entirely false. The war, conceived in lies, error, and dreams of empire, is evil, no matter the good motives of some of its supporters, and it's pretty clear that in this case, evil does indeed contain the seeds of its own destruction.<br /><br />But back to Brooks, whose despair over a three-year insurgency ignores the story of Sleeping Beauty, whose curse could not be defeated for a hundred years. Even worse, though, he apparently believes that if Jesus, Mother Teresa, and Ghandi had been running the United States and its military over the past few years, they could not have compiled as spotless a record as the Bush administration, and that all of the savagery in Iraq is due to the insurgents. "The defining feature of their violence is not merely that they murder, but that they torture those they are about to kill." Let's see, I remember reading something about Aba, or Abo, or Abu, Abu something. It's on the tip of my toungue . . . nope, it's gone. "Videos of such acts are posted on the Internet or sold in the markets of towns like Haditha." <a href="http://www.ojr.org/ojr/stories/050920glaser/">Because Americans would never dream of doing any such thing</a>. "Far from motivating most Americans to fight harder, cruelty on this scale is unnerving. Most Americans simply want to get away." Except for the Americans at Haditha, or <a href="http://www.cbc.ca/story/world/national/2006/06/02/ishaqi06022006.html">Hamandiya, or Ishaqi</a>, or, most likely, a number of other occurences that we haven't yet heard about and may never hear about. Of course, the various Iraqi militias are considerably more vicious and bloodthirsty than the Americans -- Saddam didn't exactly encourage a brotherhood of man in Iraq -- but for Brooks to say "Because American troops come from the culture they do, they have not become the sort of people they would have to be to defeat the insurgents at their own game" is breathtakingly naive. After a while, the constant IED's and ambushes start to wear on you. You start to wonder if you're really fighting for the Iraqi people: they don't seem to be too grateful, do they? Plus, as Brooks says, the insurgents are filled with "blood madness." They're barely human, right? Completely crazy, anyway. The only thing they understand is force. We're hear to bring civilization, and by God, we're going to bring it, no matter how many of them we have to kill. Apparently, Brooks never read "Heart of Darkness" in high school (though his trouble with fairy tales suggests that Joseph Conrad may be a bit beyond his intellectual level).<br /><br />Brooks follows up with some muddled thinking: "The insurgents' second great advantage is that they seem able to create an environment in which it is difficult to survive if you are decent." As evidence, he points out that every civilian is a possible suicide bomber. The connection between these two things is tenuous at best. Perhaps he means that one has to become a barbarian in order to survive? But then he spends two paragraphs discussing how most American soldiers are not becoming barbarians. In the end, it appears that this sentence sounds good but means nothing: a Brooks special.<br /><br />And then we return to Brooks-land, where the United States bears no responsibility for anything bad that happens anywhere: "Similarly, in our debates at home we are searching for ways to exercise enough power to defeat the insurgents while still behaving in accordance with our national conscience. We are seeking a sweet spot that satisfies both the demands of power and of principle. But it could be that given the circumstances we have allowed the insurgents to create, that sweet spot no longer exists." Circumstances we have allowed the insurgents to create! Is the man mad? The circumstances are as follows: for years, Iraq has been ruled by members of an ethnic-religious minority, the Sunni Arabs. Not just under Saddam, either (whose regime the U.S. may have had a hand in installing and certainly propped up for years as a counterweight to Iran): the British installed a Sunni king and worked closely with the Sunnis when they ruled Iraq, and prior to that the Sunnis had been treated preferentially by the Ottomans. However, under Saddam, the oppression of Shiites and Kurds became worse, especially following the abortive Shiite rebellion immediately after the Gulf War. In the meanwhile, fundamentalist Islam gained steadily in Iraq, just as it has done throughout the Arab world, partly due to the discrediting of secular alternatives (through association with autocratic rulers sustained by Western powers: see, e.g., the modern history of Iran) and partly because it was encouraged by Saddam who hoped to use the anti-Western inclinations of fundamentalist Islam to prop up his regime and move the focus of popular discontent from him to the U.S. Then the United States invaded and overthrew Saddam and, symbolically (especially in a highly tribal society like Iraq) the Sunni Arabs. It was fairly clear that the new Iraq would not have nearly as big a place for the Sunni Arabs in it as the old one, and the Americans did nothing to dispel the impression, dissolving the Iraqi Army and allowing Shiites to move forward with hard-line deBaathification plans. American rhetoric also fueled Sunni paranoia about a war against Islam (furthering the radicalisation of the Sunni population and the legitimitisation of the jihadis as on par with the nationalist resistance in what was once one of the most secular countries in the Middle East), and the Americans did little to prevent Shiite militias from enacting reprisals against Sunnis for the long list of Saddam's crimes, or, really, to keep order and provide security, instead forcing people to turn to militias for defence. The result is a vicious and bloody sectarian conflict, and while we are certainly not responsible for the viciousness and bloody-mindedness (or not all of it), we do bear considerable responsibility for "the circumstances". But, again, as we know, the United States models its foreign policy on the life of St. Francis of Assisi, so clearly it cannot possibly be at fault for any of the bloodshed currently happening in Iraq, and it certainly cannot be the case that we are not winning because the war as it was conceived by the Bush administration was not winnable.<br /><br />Finally, Brooks offers definitive proof that he is living in his own world with this: "The insurgents' third malicious advantage is that they have no agenda. . . All they have to do is destroy . . . ." This is only defensible because Brooks mashes the jihadis, Iraqi nationalists, and Shiite militias into one all-encompassing insurgency, and then claims that it has no overarching goal. Well, duh. However, each of the groups has an agenda, and at the moment, the agendas of the various Sunni insurgencies are the same: force the Americans to withdraw, which is best done by attacking them constantly and creating as much chaos as possible to make it clear that the Americans and the government they have installed will never be able to fully control Iraq. This involves lots of destruction, yes, but to claim that it's meaningless destruction is simply foolish and betrays a deep lack of understanding. "Every day they spread mayhem is a victory" Brooks writes, and this is true not because they are nihilists who rejoice in destruction, but because the spread of mayhem shows that the Americans are failing.<br /><br />To this point, Brooks has been content to paint the Iraqis as blood-lust crazed savages while ignoring everything bad the U.S. has done in this war, including starting it. In other words, this is basically par for the course for Brooks. In the last paragraph, though, Brooks takes his game to a whole new level. "And so the hunger to leave Iraq grows. A dissenting minority is furious that so many Americans are willing to betray the decent Iraqi majority in order to preserve some parlor purity. And the terrorists no doubt look at our qualms not as a sign of virtue but of weakness, and as evidence that savagery will lead to victory again and again." Remember, only six paragraphs above Brooks wrote "Because American troops come from the culture they do, they have not become the sort of people they would have to be to defeat the insurgents at their own game." And "Indeed, the people who are most furious about what happened at Haditha are those marines who have been in similarly awful circumstances but who have not snapped, and who fear that their heroic restraint will be tainted or overshadowed by comrades who behave despicably." So, apparently, among those who are "willing to betray the decent Iraqi majority" and who are too weak to prove to the terrorists that savagery will not lead to victory are the U.S. Marines and Brooks himself. Of course, all the evidence suggests that the "decent Iraqi majority" is <a href="http://www.worldpublicopinion.org/pipa/articles/home_page/165.php?nid=&id=&amp;pnt=165&lb=hmpg1">more than happy to be betrayed</a>, and would not appreciate it if the Americans started to imitate the ethnic militias they are supposed to be controlling. But these are mere quibbles compared to what is really beyond the pale here, Brooks's suggestion that Americans who are unhappy about, say, Abu Ghraib or Haditha are seeking only to maintain a "parlor purity". I sincerely hope that the "dissenting minority" that Brooks speaks of is indeed a minority, and a tiny one at that, since it would be uncomfortable to live in a country with many people who believe that an opposition to torturing prisoners and massacring civilians is merely a veneer of high-mindedness. Of course, we can easily measure the size of this minority: it happens, not-so-coincidentally, to coincide with the fraction of the population that still supports Bush, about 1/3 of the country. I suppose that this is a large enough group that it deserves to have its views heard on the editorial page of the New York Times, though you'd like to believe that the Times would be willing to draw the line at its columnists suggesting, no matter how carefully, that what the U.S. really needs to do to win in Iraq is be more savage. But if you're naive enough to believe that, you're probably naive enough to believe that the media is actually liberal, or that David Brooks is a sensible conservative with worthwhile opinions, and if you believe <span style="font-style: italic;">that</span>, you'll believe anything.<br /><br />PS: I will try to update regularly over the summer, when I should be less busy, but I make no promises.williehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16145062507112173102noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10096138.post-1127877738905893262005-09-27T22:48:00.000-04:002005-09-27T23:23:33.453-04:00Column 2005-9-25 CommentaryIn his latest column, Brooks inexplicably lays the blame for the increasing gap between those with a college education and those without on the colleges. "The most damning indictment of our university system is that these poorer kids are graduating from high school in greater numbers. It's when they get to college that they begin failing and dropping out. " So says Brooks, despite the fact that a few minutes (ok, maybe more than a few minutes in his case) of thought should make the gaping hole in his argument perfectly clear. According to Brooks, these poor kids graduate from high school with essentially the same education as their more affluent peers: the problem is that colleges just don't treat them right somehow. The obvious rejoinder to this is that most poorer kids receive worse, often far worse, elementary and high school educations than the better-off, and that colleges simply expose these differences. At any rate, it should be obvious that some fault lies with the poor quality of public schools where most poor children receive what education they get. For example, we know this, from Bob Herbert via the <a href="http://www.dailyhowler.com/">Daily Howler</a>: “By the fourth grade, low-income students read about three grade levels behind non-poor students." Will these children catch up to their wealthier peers? What do you think? And even if they don't catch up, a good number of these kids will graduate from high school, as we know from Brooks's (admittedly unsourced) claims. Even assuming that these kids remain only three years behind, it's no wonder that new college students who can barely read at a high school level are "failing and dropping out" in a college with any type of standards. And yet Brooks refuses even to acknowledge the possibility that the pre-college preparation of these poor children may be at fault: indeed, he explicitly states that "Crucial life paths are set at age 18 . . . ." Ok, so even Brooks can't completely ignore what's staring him in the face: he gives the necessity of being "academically prepared, psychologically prepared and culturally prepared for college" a throwaway line at the end of the column. But he, and "Thomas Mortenson of the Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education", the only person whose work is cited in this column and so presumably the source for the whole thing, appear to be blaming colleges for failing to compensate for the abysmal performance of the lower levels of the public school system. Could colleges do more to help lower-income students? Yes, of course. But to concentrate on what they could do, while ignoring the far more pervasive and damaging problems with the public schools, is sheer idiocy. As such, is it any surprise that Brooks is embracing it?williehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16145062507112173102noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10096138.post-1127585751945508262005-09-24T14:05:00.000-04:002005-09-25T00:11:32.913-04:00Column 2005-9-22 CommentaryIn today's column, Brooks gives advice to the Democratic party. He feels the Democrats need to stop being angry and attacking Bush and concentrate more on wonky policy proposals. The fact that approximately nobody else thinks this -- and that, in fact, this is directly opposed to the successful strategies employed by the Republican party over the past few years -- forces one to wonder once again what Democrats would be stupid enough to take Brooks's advice on the direction of the party. Brooks is inspired to tell the Democratic party what it should do with itself by two speeches by prominent Democrats, <a href="http://www.johnkerry.com/pressroom/speeches/spc_2005_09_19.html">Kerry</a> and <a href="http://www.oneamericacommittee.com/20050919.asp">Edwards</a>. (I urge readers to read both speeches and judge for themselves, btw.) According to Brooks, each speaker is responding to Hurricane Katrina in the only way they know how: Kerry with borderline-incoherent Bush-bashing, and Edwards with important policy recommendations. More fundamentally, according to Brooks, these two speeches represent an important divide in the Democratic party, between those who only care about attacking Bush and those who actually want to govern. Incidentally, Edwards's speech mentions Brooks favorably and Kerry's doesn't mention him at all. But I'm sure that this had absolutely no effect on Brooks's analysis.<br /><br />If this strikes you as rather simplistic, that's because you're smarter than Brooks. "Edwards is not so obsessed with power struggles" Brooks writes, and indeed, therein lies the rub. Kerry is currently a politician who is ramping up for the 2006 elections, which will largely be run as a referendum on Bush and his policies. His speech is a highly political speech. Edwards, by contrast, will not be involved in those elections, or strongly involved in politics at all until 2007 at the earliest. Instead, he has plunged into the world of policy, and while he makes some attacks on Bush, the focus of his speech is on programs for dealing with poverty. There's not much partisan politics in it, but that's because, as even Brooks is forced to admit, Edwards is not a politician at the moment. The fact is that these two speeches complement each other. An effective Democratic party requires both the the political and the policy components, and to suggest that these two speeches are actually representative of two divergent strands of thought in the party is very simple-minded. It is also worth noting that the Democrats are not currently in the majority, and so the policy side will inevitably be smaller than the political side, especially in the current political environment where any Democratic proposal is essentially DOA.<br /><br />Having explained why Brooks is wrong in general, let us examine how he gets the details wrong. Specifically, Brooks's analysis of Kerry's speech completely twists its meaning. Kerry begins his speech by saying "And that's what I've come to talk with you about today. The incompetence of Katrina's response is not reserved to a hurricane. There's an enormous gap between Americans' daily expectations and government's daily performance. And the gap is growing between the enduring strength of the American people -- their values, their spirit, their imagination, their ingenuity, and their willingness to serve and sacrifice -- and the shocking weakness of the American government in contending with our country's urgent challenges. On the Gulf Coast during the last two weeks, the depth and breadth of that gap has been exposed for all to see and we have to address it now before it is obscured again by hurricane force spin and deception." It should be clear to the meanest intelligence -- which, apparently, Brooks has yet to achieve -- that Kerry intends to talk about how the incompetence of the response to Katrina is not a fluke, but in fact is a function of the incompetence of the Bush administration as a whole, and that is indeed what he does. "There are many interesting issues raised by Katrina, but for Senator Ahab it all goes back to the great white monster, Bush" says Brooks. While he gets points for the metaphor, Bush is, after all, the president, and what is more a president who has consistently run on a promise to make America safer. When his administration badly bungles the response to a major natural disaster, that's an extremely interesting issue. To a politician, it might well be the most interesting issue: Bush's response, most notably putting his political point man, Karl Rove, in charge of the Gulf Coast reconstruction effort, certainly suggests that Bush thinks so. "Bush and his crew should have known the levees were weak. Bush and his crew should have known thousands of people would be trapped" Brooks paraphrases sarcastically, adding with a parenthetical sneer "(Did I miss Kerry's own warnings on these subjects?)" To which, again, the obvious response is that Bush is the president (not Kerry, who does not have access to all the information Bush can, or should, get from various agencies attached to his administration). And, furthermore, Bush is claims to be the security president, and a hurricane taking out New Orleans was rated one of the three catastrophes most likely to strike the United States. Someone in the administration probably should have known about the status of the levees. Somebody probably should have anticipated that people would have been unable to get out and made contingency plans to evacuate them. But, of course, nobody did. However, anyone can make mistakes. And the DHS is a new agency (even though the decision to fold FEMA into the DHS was made by Bush), so it's believable that even a consistently competent administration could foul this up. Which is why it is necessary for Kerry to point out that the administration, and the Republican party, have been, in fact, consistently incompetent. Brooks dismisses this with "Porn movies have less repetition than this," but in fact the repetition (of facts mentioned in other speeches, not this speech, so it's not even a very good metaphor) is exactly the point: when all the stupidities, incompetences, and corruptions are listed side-by-side, they can not be dismissed as isolated instances but must be regarded as part of a pattern. Brooks wonders disdainfully why Kerry continues to drag out the old "anti-Bush jabs", "DeLay jibes", and "Wolfowitz attacks": "Doesn't this guy ever get bored?" But, of course, Wolfowitz was spectacularly wrong about Iraq. Tom DeLay is entirely corrupt: hell, Brooks even wrote a column about it (see the archives). And Bush has screwed up so many things it's not even funny any more. Sometimes it's good to keep reminding people of the facts. Brooks concludes that "this is not a normal speech designed to persuade or inform, but a primitive rite designed to channel group outrage." He is, of course, wrong: the speech is intended to persuade people that Bush's record indicated that he is a bad president. Judging by recent poll numbers, people are starting to get the message: perhaps this is why Brooks is attacking the messenger.<br /><br />Finally, the most inexplicable part of this column is that Brooks seems to think that Edwards's speech represents a less partisan, more centrist wing of the Democratic party. This strongly suggests that Brooks didn't actually read Edwards's speech. In the speech, Edwards praises the New Deal and points out that the War on Poverty, though it had some faults, was quite successful. He says "If you work full-time, you shouldn't have to raise your children in poverty." He wants to raise the minimum wage to at least $7.50 an hour and "give [workers] back a real right to organize." He proposes offering workers money they can use for down payments on houses, expanding the EITC to help families save, and subsidizing housing for poor people so they can move into better neighborhoods. Edwards also wants to give everyone their first year of college free. And how will he pay for it? Largely by raising taxes on the rich: repealing the Bush tax cuts for the richest 1% and changing the Alternative Minimum Tax so that it applies to only to the rich, as it was originally designed to. Now, this program certainly doesn't go nearly far enough, in my opinion. For one thing, Edwards barely mentions health care and is vague on just how a "real right to organize" would be achieved. Furthermore, why just one year of college? Why not four years for free? There are other shortcomings, but the fact remains that Edwards wants to raise taxes on the rich to pay for programs to lift the poor out of poverty. If that's not liberalism, I don't know what is. And if Brooks thinks the Democratic party is ever going to return to "Clintonian centrism", he is much mistaken. "Bush may end up changing the Democratic Party more than his own." Brooks opines. Well, that may not be true: Bush has had a major effect on his own party as well. But if Edwards will come to define the right wing of the Democratic party, Bush may have accomplished one good thing after all.williehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16145062507112173102noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10096138.post-1127359747985672492005-09-21T22:55:00.000-04:002005-09-21T23:29:07.993-04:00Column 2005-9-18 CommentaryIn order to really understand this column, it's important that you read Brooks's own words, so I'm going to do some direct quoting here:<br /><br />"On Oct. 5, 1999, George Bush went to the Manhattan Institute and delivered the most important domestic policy speech of his life. . . . he also broke with mainstream conservatism as it then existed. . . . Then he bluntly repudiated the small government conservatism that marked the Gingrich/Armey era.<br /><br />It's not enough to cut the size of government, Bush said, or simply get government out of the way. Instead, Republicans have to come up with a positive vision of "focused and effective and energetic government."<br /><br />With that, Bush set off on a journey to define what he called "compassionate conservatism" and what others call big government conservatism. . . .<br /><br />Over the past five years, Bush has overseen the fastest increase in domestic spending of any president in recent history. Moreover, he's never resolved the contradiction between his compassionate spending policy and his small-government tax policy.<br /><br />But gradually and fitfully, Bush has muddled his way toward something important, a positive use of government that is neither big government liberalism nor antigovernment libertarianism. "<br /><br />The rest of the column is a lot of fluff about how Bush's programs for the area devastated by Katrina are going to <s>give lots of money to important campaign contributors and politically connected corporations</s> turn everything into a conservative utopia of "enhance[d] individual initiative and personal responsibility" (the latter of which is, of course, only for poor people, not presidents). But the beginning is as egregiously ludicrous a description of Bush's domestic policy program as has ever been written, and surely ranks among the most moronic words Brooks has ever committed to paper. Bush's domestic policy (or, at least, the economic aspects of it), insofar as it doesn't involve giving money to corporations and the rich, is really quite simple. Prior to Bush, the two parties had roughly opposite philosophies: for the Democrats, tax and spend, and for the Republicans, don't tax and don't spend (I am, of course, generalizing like mad here, but then so is Brooks). Bush's (or, more likely, Rove's) idea was to combine the popular parts of these programs -- the spending from the former and the not taxing from the latter -- and make that their new program, what Brooks refers to as "big government conservatism" (with, of course, much of that spending going to the rich, corporations, etc., but we're not dealing with that now). Brooks remarks on the "contradiction" between the two parts of this program as if this is a knotty problem that will be resolved in time, but of course it won't be. Bush has no intention of raising taxes or seriously cutting spending: either would be politically unpopular, and since he cares far more about politics than policy -- after all, why else would Rove be in charge of the Gulf Coast rebuilding effort? -- political concerns about popularity ratings will trump policy concerns about deficits every time. Essentially, Bush's fiscal policy is to recklessly bankrupt the U.S. by throwing money at problems -- the <a href="http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2005_09_11.php#006541">Katrina response</a> is the latest example in a long list, including Iraq and the Medicare prescription drug benefit -- while cutting taxes. Remember, this is a president who has never vetoed a spending bill. Regardless of the quality of the programs taking up this much money, this is simply not a sustainable course. And this is what Brooks is lauding as a "positive use of government". It's sickening.<br /><br />PS: When one realizes that almost all the new spending is intended to give money away to corporations and the rich while simultaneously helping the Republicans stay just popular enough to keep winning, it really starts to look like the Republican party -- or at least the corporate elites who run it -- is simply looting the U.S. government, on the theory that by the time the crash comes, they'll be safely away and everybody else will be left holding the baby. Sadly, they may be right.williehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16145062507112173102noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10096138.post-1126917803240801332005-09-15T20:41:00.000-04:002005-09-16T20:43:23.256-04:00Column 2005-9-15 CommentaryBrooks makes it easy for me with his latest, an actually funny column. Of course, not even Brooks could fail to be funny when the target of his satire is the Roberts confirmation hearing. This column is hardly perfect, but the nitpicks will be left as an exercise for the reader.williehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16145062507112173102noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10096138.post-1126753812191080932005-09-14T22:14:00.000-04:002005-09-14T23:14:32.920-04:00Column 2005-9-11 CommentaryFirst, an administrative note: now that I'm a graduate student, my time has many more demands on it than before, and the recent trend in which my posts become shorter, more erratic, and, I fear, worse is likely to continue. Hopefully all five of my readers will be able to bear up under this crushing blow.<br /><br />Brooks's latest column demonstrates conclusively that he has gotten over the devastation of Hurrican Katrina. How can one tell? Simple: he is back to spouting Republican talking points, in this case the claim that the failure of the Bush administration to deal effectively with the aftermath of Katrina is not their fault, but instead is due to the fact that government simply can't deal with something like Katrina. The government had a great plan, he says -- well, actually, he spends the first half of the column making fun of the bureaucratic nature of the plan, which makes his sudden approval of it rather surprising -- but government being government, all tangled up in bureaucracy and whatnot, it simply can't implement the plan effectively. This piece of propaganda would be more believable were it not that the implementation of the plan was so obviously screwed up that only a Brooks could believe that it could not have been done better. When the government leaders who are supposed to be in charge of the emergency response are getting information on the situation <a href="http://dailyhowler.com/dh091305.shtml">from the journalists</a> who are interviewing them, it's hard to simply shrug one's shoulders and blame bureacratic inefficency. When the head of Homeland Security <a href="http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2005_09_11.php#006536">doesn't seem to know</a> what he's supposed to do to set the implementation of the plan in motion (or possibly even understand the mechanism under which he acquires the power to do so), one starts to wonder whether, even if government can never be perfect, it can at least be better than this. (In the interests of balance, it must be noted that Tom Delay believes that government is currently running at <a href="http://atrios.blogspot.com/2005_09_11_atrios_archive.html#112670931487167987">peak efficiency</a>. Which side of the argument this supports is left to the reader to determine.) When it becomes clear that the <a href="http://www.pnionline.com/dnblog/attytood/archives/002346.html">top staff</a> of the agency which is intended to deal with situations such as this one was made up almost entirely of political appointees whose qualifications tended to have to do with managing political campaigns rather than natural disasters, and that its head appears to have achieved his position by dint of being the college roommate of the previous agency head, who achieved <span style="font-style: italic;">his</span> position because he was a close associate of the president, one really starts to question whether bureaucracy is entirely at fault here.<br /><br />Leaving these questions aside, though, this is a deeply pessimistic theory of government, and one that furthermore seems to be entirely at variance with Bush's, and hence Brooks's, ideas. After all, Bush has run on his ability to do big things with government, most notably keep Americans safe from terrorists. If government is unable to deal with a hurricane, it presumably can't do anything about a terrorist attack. And as for spreading democracy in the Middle East in order to defeat terrorism? If Brooks doesn't believe that it is possible for the American government to coordinate a relief effort to a relatively small area of the United States in a timely fashion, how can he, in good conscience, support a plan to reshape the political landscape of a large, volatile area of the world? Obviously, government would be bound to screw it up. Of course, a Brooksian government would be unable to do anything, except maybe pass tax cuts. Which makes it a perfect government to some movement conservatives, but most people believe government can do more. Even the Dobsons of the world think that government can effectively regulate morality, if nothing else. The fact that Brooks has been reduced to blaming the system for Republican failures -- once again proving that personal responsibility is only for the poor and non-white -- shows just how afraid Republicans are of this latest proof that they are incapable of governing effectively. "You might as well elect me, nobody else will do better anyway" is a slogan that may deter blame in the short run but is hardly likely to inspire confidence in the public.<br /><br />But it is also worth noting that many movement conservatives truly believe Brooks's thesis -- for instance, everybody has heard Grover Norquists's quote about wanting to shrink government to the size where he could drown it in the bathtub -- and that this belief in the inherent inability of government to do anything is at least partly responsible for the complete incompetence the Bush administration has demonstrated. When people who believe that government can do nothing come into power, their convictions become self-fulfilling. FEMA will never be able to really deal with a big disaster anyway, so why not fill its top ranks with political operatives? The government would only waste this tax money: why not funnel it to major contributors? And when something big goes wrong, well, of course it did: after all, this is the government we're talking about here. Unfortunately for the movement conservatives, most Americans aren't going to simply accept that due to government shortcomings that nobody will ever be able to overcome, there will be nobody to help them for days in the aftermath of a major disaster. It is, hopefully, finally becoming apparent that when you vote for people who don't believe that the government can (or, for that matter, should) help you, you don't get helped. In the face of this fact, Brooks's claim that nobody can help you anyway is unlikely to be popular, especially when it's so obviously wrong. In this way, this column is actually quite encouraging: when the excuses are so poor, the excuse-makers are obviously in trouble.williehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16145062507112173102noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10096138.post-1126380312840313252005-09-10T15:24:00.000-04:002005-09-10T16:18:00.220-04:00Column 2005-9-8 CommentaryIn his latest column, self-declared conservative David Brooks proposes a massive program of governmental social engineering: the displaced poor of New Orleans, many of whom have lost everything, should be resettled in better-off neighborhoods around the U.S. How Brooks reconciles this proposal with his conservatism is unclear. Not that I'm complaining. Or rather, I am complaining, for several reasons. First of all, I don't think it's overly cynical to wonder about the difficulty of getting better-off communities to <a href="http://www.cadenhead.org/workbench/news/2748">accept an influx</a> of poor blacks. I'm also somewhat suspicious of Brooks's motives in moving so rapidly to the question of what is to be done now, and, what is more, addressing the one situation that was probably unavoidable: large numbers of poor refugees. This may well simply be reflexive cynicism on my part, and Brooks's naivete has been well documented, and if this were all this column would be fairly non-objectionable.<br /><br />However, the column also suffers from Brooks's usual refusal to accept that poverty is not simply a product of societal bad habits. To Brooks, a society falls into poverty because its members get used to dropping out of school, having kids young, and committing crimes. After all, everybody around them is doing it, right? The obvious solution is therefore to move the poor people to richer neighborhoods where nobody drops out of school, becomes teenage parents, or commits crimes: once they see that doing those things is not a good idea, they'll be fine. There is certainly some merit to this argument, but it would be incredibly simple-minded to assume that this argument encapsulates the problem of poverty. The main problem here is that poverty tends to cause these behaviors, rather than vice versa. For instance, many people commit crimes because they are poor and need money. People drop out of school because they are poor and need to work a job instead. This is Brooks's biggest blind spot (which is a very bold statement, as he has no shortage): he sees only cultural explanations for everything and refuses to accept that economics may also play a role. He is incapable of recognizing that one of the reasons past programs along these lines were successful is because not only the cultural but also the economic influences were changed. The poor people were given better housing. Their kids went to better schools. Their new neighborhoods were better protected than their old ones. And all of this has nothing to do with culture and everything to with money (and, partly, race, but let's not get into that now). And this is, really, the most frustrating part of this column. In one way, this is a really good idea. New Orleans is likely to be uninhabitable for months, so most people won't be able to go back anyway, and this proposal would probably help them a lot. But in the bigger picture, this is, in many ways, an abdication of responsibility. After all, even Brooks would have to admit that the entire poor population of the United States cannot be resettled in richer neighborhoods. However, we can attempt to improve their lives by replicating the advantages they would receive in richer neighborhoods -- better schools, better housing, etc. -- where they actually live. That is the real way to defeat poverty, not resettlement programs that depend on a vast natural disaster to give them impetus. In the final analysis, Brooks deserves credit for proposing this idea: sadly, his prejudices make it impossible for him to go beyond it to an actual poverty-fighting program.williehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16145062507112173102noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10096138.post-1125852497889889722005-09-04T12:22:00.000-04:002005-09-04T12:48:17.903-04:00Column 2005-9-4 CommentaryToday, Brooks predicts that the political culture is about to change significantly: that Katrina is the event around which popular dissatisfaction will crystallize, leading to a sea change which Brooks compares with the Reagan revolution. What's really amazing about the column is not that Brooks predicts a major political shift, but that he admits that there is significant discontent among the American people. He retains some foolish optimism -- he is still unable to comprehend that GDP growth is not the be-all and end-all of economic statistics, and that a supposedly strong economy is not helping everyone, as the <a href="http://www.theage.com.au/news/Business/US-poverty-rate-rises-again/2005/08/31/1125302593924.html">steady rise</a> in the poverty rate and slow decline in real median household income over the last few years makes clear (and, of course, Katrina is unlikely to be kind to the economy, especially as <a href="http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nm/20050831/bs_nm/energy_gasoline_spike_dc">gas prices skyrocket</a>) -- but overall there is a palpable air of gloom hanging over this column. Much of the piece is a litany of depressing pronouncements: "confidence in civic institutions is plummeting", "Last week's national humiliation comes at the end of a string of confidence-shaking institutional failures", "this will be known as the grueling decade, the Hobbesian decade." While Brooks never mentions Bush or refers to the administration or Congress by name, it's an easy connection to make. After all, who has been president throughout this decade so far? It really seems that the hurricane has destroyed Brooks's confidence in the administration and possibly even in the Republican party as currently constituted: he's depressed enough that he can't even rule out the possibility of a "progressive resurgence" instead of one of his idols -- McCain or Giuliani -- taking over. And that is the amazing thing about this column: it's a conservative columnist writing "People are mad as hell, unwilling to take it anymore." Brooks has gone off the reservation, and if the Republican's can't keep Brooks under control, what hope do they have?williehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16145062507112173102noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10096138.post-1125632121854246412005-09-01T19:53:00.000-04:002005-09-01T23:40:41.363-04:00Column 2005-9-1: Special 2005-8-28 EditionToday's Brooks offering is completely reasonable: Brooks points out that past floods exposed injustices and caused social change -- bolstering his argument with well-chosen historical examples -- and that we can probably expect something similar from Hurrican Katrina, given that most of the people currently suffering in the hurricane's aftermath are poor and black. This is all a pleasant surprise, allowing me to go back to his August 28 column, which I never discussed, and go over that one instead.<br /><br />On August 28, Brooks presented a counterinsurgency strategy for the administration to use in Iraq. In essence, Brooks suggests that it might be a good idea to try to lock the barn door after the horses have left and the barn has been burned to the ground. I'm not going to dispute the merits of the Krepinevich "oil spot" strategy that Brooks likes so much (in which American forced would take over a handful of territories, largely abandoning the rest, and provide total security and cash in the areas they controlled, thus winning over the natives): for all I know, it would have worked (according to Brooks, it worked in Malaya in the 1950's and "other places" which are not specified.) But it's far too late to implement it now, not for military reasons (though there are certainly military difficulties) but for political ones. To be fair to Brooks, he is at least bright enough to recognize that this is the case. He points out that the "oil spot" strategy, relying as it does on a heavy troop presence and playing down American advantages in technology and firepower, is anathema to the Rumsfeld way of fighting wars. And he notes that the war has not been fought with an eye to the long term, but instead from one "turning point" to the next. However, he blames these problems on Rumsfeld and the "military brass" respectively, and turns to Bush as a man who has been misled by his advisors but who will be eager to correct his mistakes once he realizes them. Of course, the problems that Brooks mentions are intimately connected, and stem partly from the fact that the administration failed to make any preparations for a long-term insurgency (<a href="http://www.defenselink.mil/transcripts/2003/tr20030727-depsecdef0462.html">Wolfowitz</a>: "It's hard to conceive that it would take more forces to provide stability in post-Saddam Iraq than it would take to conduct the war itself and secure the surrender of Saddam's security forces and his army.") and partly from the political imperatives of obtaining popular support for a pre-emptive war and maintaining that support as the stated reasons for fighting the war evaporated.<br /><br />Recall that the war <a href="http://www.usatoday.com/educate/war28-article.htm">was to be over</a> in "six days, six weeks. I doubt six months." It was sold as a quick little war that would show that America was invincible: the mighty American army would carelessly flick Saddam out of the way, expose his stocks of WMD's and ties to Al Qaeda, and leave the grateful Iraqis their very own democracy, all in less than a year, while the American people looked on proudly. Rumsfeld certainly wanted a chance to prove that light, mobile forces with overwhelming firepower were the wave of the future, but this vision of the war also required a small fighting force, partly as a demonstration of American might and partly so that the vast majority of the American people could sit on the sidelines and cheer without having to worry about loved ones in danger (or, far, far worse from a political perspective, the possibility of a draft). Of course, it took only a few months for this narrative to start to break down, and to break down in almost every possible way, leaving the administration with the problem of maintaining public support as it became clear that the war the public supported was not the one the U.S. was actually fighting. The democracy part of the war rationale, being the only part that had not collapsed irretrievably, was therefore elevated above the others, and to compensate for the fact that the war had turned from a preemptive strike to an exercise in nation-building, the administration constantly announced that we were winning and everything would be over soon. Well, they were a little more subtle than that: a series of turning points were each hailed as the sign of the imminent end of the war. Perhaps the administration even believed its own hype. At any rate, a "heavy troop presence" and an "acknowledge[ment] that this will be a long, gradual war" -- two things that Brooks thinks are required to implement this "oil spot" strategy -- were exactly what the administration did not want.<br /><br />And at this point it is far too late to do anything about the situation. Disregarding the folly of thinking that a man who does not believe that he makes mistakes (or at least refuses to admit to them) would get up and essentially concede that almost everything his administration has done in Iraq thus far was wrong, and even leaving out the domestic political repercussions of saying that we need to completely start over in Iraq and prepare to be there for a decade at least with twice as many troops as we have at present, the plan simply would not work in the current environment. It would require more troops than we currently have in Iraq, and it seems unlikely that most Iraqis would welcome more American troops. It would require largely abandoning the political process that the U.S. has invested so much in, or at best leaving the Shiites and Kurds to govern themselves while the U.S. engages in massive counterinsurgency operations in Baghdad and the Sunni heartland. The constitution-writing process has no place in the "oil spot" strategy. Providing countrywide security for the referendum on the constitution is definitely counterindicated by the strategy. Attempting to reinforce the power of the central government throughout Iraq is also not compatible with it. Most likely, the result of a move to the "oil spot" strategy would be to further divide the Sunnis from the rest of Iraq, which is hardly the desired result. Keeping in mind that political considerations are always paramount with this administration, though, this analysis is completely unnecessary. Perhaps in ten years the strategy would have worked, but over the next few years it would be a political disaster, and that is why it will never be implemented.<br /><br />It is notable, though, the Brooks is willing to admit that at the moment the U.S. is failing in Iraq. He is not yet blaming it on Bush, but perhaps he is simply setting himself up to desert the sinking ship. Brooks does have a certain amount of animal cunning, and with this column he acknowledges the problems in Iraq and presents a solution. It's an unworkable solution, to be sure, and Brooks may well be perfectly aware of that fact, but it allows him to say in a year or two that he saw the problems and pointed out what the administration should have done, but they failed to change course and so he has no choice but to regretfully abandon his support for the Iraq venture, an excellent idea sadly bungled. Of course, he may just be a moron who refuses to accept that the time for discussing strategies for winning is past: the U.S. has lost, and the only realistic thing to do now is to try to determine how to keep any further losses to a minimum. Either way, though, a respected conservative thinker like Brooks -- how he acquired the first and third of those adjectives remains a mystery -- has come out and said that the American occupation of Iraq has been horribly mismanaged from the beginning. It's another indication that the tide of public opinion is beginning to turn, and none too soon.williehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16145062507112173102noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10096138.post-1125108632404851022005-08-25T19:49:00.000-04:002005-08-26T22:12:18.193-04:00Column 2005-8-25 Brief CommentarySadly, I lack the time to discuss all the problems with Brooks's latest effort, so I'm going to focus on the big picture instead. Also, in this case the big picture is extremely important, as Brooks is unveiling what will almost certainly become a common conservative tactic as the inevitable Iraq withdrawal approaches: declaring victory at the drop of a hat. Here, Brooks declares victory because a constitution has been written, or at least <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/discussion/2005/08/22/DI2005082200830.html">"exists in people's heads and in copies annotated with handwritten notes."</a> It is worth noting that Brooks's premise is extremely flimsy, as the constitution has not yet been adopted (and given Sunni attitudes, <a href="http://nytimes.com/2005/08/26/international/middleeast/26cnd-iraq.html">may well not be</a>), and even if it is it remains to be seen just how effective it can be in a country where every major political party is associated with a heavily-armed militia and political disagreements can quickly become <a href="http://today.reuters.co.uk/news/newsArticle.aspx?type=worldNews&storyID=2005-08-24T211551Z_01_EIC252492_RTRUKOC_0_UK-IRAQ.xml">full-fledged battles</a>. Furthermore, it appears that the constitution <a href="http://billmon.org/archives/002105.html">will enshrine Islam</a> as a major part of law, trampling on women's rights, and essentially split the country in three parts. This is hardly the beacon of democracy that we were promised. But the fact is that the reason why Brooks is declaring victory here is really irrelevant: desperate conservatives will likely start declaring victory whenever anything that could be interpreted as good news appears. What is really important is to point out that unless current conditions change drastically, victory in Iraq is unachievable. The administration launched this war for no good reason, didn't prepare for it, and has now almost certainly lost it, and those such as Brooks who will assert that some event suggests otherwise need to quickly disabused of any such notion. Army Major General Joseph Taluto <a href="http://www.nola.com/newsflash/iraq/index.ssf?/base/politics-8/1125076741188390.xml&storylist=iraq">describes the insurgency</a> as "intrinsic" and, as noted above, political violence exists outside of the Sunni insurgency as well. <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/06/19/AR2005061900729.html">Unemployment</a> is around 50%. <a href="http://www.villagevoice.com/blogs/bushbeat/archive/001097.php">Power</a> is out in Baghdad for 20 hours a day. And <a href="http://www.iranmania.com/News/ArticleView/Default.asp?NewsCode=34674&NewsKind=Current%20Affairs">Iran</a> is vying with the U.S. to express its appreciation of the new constitution. No WMD's were found. Saddam and Osama weren't best buddies after all. Neocons once derided those who said that stability should take precedence over democracy in foreign policy: now they're willing to endorse a semi-theocracy in the likely vain hope of achieving that previously mocked goal. While there are multiple scenarios in which the U.S. could declare victory in Iraq -- a perfect Jeffersonian democracy is not a requirement -- none of them have any resemblance to the reality there. It is especially galling, then, for Brooks to write that the U.S. has succeeded in Iraq. This goes beyond moving the goalposts: Brooks is busily stringing a volleyball net across the field and looking at the football as if he's never seen it before. Since achieving what they set out to accomplish is probably impossible, the administration and its cheerleaders are likely to take any hint of good news as an opportunity to declare that current conditions are actually what they wanted all along, and they must not be allowed to do so.williehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16145062507112173102noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10096138.post-1124408677918304102005-08-18T19:42:00.000-04:002005-08-18T19:45:19.313-04:00David Brooks is currently following Bush's exampleBy taking as much of August off as possible. No word on whether he will refuse to speak to a mother who lost her son in the Iraq war as well.<br /><br />Actually, I'm glad that Brooks is on vacation again, as I don't have time to deal with his idiocy right now, so I'm going to stop complaining.williehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16145062507112173102noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10096138.post-1124056710008871862005-08-14T17:52:00.000-04:002005-08-14T17:58:30.013-04:00Column 2005-8-24 CommentaryTo my shock, I actually found myself agreeing with today's Brooks column. Brooks thinks that the best way to reduce illegal immigration is to increase legal immigration, which makes sense to me. He points out that increasing the number of border guards isn't too effective, and ridicules the idea of "beer-swilling good old boys" going out to guard the border. The one thing he doesn't address is the demand side: penalties for corporations that employ illegal immigrants. Otherwise, though, a very reasonable column that even includes an endorsement of a bill co-sponsored by Ted Kennedy. How he manages to switch from dribbling idiocy to sense in a mere three days is completely beyond me.williehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16145062507112173102noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10096138.post-1123905106376426122005-08-11T21:03:00.000-04:002005-08-13T14:51:48.243-04:00Column 2005-8-11 Commentary(Update below)<br /><br />Brooks's last two columns had reasonable moments, but in his latest column, Brooks falls back to his usual level. In it, he attempts to create the field of "cultural geography", which seems to simply be the study of cultures and why they are different. "Study why and how people cluster, why certain national traits endure over centuries, why certain cultures embrace technology and economic growth and others resist them" Brooks says to the hypothetical "18-year-old kid with a really big brain" whom he seems to think reads his column regularly in the search for any advice he can get from one of the greatest morons -- or rather, public intellectuals -- of our time. Frankly, this doesn't sound quite as revolutionary or interesting as Brooks seems to think it is. For instance, take the question about the persistence of certain national traits. It seems pretty obvious that insofar as traits do persist, they do so because the vast majority of people in any given nation were born there and inherited those traits from their parents, or, if not from their parents, then from other children and the parents of these other children, in the same way that the children of immigrants learn to speak the language of their new country without an accent. In fact, one might as well ask why certain nations keep speaking the same language for centuries. Of course, they don't: languages evolve over time, and the same is likely true for national traits. Before Brooks's question about why certain cultures reject economic growth and technology can be answered, he's going to have to give some examples of such cultures that aren't extreme religious groups engaged in a blanket rejection of modernity. Otherwise, the question doesn't seem to be worth asking. And finally, Brooks wants to know why people cluster. Luckily, I can answer that one too: because human beings are gregarious animals, and they are gregarious because they evolved from other gregarious animals. Presumably, what Brooks really wants to ask is why people cluster with other like-minded people, but I feel that this question practically answers itself. After all, this is not exactly a new phenomenon. Consider the Amish, or the Mormons, or the early Puritans. Artist colonies, such as Greenwich Village or the Left Bank, form another not particularly recent example. The human tendency to band together against those that are different is as old as humanity. So too are the two outsider responses: forming one's own group or assimilating. Modern technology makes it easier to find like-minded people and to form a group with them, et voila.<br /><br />Brooks doesn't actually try to answer these questions right away, though: first, he reinforces his conservative credentials by attacking "the gospel of multiculturalism". Incidentally, most of Brooks's columns these days seem to have an attack on some conservative bugaboo -- the academy, Europe, multiculturalism, etc. -- shoehorned in for no particular reason. One has to wonder if Brooks's handlers are perhaps worried about his devotion to the movement and are making sure that he toes the party line. Whatever may be the reason, Brooks makes his usual sweeping assertions without providing a shred of proof, and then, having apparently convinced the Party bosses that he's not backsliding, is free to continue with his column and this gem of a statement: "But none of this helps explain a crucial feature of our time: while global economies are converging, cultures are diverging, and the widening cultural differences are leading us into a period of conflict, inequality and segmentation." First of all, I defy Brooks to identify any period of human history that could not be described as one of "conflict, inequality, and segmentation." In fact, one could easily argue that this period of human history has considerably less conflict than some quite recent ones, e.g. the Cold War. It's hard to argue that there is more inequality now than there has been before, and as for segmentation, it's unclear if segmentation enforced by distance is any better or worse than a more voluntary sort. Secondly, I would like to quibble with Brooks's claim that "cultures are diverging". In fact, I'd argue that at no point in human history have all the world's cultures ever been as similar as they are now. I'll try to avoid sounding too much like Thomas Friedman, but if I can see in a New York Times (no link, as the article is too old to be available for free) photograph of the interior of the Beijing (or possibly Shanghai) subway system the exact same IPod ad campaign that is visible in the T here in Boston, then it seems to me that cultural differences are not exactly widening. Perhaps in the United States the cultural difference between, say, Massachusetts and Mississippi is wider than it used to be (though I'm not sure about that), but Brooks is talking about a global phenomenon. All in all, this sentence definitely qualifies as one of the stupidest Brooks has ever written. It's a signal achievement, and I feel proud to have been associated with it, albeit only distantly.<br /><br />Naturally, Brooks can't keep up this level of idiocy throughout the column, but he's clearly trying hard and produces some quite respectable work. For instance, we find that "People are taking advantage of freedom and technology to create new groups and cultural zones." And yet "Old national identities and behavior patterns are proving surprisingly durable." There would seem to be a contradiction between these two statements. The first suggests that people are abandoning old cultures for new, while the second asserts that those old cultures are actually not much damaged. But Brooks doesn't seem to see any conflict between these sentences: in fact, he presents them back to back, and appears to think that both provide evidence for his assertion that globalization and technology are not "bringing us together." Next, Brooks redefines "globalized" to mean "economically integrated". Now, while economic integration is certainly part of any definition of globalization, there's a lot more to globalization than that. There's the little matter of the root word, "global", for instance. Why does Brooks redefine "globalized" in this fashion? So he can say "We in America have been "globalized" (meaning economically integrated) for centuries . . . ." If economically integrated is what he means, then why the hell doesn't he just say so?<br /><br />Brooks goes on to point out, in a tone of wonder, that there are lots of American subcultures and fewer cultural unifiers, even though America is so economically integrated. Actually, Brooks points out that the mass media market is heavily segmented, which is not really the same thing. For example, the advent of cable means that the television market is highly segmented, with channels for practically anything, but it's not as if there is no overlap at all between people who watch ESPN and those who watch the Cartoon Network. And, of course, mass media segmentation is a function of economic integration (and better technology). Again using television as an example, cable only works because the more esoteric channels can be pumped into almost every house in the country, meaning that the pool of possible viewers is large enough that even if only a small fraction actually want to watch the channel there are still enough viewers that the channel is viable. And what makes this wide pool of potential viewers possible is, obviously, economic integration.<br /><br />So Brooks strikes out with his first example of something that future cultural geographers could ponder. His next is just very obvious: liberals tend to move to liberal places (for some reason, Brooks says "crunchy" instead of liberal: I suspect it's supposed to be an insult, but it's just too obscure to qualify), and conservatives to conservative places. Golly gee, whyever could this be? Moving right along before the impulse to bang my head against my desk becomes too strong, we find that people don't all work on farms or factories any more. Which is true, but the reasons for that are well-documented and have little to do with culture. This is followed by yet another blindingly obvious observation: military and civilian cultures diverge. This is also an awful example, since it has nothing to do with the cultural changes of globalization and everything to do with the fact that the United States has a volunteer army, which places the risk of dying in a war entirely on one segment of the population. Next comes another reference to political polarization, except that the geographic component has been removed. In fact, there isn't a geographic component to either of the last two examples, or to the mass media example, for that matter. Which really reduces Brooks to saying that some Americans live differently from others. If Brooks really thinks that this is an important trend that needs to be examined, he's stupider than even I thought.<br /><br />Next, Brooks attempts to globalize his phenomenon. Here, he does a better job, painting a picture of anti-globalization advocates and the extremely religious -- ranging from the simply "orthodox" to Islamist terrorists -- banding together to form their own groups. But, again, there's nothing really complicated here. Modern technology allows people to choose to follow any ideology or religion they like and to get together with other people who make the same choices. Two hundred, one hundred, or even fifty years ago this was impossible, or at least very, very difficult. But today the world is full of highly literate people who control wealth that was unthinkable for most of human history. Their literacy means that they are not restricted to the beliefs they were brought up with. Their wealth allows them to communicate with others almost anywhere in the world instantly and travel almost anywhere in the world in a few days. Given all this, it would be surprising only if we did not see this kind of clustering of like-minded people.<br /><br />Having spent most of the column bumbling about, Brooks finally shows why he thinks this "cultural geography" is significant. "Transnational dreams are faltering" he says, referring to European integration and, inexplicably, Arab unity. I'm pretty sure that Arab unity has been dead for a couple of decades at least. The <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Arab_Republic">United Arab Republic</a> ended in 1961, and the Arab League is much closer to the Organization of America States than the E.U., so it seems that the dream of Arab unity passed the faltering stage some time ago. Of course, what Brooks really cares about here is attacking the E.U. This is fairly typical, as is the swipe at Europeans for not working more and Canadians for not having more babies (I guess that Brooks felt that if he kept piling on the Europeans, people would start to think that he has something against Europe or something). Admittedly, he phrases these in neutral language -- fertility rates and work hours are "diverging" -- but Brooks has spent enough time talking about how low fertility rates and insufficient work hours will be the death of Europe that it's pretty clear that he expects future cultural geographers to spend a lot of time analyzing just why the United States is so much better than Europe and Canada. And finally we have this: "Global inequality widens as some nations with certain cultural traits prosper and others with other traits don't." Perhaps Brooks's earlier attack on "the gospel of multiculturalism" was also intended to cover himself against the inevitable backlash of people wondering if it's just a coincidence that in this analysis the countries with bad cultural traits tend not to be those inhabited by white people, and that this means that the non-white people are entirely responsible for their problems. On the other hand, Brooks said in his denunciation of multiculturalism that "there are a certain number of close-minded thugs . . . who accuse anybody who asks intelligent questions about groups and enduring traits of being racist . . . ." And since imputing that whether or not nations prosper is entirely dependent on their cultural traits and has nothing to do with history is certainly not intelligent, it appears that he has no outs at all on this one.<br /><br />Finally, Brooks tosses away any shreds of credibility he retains by citing noted psuedoscientist and moron <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_P._Huntington">Samuel Huntington</a> as one of the people that potential cultural geographers should emulate. Huntington is the man who once said that South Africa was more content than France in the early 1960's, using some ginned-up formula that took statistics like the number of telephones per capita and turned them into a "satisfaction index". If you're not sure just how satisfied South Africa was during the early '60's, look it up. You could start by googling "sharpeville massacre". And just last year Huntington published a book in which he claimed that Latino immigration was undermining the Anglo-Saxon character of the United States and that Mexican values, such as laziness (okay, he didn't actually say that, but he did say "lack of ambition" and "acceptance of poverty") are incompatible with the proud Anglo-Saxon ideals that have made the United States what it is today. Brooks finishes his column with one last appeal to the youths: "If you are 18 and you've got that big brain, the whole field of cultural geography is waiting for you." All I can say is that if the eighteen-year-olds Brooks is addressing can't figure out that a field which is supported by Brooks and where Samuel Huntington is a figure to emulate is not something that they want to be associated with, they can't have that big of a brain after all.<br /><br />Update: Courtesy of <a href="http://sadlyno.com/archives/001616.html">Sadly, No!</a> we find that Brooks is even less revolutionary than we thought. A google search for "cultural geography" gives about 202,000 hits, the first one of which is to the <a href="http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&ct=res&cd=1&url=http%3A//www.geog.okstate.edu/users/culture/culture.htm&ei=7j_-QrKvNJquac7TrTA">Journal of Cultural Geography</a>. So, um, it seems that this field is a little more established than Brooks thinks. Especially when one realizes that cultural geography bears more than a passing resemblance to anthropology. Could this column be Brooks's stupidest ever? Well, we're too lazy to go back and compare it to all his others, but in the true Brooksian tradition, we say yes it is, evidence and research be damned.williehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16145062507112173102noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10096138.post-1123380870065988382005-08-07T21:45:00.000-04:002005-08-06T22:25:07.870-04:00Column 2005-8-7 CommentaryI don't know what's gotten into Brooks, but once again his column is full of actual facts, with actual sources cited. Actually, his column is practically all statistics, positive ones having to do with falls in domestic abuse, teen pregnancy, etc., etc., etc. Of course, once he gets done with facts, the column falls apart, but it still leaves two-thirds of a reasonable column, which is well above Brooks's average. He begins with: "According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the rate of family violence in this country has dropped by more than half since 1993. I've been trying to figure out why." However, the column leaves a distinct impression that he's really not sure. Not that this is necessarily a bad thing: I was afraid he would simply give all the credit to the religious right. He then lists statistics and finally gives four "explanations" for why all these good things are happening, because he's a columnist and so not allowed to simply throw up his hands and declare that he has no idea what's going on. Sadly, his explanations are, for the most part, not based on nearly as solid ground as the rest of the column, and seem fairly inadequate anyway. His first explanation is that nobody believes any more that "the traditional family is obsolete, that drugs are liberating, that it is every adolescent's social duty to be a rebel." My guess is that exactly the same people who used to believe these things still believe them, and that this number was never very large, and still isn't. Since Brooks relapses here by not offering any evidence for this claim, my guess is apparently just as good as his. (And people may not believe that "drugs are liberating" any more, but none of the statistics he gives suggest a decline in drug use.) Next he posits that Americans have become better parents, and actually supplies evidence (an increase in the amount of hours parents spend "constructively engaging" with their children) to suggest that this is true, so I'll take him at his word. His third argument is that those under 30 are reacting against the "culture of divorce" and trying to lead more stable lives than their parents. I think it's a little too soon to be judging this -- in fact, way way way too soon to be judging this -- and no evidence is given either, so we'll discard it. Finally, "over the past few decades, neighborhood and charitable groups have emerged to help people lead more organized lives, even in the absence of cohesive families." This seems the flimsiest and vaguest of his explanations. What exactly does he mean by "neighborhood and charitable groups"? Is this where he sneaks the religious right in by the back door (and if so, why not just come out and say so)? Does he really believe that there were no such groups before, say, the seventies? And why can't he supply any facts to back up this assertion? Actually, he probably can't because it's far too vague, which simply reinforces its worthlessness. So, Brooks can't really explain why Americans are leading better lives, which is unsurprising, to say the least. And even if all his explanations were valid, they really wouldn't be able to cover all his statistics. His third explanation deals solely with divorce, and since the divorce rate is falling only very slowly, it wouldn't seem to provide much help. And really, which of these explanations accounts for a drop in drunk driving? Or child poverty? Or teenage pregnancy? But we can't complain too much: Brooks offering facts and then giving vague and pointless non-explanations for those facts is far better than his usual combination of idiocy and lies.williehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16145062507112173102noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10096138.post-1123290878897715752005-08-04T20:04:00.000-04:002005-08-05T21:24:35.556-04:00Column 2005-8-4 CommentaryAmazingly, Brooks's latest column has some redeeming features. For starters, he breaks from tradition by presenting actual facts and, even more incredibly, citing actual sources. In yet another unusual development his point is actually interesting and well-argued. Brooks is claiming that terrorists are not peasants from backwards nations lashing out against America as the symbol of a modernity that is excluding them (actually, I can't really remember anybody making this claim, but I'll let that go: maybe this was Brooks's pet theory), but rather are largely from middle- and upper-middle-class families, well-educated and with good jobs, who are rebelling against globalization and latching onto jihad to give their lives meaning. These new jihadis are fundamentally products of Western, or at least modern, globalised society. Therefore, Brooks says, "democratizing the Middle East may not stem terrorism." Of course, his analysis strongly suggests that democratizing the Middle East <span style="font-weight: bold;">will</span> not stem terrorism, as it would not affect any of the factors he mentions as creating terrorists, but for Brooks to actually stand up and say anything that might be construed as direct criticism of the Iraq war is practically inconceivable. And, really, given that democracy is the solution for everything in the neocon vision, this is a pretty big break for Brooks. Brooks also points out that nationalists are in many cases distinct from jihadis, since the latter are a product of globalization rather than "springing organically from the Arab or Muslim world," and that the U.S. should work on separating these two forces. While these two conclusions are both quite reasonable, they don't go quite far enough, but we'll come back to that.<br /><br />A more immediately obvious blemish is the fact that, to balance what might well be taken as criticism of the GWOT, or GSAVE, or whatever, Brooks throws in two (half-hearted) swipes against old targets. First, he claims that "[i]deologically, Islamic neofundamentalism occupies the same militant space that was once occupied by Marxism." Because people blowing themselves and others up in an attempt to bring about a return of the Caliphate in the Muslim world, insofar as they have any goal in blowing themselves up, is clearly exactly the same as people agitating (in some cases violently) for world revolution and proletarian control of the means of production. Actually, since the first goal is entirely spiritual, and the second entirely economic, it's hard to imagine two ideologies more opposed to each other. Brooks's only evidence for this claim is that both attract disaffected youths who are opposed to the system, a purely surface resemblance. He also claims that both movements use similar symbols, which would be a more important, if only slightly so, correspondence, but, tellingly, he can't provide any examples of this, though he does give examples of overlap in the recruiting pool and points out, quite pointlessly, that both Islamists and Marxists rail against imperialism and capitalism. In fact, this whole diversion is quite pointless -- it adds nothing to the analysis of Islamists, this column's topic, as they share no goals or methods with Marxists except in the most general sense (e.g., both attempt to persuade people to join their orgainizations). It really appears that the only reason to include it is to ensure that there is at least one criticism of leftists in the column.<br /><br />A similar reasoning applies to Brooks's final conclusion (he gives three, the first two of which were discussed earlier), which is that what is really needed is more assimilation. Actually, I'm being charitable in assuming that Brooks intends for this to be taken as a criticism of European immigration policies, as otherwise there is absolutely no explanation of why this conclusion is included. The title of this column is "From Cricket to Jihad". Brooks spends much of it explaining that even assimilated Muslims become terrorists, despite their education and technical jobs. To quote Brooks from earlier in the column, "[t]hey give up cricket and medical school and take up jihad." So, essentially, after expending much effort to show that the pool of terrorists is largely drawn from assimilated Muslims, perhaps because of their assimilation -- after all, this conflict is presented as "a conflict within the modern, globalized world" and so presumably the jihadis can't be outsiders -- Brooks concludes that more assimilation is needed. Actually, this stunning illogic is fairly typical for Brooks: it's just that he is sufficiently reasonable in the rest of the column that it comes as a surprise.<br /><br />But this both these problems pale beside the main issue that Brooks does not address. Assuming that these terrorists are striking a blow against globalization to give their lives meaning, we must ask why they choose to revolt against globalization in this fashion? Why not give their lives meaning by becoming radical leftists or anarchists (with the added benefit that they don't have to give up on their newly meaningful life so quickly)? Brooks does not even bring up this question in his column, but <a href="http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mpl/world/3269420">these studies</a> of foreigners who tried to get to Iraq to fight the Americans (and some who got there and committed suicide attacks) sheds some light on the question. It turns out -- surprise, surprise -- that almost all of those studied had no terrorism background and had been inspired by the war itself. Combine this piece of information with the rest of Brooks's facts and we can see that his conclusions don't go nearly far enough. Democratizing the Middle East may not stem terrorism, yes, but the more important and obvious conclusion here is that attempting to democratize the Middle East by force will certainly not stem terrorism, and will almost certainly increase it. Similarly, while the U.S. should certainly try to separate jihadis and Arab nationalists, the worst possible way to do this -- in fact, the one way that is guaranteed to drive nationalists and jihadis into each other's arms -- is to invade an Arab country. In short, given what we know about terrorists, the Iraq war is a complete failure as a terrorist-fighting technique. I'm tempted to give Brooks, wholly owned subsidiary of the Republican Party that he is, some credit for even approaching criticism of the war, even though I'm sure that he read about these studies -- they were circulated fairly widely for a few days -- and it really doesn't take much to come to the conclusion that the Iraq war exactly the wrong move to stop terrorism (and for many other reasons too, of course, but we're just dealing with terrorism here). However, we must try to use carrots as well as sticks, and when Brooks displays vestiges of logical thinking, he should be encouraged for his successes, just as he is castigated for his failures. So we'll call this column a good start, and while I'm not sanguine about the likelihood of this being the precursor of some improvement on Brooks's part, I can still hope (and I need something to hope for now that it seems that the Times will never fire Brooks).williehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16145062507112173102noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10096138.post-1122771740074325462005-07-30T21:01:00.000-04:002005-07-30T21:14:15.056-04:00Column 2005-7-30 CommentaryWell, Brooks isn't quite as lazy as I thought: he only took a few days of vacation this time. However, he comes back with a column about how great his son's AAU baseball team is, and how people should stop criticizing youth sports because, as he reasons with typically Brooksian logic, if his son's team is so good, all youth sports teams must be good. (It must be noted that his rhapsodic descriptions of youth baseball suggest that he fits the stereotype of the parent who is living through his son's athletic success to a T.) Combined with his previous column on the dangers of airplane travel with small children, it appears that either Brooks is remaking himself into a family-oriented columnist (another attempt to get himself removed from the op-ed page and perhaps moved to the Style section?) or is simply too lazy to write about any actual issues that might require actual thought or actual research, though this theory is undermined by the fact that Brooks never does any thinking or research anyway. But I should stop looking a gift horse in the mouth: Brooks is not tormenting his readers with his idiocy, and that's all that I could possibly ask for.williehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16145062507112173102noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10096138.post-1122585732997413542005-07-28T17:18:00.000-04:002005-07-28T17:22:21.453-04:00Non-Column 2005-7-28: Brooks is a Lazy BastardI'm torn here. On the one hand, the less David Brooks, the better. And I need the time usually spent pointing out how much of a moron Brooks is for actual work associated with my actual life, such as it is. On the other hand, Brooks got back from his last vacation two frickin' weeks ago! And he doesn't exactly have the hardest job on the planet, either. Well, maybe he was exhausted by the effort of making his last column actually funny and had to take some time off to recover. On the whole, I'd rather have him gone: what really pisses me off is that he's likely to come back.williehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16145062507112173102noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10096138.post-1122169638735451172005-07-24T21:38:00.000-04:002005-07-23T21:47:18.743-04:00Column 2005-7-24Today, Brooks has chosen to be humorous. Instead of writing about something important, he chooses to write about the vicissitudes of traveling on airplanes with children. We must give credit where credit is due, however: he actually manages to be funny, which is quite a departure from his usual comic efforts. Also, I feel something of an undercurrent of rage in this column. Perhaps he is drawing on personal experience? Otherwise, there's not much to be said here. We await Brooks's inevitable return to moronicity on Thursday. In the meantime, you can go <a href="http://dailyhowler.com/dh072305.shtml">here</a> for proof that Brooks has not decided to reinvent himself as a comedian.williehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16145062507112173102noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10096138.post-1122092353868022942005-07-21T22:38:00.000-04:002005-07-23T00:28:32.633-04:00Column 2005-7-21 CommentaryIn Brooks's Thursday column, we learn that Brooks wants to have sex with John Roberts, Bush's Supreme Court nominee. (Wait a minute, that's not right). Correction: in the <a href="http://rudepundit.blogspot.com/2005/07/luvin-john-roberts-man-oh-man-after.html">Rude Pundit's</a> Thursday column, he says that he wants to have sex with John Roberts. Brooks is not actually in love with Roberts, merely his nomination. This is hardly surprising, as it is impossible to imagine Brooks being critical about any administration nominee to the Supreme Court, up to and including James Dobson. Brooks really gives himself away with two sentences: one from the beginning of the column -- "President Bush consulted widely, moved beyond the tokenism of identity politics and selected a nominee based on substance, brains, careful judgment and good character." -- and one from the end "And most important, [Bush has] shown that character and substance matter most." Note first that Bush has "moved beyond the tokenism of identity politics": that is, he picked a rich white male ("the face of today's governing conservatism", as Brooks so nicely puts it). What's more interesting, though, is <a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=washingtonstory&sid=IJWRAX1A74E9">the fact that</a> "<span class="style5">Bush accelerated his search for a Supreme Court nominee in part because of special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation into the leak of a CIA agent's name, according to Republicans familiar with administration strategy." Apparently Bush dumped the long-term advantage of playing identity politics in favor of the short-term advantage of trying to manipulate the media (which didn't even work very well). But maybe Brooks, Rove's indefatigable defender (more on that in the archives), thinks that this is merely another way for Bush to demonstrate how much character and substance matter to him. After all, Brooks never specified whose character and what substance.<br /><br />As for Roberts himself, Brooks does a nice whitewash. Look! Roberts submitted his wedding notice to the New York Times (according to Saturday's New York Times, his wife grew up in the Bronx, which might have something to do with it)! His wife is a member of a culturally heterodox anti-abortion group! And he lives in the Maryland suburbs of D.C., not the the Virginia ones! Clearly, then, he's not some crazy ideologue! The only real substance backing Brooks's claim that Roberts is not an ideologue is the assertion that Roberts "has done pro bono work on behalf of the environment, parental rights [and that's a hot-button liberal topic-ed.] and minorities." Unsurprisingly, the word "abortion" does not appear in this column. Neither does the phrase "Roe v. Wade". How Brooks hopes to analyze Robert's record without once mentioning his views on this key issue is beyond me (of course, Brooks doesn't actually present Roberts's views on any issue, never getting beyond platitudes about how "principled" and "rich in practical knowledge" he is). As a side note, Brooks states approvingly that Roberts is "</span>a conservative practitioner, not a conservative theoretician", who is "skilled in the technical aspects of the law," but "doesn't think at the level of generality of, say, a Scalia." Exactly two columns ago, Brooks wrote that Bush should pick the candidate with the largest brain, a philosophical giant who would stun us all with the breadth and depth of his conservative theorizing (see below for more). So, in exactly one week, Brooks has completely abandoned every idea he set forth in that column without a peep of protest. Can you say "partisan hack"?<br /><br />What is really fascinating, though, is the last part of the column, in which Brooks analyzes the effect of this nomination on the Democratic party, seeing a fight between the "Democratic elites" (for some reason, he refers to the centrists in this way) and the "liberal interest groups" (which appears to refer to the rest of the party). "The outside interest groups and donors . . . need this fight" Brooks says. They are "rolling out the old warhorse rhetoric" and "distorting Roberts's record . . . ." And to cap it all off, they insist that the balance of the court be maintained! How dare they insist that Bush nominate a non-crazy conservative like O'Connor, rather than a crazy one like Scalia! Brooks also makes the mistake of asserting that the balance of the court "never matters when a Democrat is president. This is a mistake because it invites a brief diversion down memory lane to the last time a Democratic president (one W. J. Clinton) got to nominate a Supreme Court Justice. Courtesy of <a href="http://thinkprogress.org/2005/07/01/how-clinton-treated-hatch/">Think Progress</a>, we find that, amazingly enough, Clinton actually consulted with the ranking minority member of the Senate Judiciary committee, Orrin Hatch! Why, one might almost think that he took that "advice and consent" nonsense in the Constitution seriously! Furthermore, one of his nominees, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, was pretty clearly a moderate (<a href="http://dailyhowler.com/dh070505.shtml">a study found</a> that she voted with her Republican-appointed colleagues on the D.C. Court of Appeals more than with her fellow Democratic appointees). So much for balance, I guess. It goes without saying that Patrick Leahy, the current ranking minority member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, was never consulted on this nomination.<br /><br />Who was consulted? Why, the crazy ideologues and holy warriors, naturally. And there lies the rub, for a day after Brooks attacked liberals who were making Roberts out to be an extreme conservative, the New York Times published <a href="http://nytimes.com/2005/07/22/politics/politicsspecial1/22lobby.html">an article</a> detailing how the administration managed to convince its base on the lunatic Christian right that Roberts was one of them. Brooks does not assert in so many words that Roberts is no Scalia, but his claim that Roberts is not as broad a thinker as Scalia is undoubtedly intended to disassociate Roberts from Scalia. It is interesting, then, to find Leonard Leo, chairman of Catholic outreach for the Republican Party and someone "tapped by the White House to build the coalition for judicial confirmation battles", describing the process by which people came to realize that "'Roberts fit the president's standards as he set forth in his two campaigns' - a jurist in the mold of Antonin Scalia or Clarence Thomas . . . ." Brooks speaks of liberals "misrepresenting" Roberts's record, which makes one wonder what to think when Jay Sekulow, also picked to help sheperd the nominee through and "chief counsel of an evangelical Protestant legal center founded by Pat Robertson," who also worked with Roberts as a lawyer, says that he knows that "Roberts doesn't argue just to argue", and his heart was in all those cases he fought (including ones in which he argued that Roe v. Wade should be overturned). In fact, the Times article says that a central part of the case for Roberts was his record as a lawyer for Republican administrations. And no less a personage than James Dobson is quoted as saying "We believe the issues we care about will be handled carefully by this judge." So, either the administration has been baldly lying about Roberts's record and beliefs in an attempt to persuade Dobson, Robertson, and their minions to back him, or Brooks is simply casting baseless aspersions on liberals as part of an adminstration campaign to present Roberts as a moderate (with a wink to the Dobsonites) to make his confirmation easier. A tough call, admittedly, but given the loud outcries and veiled threats from the radical Christian right when the idea of an Alberto Gonzalez nomination was floated, I'm going to say that the second option is likely the correct one (after all, what is the name of this website?).<br /><br />PS: Since Brooks didn't bother to actually address Roberts's record, I didn't either. However, if you're interested, you can download <a href="http://www.independentjudiciary.com/resources/docs/John_Roberts_Report.pdf">this pdf</a> from the Alliance for Justice, or check out the always-good <a href="http://www.pfaw.org/pfaw/general/">People for the American Way</a>. Also, see <a href="http://www.michaelberube.com/index.php/weblog/roberts_and_civil_rights/">this post</a> for information about a recent and extremely disturbing Roberts decision. And don't forget that <a href="http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/0721-07.htm">Roberts advised the Bushies</a> during the whole Florida recount thing back in 2000.williehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16145062507112173102noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10096138.post-1121825815722089242005-07-18T21:52:00.000-04:002005-07-19T22:17:49.260-04:00Column 2005-7-17 CommentaryTo the unitiated, Brooks's latest might suggest that Brooks is a fair-minded conservative. He praises Robert Kennedy, after all, and Theodore Roosevelt, who is hardly an icon to today's conservatives. And while he does wholeheartedly endorse McCain and Giuliani, they are somewhat outside of the modern conservative mainstream, and certainly not beloved by the lunatic Christian right. This faux reasonableness is Brooks's greatest (and, for that matter, only) weapon, which is one of the reasons why we feel this blog provides a valuable public service. After all, immediately below this entry, you can read about Brooks's recent appearance on NPR in which he did nothing but disgorge talking points in defense of Karl Rove. The radio appearance was only a couple of days before the column, so either Brooks went through a complete about-face in those days, or he is not quite the reasonable being that his newest New York Times offering suggests. A quick survey of the archives would rapidly convince anyone new to Brooks that reasonableness is the last attribute that would be associated with him, and allow such a person to dismiss this column as a rather transparent attempt to keep himself in the good graces of his largely liberal readers.<br /><br />From this perspective, one can note that Giuliani turned himself into a Bush shill in the months leading up to the election (and how much courage does it take to attack "self-indulgent edifice of urban liberalism"? For that matter, what <span style="font-style: italic;">is</span> the "self-indulgent edifice of urban liberalism"?) and that John McCain is far more conservative then is generally acknowledged (see the <a href="http://www.dailyhowler.com/dh032305.html">Daily Howler</a> for more on McCain). Kennedy was undeniably liberal, but he is also safely dead, and is praised for his courage in fighting the mob, rather than for fighting for any liberal cause, such as social justice. Brooks's paean to "courage politicians" sounds nice and appeals to liberals who still dream of a Republican party that does not regard all liberals as traitors, but it's merely a distraction. The real David Brooks is the one lying through his teeth (or, at best, mindlessly repeating Republican talking points) to defend Karl Rove, and it's important not to lose sight of this fact.williehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16145062507112173102noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-10096138.post-1121545060841409812005-07-16T14:57:00.000-04:002005-07-16T16:22:51.986-04:002005-7-15: Special NPR Edition(Hat tip to Dave for bringing this to my attention.) Apparently, Brooks is a regular commenter on <span style="font-style: italic;">All Things Considered</span> on NPR, and on Thursday appeared on that show to answer questions about the Plame case, the Supreme Court vacancy, and the London attacks. Since his discussion of the Supreme Court vacancy was simply a rehashing of his most recent column (see below for more) and he merely gave some meaningless platitudes in answer to a question about the London attacks, we'll concentrate on his amazing ability to memorize RNC talking points about Plame. First, a transcript (by ear, so any errors are my fault, from <a href="http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4754569">here</a>):<br /><br />Host: David Brooks, is President Bush standing by his closest adviser, or is the absence of a vigorous presidential defense of Karl Rove more noteworthy, despite every other Republican offering a vigorous defense of Karl Rove?<br /><br />Brooks: Yeah, I think the president is not inclined to leap into this thing where we know so little and when the investigation is still ongoing. It would stun me if George Bush were to walk away from Karl Rove, it would take a lot to pry that guy away from the other guy. And I must say, I'm not really one of those people who understands Roveaphobia, the idea that Karl Rove is the dark genius at the center of the universe. And I must say, the frenzy has gone on around us all week, I still don't know that there's a crime or anything particularly wrong going on here. Joe Wilson was going around saying that the Vice President sent him to Iraq, which turns out to be untrue, and Matt Cooper, from what we know of his memo, was looking into that story, and Rove said "No, it wasn't the Vice President who sent him, his wife's a CIA agent."<br /><br />Host: If there's no crime, what's Judy Miller, from your newspaper, doing in jail right now?<br /><br />Brooks: Well, she is there to protect a principle. The principle is that you don't reveal sources: that has nothing to do with crimes.<br /><br />{Interval in which E.J. Dionne, the other analyst, speaks}<br /><br />Host: David, one more point here.<br /><br />Brooks: Well, I mean, we're in Alice in Wonderland territory. The idea -- Joe Wilson was the guy not telling the truth. He said the Vice President sent him there, that turned out from the Senate Intelligence Committee not to be true. He said his wife had nothing to do with him being sent, that turned out according to the Senate Intelligence Committee not to be true. Karl Rove, from what we know from Matt Cooper's memo, was the guy actually telling what happened.<br /><br />Host: But on a more central pont, he said there's nothing to the Iraq looking for uranium in Niger story, and at that time, that was still the official line of the U.S. that there was an Iraq interest there.<br /><br />Dionne: And Wilson turned out to be right on that the central point.<br /><br />Brooks: Well, we don't want to get deep into that, but the CIA said that he did not look deeply into it enough -- the Iraq was trying to get Uranium but that's deep into the weeds it just shows how we're getting into Alice in Wonderland territory.<br /><br /><br />Before I continue, I just want to confirm that yes, Brooks really did say that Joe Wilson was going around saying that the Vice President had sent him to Iraq (it took me several listens to convince myself), but we'll generous and assume that he simply misspoke.<br /><br />Now for the analysis. First, Brooks says that "we know so little" about this when in fact we know a lot. For instance, we know that <a href="http://msnbc.msn.com/id/8445696/site/newsweek/">Rove revealed Plame's identity </a>to Matt Cooper, a reporter for Time magazine. The day after this NPR show, we found out that, at the very least, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/15/politics/15rove.html">Rove confirmed Plame's identity</a> to Robert Novak (however, Brooks may not have known about this at the time, so we'll gave him a pass for now). One thing we knew, then, beyond all doubt, is that Karl Rove revealed the identity of a CIA agent operating under nonofficial cover to someone not authorized to know that information. Did he do it deliberately? Did he know that she was a NOC at the time? That we don't know. Brooks is, of course, correct to say that "I still don't know if there was a crime . . . ." But what we do know is that Rove acted, at the very least, very recklessly in revealing the identity of an undercover CIA agent and that his act certainly damaged national security. To me, it seems like this is plenty, but Brooks apparently is not satisfied.<br /><br />It's interesting, though less germane, that immediately after talking about who difficult it would be to "pry that guy away from the other guy" (the guys are Rove and Bush) Brooks declares that he can't understand "the idea that Karl Rove is the dark genius at the center of the universe." Maybe he sees Rove as the good genius at the center of the universe.<br /><br />Anyway, on to the completely false assertion that Joe Wilson went around telling people that Dick Cheney had sent him to Niger. Courtesy of <a href="http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2005_07_10.php#006069">TPM</a>, we can quote the relevant material from his New York Times op-ed that began the whole thing:<br /><br />"In February 2002, I was informed by officials at the Central Intelligence Agency that Vice President Dick Cheney's office had questions about a particular intelligence report. While I never saw the report, I was told that it referred to a memorandum of agreement that documented the sale of uranium yellowcake — a form of lightly processed ore — by Niger to Iraq in the late 1990's. The agency officials asked if I would travel to Niger to check out the story so they could provide a response to the vice president's office.<br /><br />After consulting with the State Department's African Affairs Bureau (and through it with Barbro Owens-Kirkpatrick, the United States ambassador to Niger), I agreed to make the trip. The mission I undertook was discreet but by no means secret. While the C.I.A. paid my expenses (my time was offered pro bono), I made it abundantly clear to everyone I met that I was acting on behalf of the United States government."<br /> <p>Does Wilson assert that he was acting on Cheney's behalf? It doesn't seem so. According to the <a href="http://www.dailyhowler.com/dh071305.shtml">Daily Howler</a>, the closest Wilson came to making such a statement was on CNN's <span style="font-style: italic;">American Morning</span>, where he said: "Well, I went in, actually in <b>February of 2002 was my most recent trip there—at the request, I was told, of the office of the vice president,</b> which had seen a report in intelligence channels about this purported memorandum of agreement on uranium sales from Niger to Iraq." (emphasis from the Howler). The <a href="http://rawstory.com/news/2005/Exclusive_GOP_talking_points_on_Rove_seek_to_discre_0712.html">RNC talking points</a> Brooks is using have a different Wilson quote, however, one taken from a different CNN program and nicely debunked by <a href="http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2005_07_10.php#006082">Josh Marshall</a>. Wilson, in fact, never directly claimed that he was sent to Niger by Cheney, and Brooks is just plain wrong here. However, his constant pushing of this line does open the door for a very revealing quote, in which Brooks is paraphrasing Karl Rove: "No, it wasn't the Vice President who sent him, his wife's a CIA agent." This is so revealing because put this way, you can see that there is really very little connection between the two. Why not say simply say that Cheney didn't send him, it was an internal CIA matter? After all, Wilson was not exactly unqualified for this job: he had been <a href="http://www.politicsoftruth.com/bio.html">acting ambassador to Iraq</a> at the breakout of the first Iraq war and was commended for his service by President Bush the first. He had also served as a diplomat in West Africa for many years and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_C._Wilson">helped direct Africa policy</a>for Clinton's NSC. His wife may well have recommended him, but she was not, after all, in charge of the CIA, and presumably he ended up going thanks to these qualifications rather than his wife's status. (Some conservatives, most notably Ann Coulter, have ridiculed a memo from Plame pointing out that Wilson knew the President of Niger and the Minister of Mines, because of course you would never want to send someone on a sensitive diplomatic mission who had actual contacts among people who might know the information he was supposed to obtain). Mentioning Wilson's wife was clearly unnecessary if all Rove wanted to do was warn Cooper off of a story. On the other hand, if he wanted to attack Wilson to prevent his story of no attempts to purchase uranium from Niger from being believed, the suggestion that Wilson only got his job through nepotism could come in very handy.<br /></p> <p>Next, Brooks gets asked why Judy Miller is in jail. Why, Brooks cries, that's a matter of principle! Certainly no crime is involved here! Well, that's why Miller chose to go to jail rather than talk to prosecutors. Why prosecutors want to talk to her so badly they're willing to send her to jail is another matter entirely, one almost certainly connected to some sort of crime.<br /></p> <p>Brooks then returns to his patently false claim that Wilson had said that Cheney sent him to Niger, and then makes the possibly true claim that Wilson asserted that his wife had nothing to with his being sent to Niger, finishing by asserting that Karl Rove is the one honest man in the whole story. Finally, Brooks attempts to dispute the fact that Iraq was not trying to purchase uranium from Niger before subsiding as he realizes that he really doesn't want to get into questions of weapons of mass destruction at this point. The best he can do is say that the CIA wasn't sure if Wilson did enough work to warrant his conclusion: this doesn't change the fact that it was still the correct conclusion. So, did Wilson deny that his wife had a role in his going to Niger? Possibly, but really, who cares? This is a minor point, and it's time for the big picture now. In the big picture, Brooks says that yes, Rove leaked the identity of a clandestine CIA operative working on WMD proliferation to the media, damaging national security, but that he was right to do so because otherwise the media might have believed Joe Wilson's lies (remember, this is Brooks's defense: Wilson did not lie about the main point, who sent him to Niger). What was so horrible about Joe Wilson's lies? They might have damaged the credibility of Dick Cheney and thus the administration. In Brooks's formulation, then, it's fine to hurt national security by leaking the identities of covert CIA operatives if that's what it takes to prevent people from thinking that the administration might have lied about something. And, really, this isn't very far from what actually happened, which was the damaging of national security by the leak of a covert CIA operative's identity to the media in order to prevent people from realizing that the administration was exaggerating the threat of Saddam's WMD's. In fact, Brooks has taken the accusation against Rove, mixed in a few attacks on Joe Wilson's credibility, and turned it into his defense of Rove. Which means that he has one thing exactly right: we are deep, deep, deep into "Alice-in-Wonderland territory."<br /></p>williehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16145062507112173102noreply@blogger.com