Charles Krauthammer’s New Best Friend; David Brooks’ New Worst Enemy
Triangulation; it's all the rage! In one form, a propagandist bestows false praise on one political enemy, in order to make an attack on another enemy appear credible. The propagandist believes that the contrast will reflect positively on him, but this belief cannot bear scrutiny.
In another form, a candidate and his propagandist embrace a running mate who is meant to bring in votes from the party base whom the first two despise.
As my friends know, I can't stand Charles Krauthammer. First, he's a neocon who has about as much regard for American interests as Nick Sarkozy (i.e, he likes America. He just doesn't identify with it). Second, (stop me if I told this before) he bellowed at the rabbi in synagogue on Yom Kippur 2001 for expressing the hope that Jews and Arabs could coexist peacefully. I mean, he started screaming from his seat in the middle of services. Unforgettable.
But today I give him credit for the best analysis of why Barack Obama should be President: "Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. famously said of Franklin Roosevelt that he had a 'second-class intellect, but a first-class temperament..'" Barack Obama, is better than that. "He's got both a first-class intellect and a first-class temperament. That will likely be enough to make him president."
Rosenberg, who blogs for Talking Points Memo (TPM), has all the intellectual integrity of the characters at Media Matters,* and TPM’s posters were indistinguishable from their fellow Obamanoids at the Huffington Post and Media Matters.
Now I hold no brief for Charlie Kraut, but … if Kraut’s rabbi was politicking during a Yom Kippur service, he deserved more than to be yelled at. I’m guessing, that had Krauthammer not been wheelchair-bound, he would have punched out the rabbi. (What the hell kind of shul was he in, anyway? Reformed? Reconstructionist? Marxist? And has Krauthammer stopped attending that shul?)
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. famously said of Franklin Roosevelt that he had a "second-class intellect, but a first-class temperament." Obama has shown that he is a man of limited experience, questionable convictions, deeply troubling associations (Jeremiah Wright, William Ayers, Tony Rezko) and an alarming lack of self-definition -- do you really know who he is and what he believes? Nonetheless, he's got both a first-class intellect and a first-class temperament. That will likely be enough to make him president.
It’s bad enough that the socialist MSM are in the bag for O/D/S; it’s even worse that the supposedly Republican Wall Street Journal has at times been even more pc than their socialist rivals. But O/D/S’ totalitarian true believers are so obsessed with the notion that opposition to The One is unthinkable that they are even lying, and saying that His opponents support Him! (Last time I checked the Huffington Post, the Obamanoids posting there were pursuing a different sort of lunacy. They feigned certainty that The One and the white guy will win in a landslide, yet were outraged that McCain and Palin had not yet acknowledged inevitability, and resigned from the election. If the Obamanoids really were sure of a landslide, and truly believed in democratic elections, they’d be looking forward to Election Day.)
But Alfred Rosenberg could care less about Krauthammer; the former is just using the latter to beat up on David Brooks.
David Brooks has spent his career trying to be leftists’ “favorite conservative,” and get invitations to their cocktail parties. And the invitations came. And the book deals, which for folks like Brooks, are the whole point of getting invited to the cocktail parties. (Why else endure smug, boring, privileged idiots like Pinch Sulzberger?) But over the past year or so, Brooks’ journalistic machinations have led to his becoming instead the Left’s favorite GOP pseudo-intellectual whipping boy. And it couldn’t have happened to a more deserving fellow!
Rosenberg’s ire is based on Brooks’ having said nice things about Sarah Palin. He demands that Brooks insult his own political allies, as a show of good faith towards Rosenberg & Co., who would never respond in kind. Doing Rosenberg’s bidding would not only end Brooks’ career, but result in Rosenberg celebrating his misfortune. This is not too far afield from demanding that McCain and Palin concede the election to The One and the white guy, aka the Two Plagiarists.
I give Kraut credit for honesty. The contrast with his New York Times counterpart, David Brooks, is striking. Krauthammer faces what is, for him, a painful truth. Obama is preferable to McCain. [Oops! Rosenberg lied.]
Brooks simply lies. His column today is a syrupy valentine to Sarah Palin. She "passed the test." She was "surprisingly forceful" on Iraq. She "established debating parity with Joe Biden. And in a country that is furious with Washington, she presented herself as a radical alternative."
Not for a minute do I believe that Brooks believes any of it. I submit that if any of Brooks [sic] children discussed public policy with as much ignorance -- not to mention silly grammar and incomprehensible circumlocutions -- as Palin, the very Ivy David Brooks would be appalled. [Brooks attended the University of Chicago. It’s an OPU—Overpriced Private University—but it’s not Ivy League.] Of course, that couldn't happen. Brooks has smart kids who speak good English.
But Brooks does not hold a candidate for Vice President to the standards to which he holds his teenage children.
I hold my eight-year-old to higher standards than I would any politician, but what’s that got to do with the price of tea in China? John McCain nominated Sarah Palin, in order to entice conservative Republicans, above all the Party’s Evangelical base, to vote for a man who holds them in contempt. Brooks has supported McCain for president since at least 2000, and the same Chablis-sipping, country club vision of the Republican Party that McCain supports since the 1990s. I suppose one could call what McCain and Brooks are doing one form of triangulation, what Rosenberg is doing another.
Rosenberg’s triangulation routine reminds me of the time in early 2002, shortly after Mike Bloomberg’s inauguration as New York City mayor, when New York Times operative Bob Herbert praised the just departed Rudy Giuliani for reducing crime, in order to contrastingly criticize Bloomberg.
Herbert had just spent eight years race-baiting Giuliani, attacking everything he did, above all, his crime policies. Circa 1999, Herbert had gone so far, in support of the racial profiling hoax and against Giuliani’s NYPD, as to try and incite black race riots. But in 2002, Herbert fancied that contrast would lend legitimacy to his pathetic, knee-jerk criticisms of the new, nominally Republican mayor, but anyone familiar with Herbert’s track record knew that his praise of Giuliani was as comically dishonest as his criticism of Bloomberg.
I once came across a socialist blogger who said that Herbert was such a Democratic talking points bot that he was an embarrassment even to lefties. I’m not familiar with Alfred Rosenberg, so I don’t know if any of his comrades are embarrassed by him. And though I’ve been aware of Talking Points Memo for a few years, I’m not sure whether the title is meant literally or ironically. The irony-deficient Rosenberg suggests the former.
Rosenberg also claims that George Will has jumped on the O/D/S bandwagon. Does this mean I have to read Will, too?! Oh, but Rosenberg didn’t even supply a link to Will, much less a fudged quote, so as far as I’m concerned, that lets me—but not Rosenberg—off the hook. After all, I’m not the one making extraordinary claims.
*Media Matters for America is a socialist, Democratic Party propaganda site, which enjoys 501(c)(3) non-profit tax status, in spite of it being illegal for partisan political organizations to have 501(c)(3)s. “MMFA” was founded by admitted journalism fraud David Brock, who is the walking embodiment of what I call the perjurer’s paradox, a variation on the liar’s paradox. The perjurer says, “I used to be a liar, but I’m honest now, so you must believe what I am now saying.” Since switching his loyalties from the GOP to the Democratic Party, Brock has insisted that when he was a Republican investigative journalist, he lied, but has walked the straight and narrow since switching to the Democratic Party. The problem is that the truth appears to be the opposite of what Brock says. Thus, he was an honest journalist for the GOP, who became a paid liar for the Democrats, who then began lying about having been a liar and having converted to honesty. Are you feeling dizzy yet?
Award-winning, New York-based freelancer Nicholas Stix founded A Different Drummer magazine (1989-93). Stix has written for Die Suedwest Presse, New York Daily News, New York Post, Newsday, Middle American News, Toogood Reports, Insight, Chronicles, the American Enterprise, Campus Reports, VDARE, the Weekly Standard, Front Page Magazine, Ideas on Liberty, National Review Online and the Illinois Leader. His column also appears at Men's News Daily, MichNews, Intellectual Conservative, Enter Stage Right and OpinioNet. Stix has studied at colleges and universities on two continents, and earned a couple of sheepskins, but he asks that the reader not hold that against him. His day jobs have included washing pots, building Daimler-Benzes on the assembly-line, tackling shoplifters and teaching college, but his favorite job was changing his son's diapers.
Cover
•
Commentary
•
Books & Reviews
•
Climate Change
•
Site Links
•
Feedback
