Well, that sort of makes sense, and it does contain the usual amount of irony as well. 
Hear, hear. There’s an understandable human logic in killing the messenger for bringing bad news, but when he brings good news…?
I think it’s a combination of, “Too little, too late” and, “We doubt your sincerity.”
I’ve been listening to him on the PBS News Hour for years. I think I have grounds for both of those sentiments.
Brooks M.O. is to seem like he’s being reasonable when in fact he is being a partisan hack. He was an enthusiastic supporter of the Iraq war, when that turned to shit he wrote a very dishonest assesment of what went wrong that on the surface seemed reasonable. On Iraq, Brooks wrote that yes, the US got the intelligence wrong and therefore made a mistake in invading, but that’s just the piece of shit trying to rewrite history and getting people to stop looking to deep into what happened.
Paul Krugman also writing in the NY Times has made a hobby of tearing apart Brooks attempts to walk back his mistakes without ever admitting his culpability. His response to Brooks Iraq piece:
Brooks is doing it again here, he’s trying to point out that these fringe Republicans have gone all nutty in the head, without admitting that it is a natural pregression of a movement that Brooks himself enabled. He’s a partisan hack who is able to maintain his reputation of being reasonable with people who aren’t familiar with his body of work.
Again, Speaker Boehner attacked Ted Cruz. The Republican Party is fracturing. Brooks’ OP column shows no particular courage: he is just taking sides on an internecine battle. It’s not like the Tea Party has any respect for the guy. This is positioning not policy, something we’ve seen before.
Elucidator is correct though: he talks a good game on Newshour. It’s just that when you lift the hood you find there’s very little there.
Well, Brooks is obviously a wolf in sheep’s clothing. He’s one of Them! Trying to pass as human!
Can’t compromise with that sort.
Actually, the only part of Brooks’ column that I was :dubious: about was the characterization of conservatives as proponents of “steady, incremental change.” 
:):smack:
Part of Brooks hackery is his longing for a more simple time when American politics was more genteel.
Oh really, so it is only since Rush came on the scene, eh Brooks? How about when Buchanan said to Nixon, “if we tear the country in half, we can keep the bigger half,” or when GOP strategist Lee Atwater, in a 1981 interview, described the party’s southern strategy as, “you start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger.” By 1968 you can’t say “nigger” — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff.”
Were those utterances representative of the kind of “intellectual humility” and “and a tone of voice that is prudent, measured and responsible?” Or has the conservative movement always pandered to racists while trying to keep half of the nation at the throats of the other half? Brooks rewrites history to make himself look like less of a piece of shit.
OK, I admit it, I was right. Working on upgrading my reputation as someone who never admits it when he’s right, so there’s this, at least.
The Southern Strategy came into flower in 1968. Maybe Brooks was trying hard not to notice.
Has anyone seen David Brooks and Starving Artist in the same room at the same time?
No, but I did once see David Brooks squat-fucking a paper towel tube once.
Starving Artist “seems like he’s being reasonable?” Since when?
I’m sure that he thinks he’s seeming reasonable. And he’s not unlike David Brooks in thinking that everything was great back when Eisenhower ran the country.
All change is social decay for guys like that.
(Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal comic)
I have a hard time reading Brooks not because he is too Republican but because his shtick is some high concept reason for all our problems - if we only got enough roughage we could stop poverty. And he’s a lot smarter than Krauthammer, and doesn’t lie nearly as much.
But if he is a hack he is at least a relatively moderate hack. The column - which anyone with half a brain could write - is just another indication of how extreme the Republicans have gotten. They left me behind 15 years ago (it should have been over 20) and they are leaving more behind.
I figure the Freedom Clique should be starting show trials in the House Cloakroom soon to condemn false conservatives like Ryan.
Back in the old days, it was (relatively) moderate Republicans like Goldwater and Buckley who were running the extremists, such as the “Eisenhower’s a Pinko” John Birch Society, out of the GOP.
Then the GOP found it could get absolutely solid support from racist white people by inviting those elements into the party, and now its leadership is unable to run Huckabee off, let alone Trump.
So. On a scale of “Starving Artist Hates Clinton” to “Nixon Goes To China” this is hardly ping-pong diplomacy, but seeing one of the Sane Republicans officially call out what the GOP has become is still interesting. It’s a sign that, once again, the moderate consensus (also known as High Broderism) rejects what the GOP’s base appears to want, which is likely a sign that even if the Freedom Cabal can’t be removed from its safe seats, it will continue to have a hard time achieving its goals because it will continue to be unable to swing anyone else to its side on most of its issues.
In an effort to keep extremists within the party, moderate Republicans have gone along with them on abortion, gun control, gay rights, health care reform, tax cuts for the wealthy, global warming, campaign finance reform, immigration reform, foreign policy, financial regulations, and military spending in order to get the one thing they really want.
As I pointed out, 11 months ago he was blaming Obama for being bizarrely and pre-emptively obstructivist and predicting that he would ultimately regret his behavior. Now he is saying that he has been sagely watching the insidious and destructive transformation of the Republican party for more than 30 years.
I don’t feel like he is bringing us “news” of any kind.
Yeah, to me it just sounds like: Oh no, the Republican party being composed of idiots is now costing us elections rather than winning them! By sheer coincidence, I have at this point in time come to the conclusion that it was a bad idea!
It’s nice to see some members of the cult finally discover what the rest of us saw decades ago, but it’s not impressive.
The amount of shit David Brooks gets is kind of pathetic, and it’s not hard to see why it happens.
He’s a moderate Republican – relative to what American conservatism has been like for the last decade, he’s barely even that. He criticizes Republicans all the time, he likes Obama (or at least he has in the past), he’s fundamentally pragmatic instead of being ideological, and he takes a hard-line stance on basically nothing. He gets name-checked pretty frequently, much as in this thread, in “Republicans are so crazy even this Republican is bashing them for it!” arguments.
(And the people who call him “partisan” legitimately might not know what that word means. Rich Lowry is partisan; Frank Rich is partisan; in fact, the vast majority of political columnists are partisan. Applying the label to Brooks renders it completely meaningless.)
But then, being a conservative, he criticizes a Democrat or espouses a conservative position, and the liberal side of the internet mocks him and calls him a bunch of stupid names. He gets far more abuse than any other non-crazy person columnist I can think of (more than the crazies, too, probably). In that regard, he has the misfortune of writing for the NY Times Op-Ed pages and doing segments on PBS, so a few liberals are actually exposed to his ideas. I mean, I can’t remember the last time I saw a post on Gawker e.g. making fun of something from the Wall Street Journal Op-Eds, even though just about everything there is more conservative/partisan/whatever. How is someone going to be able to relate with people who differ from them politically if, as a liberal, David Frickin’ Milquetoast Brooks sets them off?
Now, if you want to mock him for spending a third of the year on pop psychology & sociology, then ok. I actually don’t hate some of that stuff – it’s occasionally or thoughtful – but it is also sometimes embarrassing or pretentious. OTOH, if I had to come up with hot political takes three times a week, I’d probably go a little crazy. Fuck, man, can’t I just write about that time I went to church?