Once again featuring his own well-readedness (this time, Hobbes' Leviathan - although it was the book's cover that seemingly impressed him the most), David Brooks oh-so-intelligently applauds the Republican victory in Massachusetts' Senate race yesterday, and cautions the Democrats against rushing the recently passed health-care bill to Obama's desk. Although Brooks seems to find much in Obama that he admires, such a move by Obama's party, says he, "would would be the act of a party so arrogant, elitist and contemptuous of popular wisdom that it would not deserve to govern. Marie Antoinette would applaud, but voters would rage." Because, says he, after all, "The American people are not always right, but their basic sense of equilibrium is worthy of the profoundest respect."
Uh huh.
This is the same American public so blessed with equilibrium and popular wisdom that millions of them, clueless to anything beyond the boundaries of their backyards or the pages of their Bibles, take their cues on domestic and foreign policy from the rantings of Limbaugh/Hannity/Beck/Hagee - and vote accordingly.
This is the same American public whose equilibrium and popular wisdom, though rightfully enraged by the attacks of 9/11, let George W. Bush lead them almost gleefully by the collective nose into ill-conceived and disastrous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that have trashed their country's global standing as well as its treasury, to that American public's own great cost.
This is the same American public whose popular wisdom has led the majority of them to blow off the theory of evolution as "un-Biblical" and therefore unworthy, who refuse to accept the evidence of human-induced global warming, who were buying gas-guzzling Hummers and mega-SUVs by the tens of thousands because they are, after all, entitled to the "American way of life," as Dick Cheney so blithely asserted soon after 9-11.
Brooks remains locked into his core message of soft neo-conservatism: that Americans have cornered the market on good sense. One might call it myopia.
Uh huh.
This is the same American public so blessed with equilibrium and popular wisdom that millions of them, clueless to anything beyond the boundaries of their backyards or the pages of their Bibles, take their cues on domestic and foreign policy from the rantings of Limbaugh/Hannity/Beck/Hagee - and vote accordingly.
This is the same American public whose equilibrium and popular wisdom, though rightfully enraged by the attacks of 9/11, let George W. Bush lead them almost gleefully by the collective nose into ill-conceived and disastrous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that have trashed their country's global standing as well as its treasury, to that American public's own great cost.
This is the same American public whose popular wisdom has led the majority of them to blow off the theory of evolution as "un-Biblical" and therefore unworthy, who refuse to accept the evidence of human-induced global warming, who were buying gas-guzzling Hummers and mega-SUVs by the tens of thousands because they are, after all, entitled to the "American way of life," as Dick Cheney so blithely asserted soon after 9-11.
Brooks remains locked into his core message of soft neo-conservatism: that Americans have cornered the market on good sense. One might call it myopia.
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