"With Any Luck"

David Brooks is nuts. I've always danced around being that complete in my derision, but his column in today's NYTimes is the tipping point for me. Read it, I most wholeheartedly suggest, no matter where you fall on the political spectrum. And then if you've got a few moments more to waste, I hope you'll come back to what I have to say in reaction.

Much of what Brooks is saying relates to the desperate desire by the Bushies to change the subject. Ignore the upcoming budget battles, ignore what may well go wrong with the Iraqi election tomorrow, ignore the battles over Dubya's cronies being put further into the trenches of this Country's bureaucracy. Brooks, in unusually obvious praise of the Bushies, wants you to ignore those and any other legitimate criticisms the entire American populace may have to present currently or previously. Because this is a "new beginning" and "(t)here's an almost springlike, postwar mood" in your President's Administration, according to Brooks. He couldn't be more hard to believe if he tried to say that Bill Clinton, JFK and FDR wanted us to put all the ugliness of the past decades behind us and embrace our internationalist saviors in the new GOP.

I sincerely believe that Brooks wants to assume the mantle left empty by the departure of William Safire. As far back as I can remember being interested in the media, I've watched the "Newshour" on PBS on Fridays to see Gergen v. Shields or Brooks v. Shields or any of the multitudes of those talking-heads pairings meant to put a kinder, gentler face on the deep divisions between the polarities of the American political debate. So I've come to understand that when the Right tells me that we're facing a "new beginning," I'm meant to dispute the timing entirely because there is absolutely no agreement on that fact. Brooks isn't especially controversial as a columnist, at least in terms of making people think differently about the political atmosphere beneath the events of the Day we all face. Using that measure, however, maybe today's was his best column ever - I leave that up to those self-flaggelators that care to advance the argument I've put forth. But I think, quite honestly, all he's done is lay bare the empty hopes of those that continue to insist in the face of overwhelming contrary evidence that "freedom is on the march."

Some might say that content means everything in news. Analysis, in my un-academic opinion, is about almost entirely "context." So let me be one to mention Brooks' "content" while parsing his "context."

BROOKS: "The Bush administration has started its second act, and it is striking how different this one feels. When you ask senior officials to remember the first term, they remember it as a time of war. There was the attack of Sept. 11. There were invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. There was the political war of the 2004 campaign."
ME: Why are so-called, unnamed "senior officials" trying to deny that this is a "time of war?" Isn't that what they insist we believe whenever political debates turn against them and they want to quiet the static? And isn't it wholly unhelpful to call the 2004 election a "political war" when our men and women are still dying almost every day in Iraq? That seems like an especially callous misuse of the war metaphor. Even if the characterization Brooks uses was that of "senior officials," the families of the 1400+ troops lost in Iraq I'm sure would be deeply hurt by trying to put Iraq behind us by using the so-called past battles for Ohio and Florida.

BROOKS: "(Senior Officials') favorite kinds of institutions are the kinds they created in response to the tsunami disaster: the kind with no permanent offices and no permanent staff, the kind that is (sic?...) created to address a discrete problem and then disappear when the problem is over. The phrase for this is coalitions of the willing. If you think the Iraq situation soured the Bush team on these sorts of coalitions, you're wrong."
ME: Just what "institutions" were actually created to deal with disaster relief? Seriously - I'm asking, because I've never seen anything about such new inititatives, and I can assure you that I read the stuffing out of the daily news on an obsessive basis. Isn't tsunami relief reimbursement to the DoD included in the $80B requested this past week with little or no details in a supplemental bill largely meant to mask the insane amount of that funding that will go to our Iraqi occupation? Oh, and if anyone wants to dispute my use of the term "occupation," I suggest you actually read or watch Bush's latest interviews. And just exactly why am "I" wrong to observe that the Bushies have soured on coalitions? If you want to say that giving money via your military budget to a disaster relief effort where close to 200,000 people died is similar to promoting the "coalition of the willing" that is dwindling in our Iraq occupation, you're the one parsing the living breath out of the world's willingness to help out.

BROOKS: "The foreign policy of the Bush officials is beginning to sound more like compassionate conservatism all the time. To win the war of ideology against radical Islam, they want to put much more emphasis on global trade. This strikes me as unpromising; if trade could loosen up radical regimes, Saudi Arabia would be Switzerland. But they really mean it."
ME: "Compassionate conservatism" is an increasingly-dated chestnut that only the most hopeful and brainwashed will ever dare to continue bringing up with regard to the still-misnamed "War on Terrorism." Someday, Mr. Brooks, you and your compatriots will be forced to admit that you never really showed any compassion in this metaphorical equation. Please, please try again and again to replace "war" with "trade" without causing the rest of us to laugh at that oxymoron. It's fun to see how that equation works for those that support your rhetorical contortionisms.

BROOKS: " There's so much soft-power talk in the Bush administration these days it would make Kofi Annan queasy."
ME: This one deserves to stand on its own. If you really believe Brooks here, I think you should look no further than Armstrong Williams, Maggie Gallagher and Mike McManus' table in the cafeteria when you're hoping not to be ostercized for being so alone as an unrealistic apologist in the larger culture's melting pot.

I'm going to send Mr. Brooks this posting. I'm unrecognized, without even any real responses to my new blog (as of yet...please let me know what you think, if you've got a moment). But I'm just as legit sitting in my living room in San Francisco as he is wandering the corridors of power in DC, offering wildly off-center opinions. Sure, I've never seen an unnamed "senior Pentagon official coming out of the State Department building - a metaphor for the reduced hostilities between those two agencies." But I'm nobody's shill.