David Brooks

For The Trump-Derangement Archives: Unethical Quote of the Week That Made Me Not Bother To Pay Any More Attention

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

“I Particularly Like the Line Where You Said Trumpism Is Seeking ‘To Amputate the Higher Elements of the Human Spirit — Learning, Compassion, Science, and the Pursuit of Justice, and Supplant Those Virtues With Greed, Retribution, Ego and Appetite.'”

—-Ancient and execrable Washington Post pundit E.J. Dionne (EA dossier here)) in the course of a metaphorical mutual masturbation session with NYT Stockholm Syndrome conservative David Brooks (EA dossier here), plus former host of NPR’s “All Things Considered” Robert Siegel, “Trump Has a Religion. What Do Democrats Have? Mamdani might be working in Democrats’ favor. But what about ‘No Kings’?”

Althouse flagged this, and I just couldn’t stomach reading it. Siegel’s bias is presumed from his long tenure at NPR, where, some readers will recall, I was blackballed for daring to defend Donald Trump on the air.

Ugh. The President pressuring universities to teach rather than indoctrinate and gutting the wasteful Cabinet department that had presided over catastrophic decline in pubic schools is “amputating” education. Enforcing the laws is “amputating” compassion. Refusing to waste trillions in response to politically-inspired climate change hype is “amputating” science. The arrogance and smug certitude of these close-minded assholes…double ugh. I’ll listen to and read my Trump Deranged friends  when they say these things because at least they aren’t paid for it and are just bloviating emotion-based opinions. But these guys…

Who can keep reading their junk and its ubiquitous equivalents? (OK, I skimmed a bit and learned that they all think the stupid “No Kings” protests were wonderful.) More to the point, how dim and confused do you have to be to take this discussion as anything but sour grapes from a sad, elite sector of our culture that wildly overplayed its hand, got its bluff called, and was exposed as the sinister charlatans they always were?

Althouse just threw this raw meat to her readers without making any statement herself: I’m sure she knew what would follow. You should check out the red-pilled comments, which almost entirely drip with contempt.  

You can read the exchange here (gift link) if you like. Me. I’ve got a sock drawer to organize.

NYT Stockholm Syndrome Pundit David Brooks Finally Wrote Something Astute and Fair Regarding Trump, So Naturally My Trump-Deranged Friend Condemns Him For It

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Imagine the late James Earl Jones’ resonant bass intoning, “THIS is Trump Derangement!” and you have the perfect backdrop for my depressing story.

A retired lawyer of great accomplishments and gravitas has recently erupted into repeated anti-Trump/anti-Republican rants on Facebook. I consider him a good freind and generally a wise one—and he’s a passionate baseball fan!—so it pains me to read this sad evidence of mental and ethical deterioration. His most recent screed began with a declaration that he now detests David Brooks. As the Ethics Alarms Brooks dossier vividly shows, there are plenty of reasons to detest Brooks, an obnoxious and arrogant conservative in his Daily Standard days, and now a sell-out who accepted the dishonest role as a token non-progressive propagandist on the New York Times opinion page and quickly “cut the cloth of his conscience to fit the fashion of the Times,” (to quote Lillian Hellman at the McCarthy hearings, except that when she said it, she used a small “t.”)

[Yikes! I just looked over my own collection of Brooks posts, and he’s even worse than I remembered. In October of 2023, for example, I nailed him for writing that President Biden was still sharp and capable though it was obvious then, a year before Biden’s debate babble-fest, that Joe was demented.]

But my learned, once rational friend wasn’t critical of Brooks for any of his lies and hypocrisy; he now detests Brooks because of this column, in which the pundit gives President Trump credit for something. It is a trait that I have also noted: Trump has amazing energy and drive, to the point of being indomitable. Brooks begins his column this way:

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Pundit Malpractice, Part II: A Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc Masterpiece From “The Hill”

/ Jack Marshall / 4 Comments

This is truly a “Hold my beer!” moment to savor from “The Hill.” David Brooks’ fake history lesson, draped in his usual smarty-pants rhetoric, was unforgivable, but The Hill’s opinion piece with the click-bait title, “Blue Alert: Why Democrats are poised to win in 2028 and 2032” is so silly, lazy and idiotic that even Brooks gets leave to make fun of it.

Authored by GOP operatives Gary D. Alexander and Rick Cunningham, the thing makes it crystal clear how the Republican Party got the moniker “The Stupid Party” if it pays for advice from people capable of writing such junk. To state the obvious, Democrats aren’t “poised” to do anything at this point. The party has no leader; its President just exited the White House with one of the worst six months in Presidential annals; its Senators made asses of themselves in the hearings on Trump’s nominees so far, and its House members have declared themselves fans of biological men spiking volleyballs that crush women’s faces and illegal aliens who rape and kill. Its DEI Presidential candidate ran an embarrassing campaign while the party’s platform became “Abort more babies” and “Having a rally in Madison Square Garden proves Trump is Hitler.” Poised? Poisoned is more like it.

The article flags itself as bonkers by the third sentence, asserting that Democrats were already in an advantageous position to win in 2032. That’s eight years from now: I’m going to forgo the amusing but needless exercise of pointing out how unpredictable American political fortunes have been even two years in the future for most of our history. In eight years, the little fifth grade girl next door will be on the pill and registered to vote. Ah, but these two swamis write that their entrails readings “are deeply rooted in history and strategic realities.” You know, like Brooks’ one-term Presidents proving that populism doesn’t work.

Let’s examine these “realities”:

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Pundit Malpractice, Part I: David Brooks, Making The Public More Ignorant About History Than They Already Are

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

What excuse does David Brooks have for publishing manifestly false Presidential history as part of the usual New York Times anti-Trump propaganda? None that I can see. He styles himself as a thoughtful public intellectual. He majored in history at Columbia. Okay, he is Canadian but he lives here and is presented by the New York Times as an authority.

I have to presume that if he writes a column with flat-out false information about U.S. political history, he is misleading the public intentionally or, just as unethically, he didn’t check his facts. Of course the New York Times editors don’t hold him to being factual, responsible or ethical. They let Charles M. Blow, Michelle Goldberg and their other biased hacks get away with worse most days. But I expect them to lie. I expect Brooks to be wrong, but at least to get his facts right.

Nope.

In the obnoxiously headlined “How Trump Will Fail,” Brooks tells us that “Trump has gone all 19th century on us. He seems to find in this period everything he likes: tariffs, Manifest Destiny, seizing land from weaker nations, mercantilism, railroads, manufacturing and populism.” At least he hasn’t embraced the version of America pushed by the Biden Administration: open borders, government censorship, racial discrimination, political prosecutions, puppet Presidencies and government cover-up journalism. The main thrust of Brooks’ analysis is that “populism” doesn’t work and has never worked in the U.S.. Brooks’ sneer at the American values of individualism, personal responsibility, exploration, confidence, exceptionalism and capitalism is palpable.

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Oh-Oh. We Have Descended into Some Diabolical Hellscape Where Chris Cuomo Is Making Valid Ethics Observations….

/ Jack Marshall / 10 Comments

Cuomo, aka. “Fredo” on the Hegseth hearing…

The country’s in the very best of hands….

Meanwhile, while Cuomo is spot-on, here’s a quote from alleged conservative intellectual David Brooks, who today leveled similar criticism, but discredited himself with this:

“The hearings got better as they went along and more junior senators got to speak. Senator Mazie Hirono was excellent, asking substantive questions: If the president ordered you, would you order troops to shoot protesters in the legs? Would you follow an order to use the military for mass deportations?”

I can’t even tell if Brooks was being sarcastic; he has written so many outrageous things since his brain was surgically removed by the New York Times and replaced with a bag of Cheetohs. Sarcasm is not typically his metier. If Brooks was attempting sarcasm, he’s lousy at it: no columnist who wants to be taken seriously should ever, ever utter the words “Senator Mazie Hirono was excellent” in jest, irony, or God forbid, sincerity.

Prestigious American Institutions Have Been Hiring Ideologically Crippled Academics For Decades, and We Are Seeing the Disastrous Results: Now What?

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Spotlight: Cornell

The Cornell Daily Sun has presented this head-exploding screed:

We, the undersigned Cornell faculty, staff and alumni, strongly support the student activists who have disrupted business as usual to protest the University’s conduct amid the horrifying, ongoing assault on Palestinian populations. The students who have mobilized under the banner of the Coalition for Mutual Liberation have fulfilled the best principles of global citizenship, engaged learning and social justice. We applaud their principled struggle.

Commending the students for opposing the wanton destruction of Palestinian lives and territories does not go far enough. These young people are, quite simply, the best of us. They have shown tremendous courage in a climate of fear and repression. We thank them for their commitment and integrity. We will do what we can to ensure that they are not unduly targeted.

The CML activists have made significant personal sacrifices to publicize the demand that Cornell divest from corporations that are linked to Israeli militarism, occupation and collective punishment. Their nonviolent demonstrations have provided a moral compass at a time of official hypocrisy.

In countless ways, the leaders of our society and our institution have signaled that silence is the only acceptable response to the profound suffering within and beyond Gaza. Cornell administrators have exacerbated campus anxiety by attempting to stifle student dissent with a draconian “Interim Expressive Activity Policy,” bypassing the faculty senate. In a moment of anguish for many members of our community, the University has chosen the path of intimidation and bureaucratic aggression.

The names of more than 300 faculty signatories to the letter can be seen here.

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Oh, I Can’t Let THIS Pass: David Brooks Abuses A Baseball Metaphor To Lie About Joe Biden

/ Jack Marshall / 8 Comments

I read this yesterday, decided that it was a double Julie Principle abomination (“Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, Biden’s demented, the Times gotta lie…“) and too outrageous to be worth even my pathetic time, and then it kept ticking away in my skull like a home-made bomb until I couldn’t stand it any more.

New York Times Stockholm Syndrome columnist David Brooks, once a conservative with intellectual pretensions, not just another Times progressive toady, actually wrote…

“The Republicans who portray [Biden] as a doddering old man based on highly selective YouTube clips are wrong. In my interviews with him, he’s like a pitcher who used to throw 94 miles an hour who now throws 87. He is clearly still an effective pitcher. People who work with him allow that he does tire more easily, but they say that he is very much the dynamic force driving this administration. In fact, I’ve noticed some improvements in his communication style as he’s aged. He used to try to cram every fact in the known universe into every answer; now he’s more disciplined. When he’s describing some national problem, he is more crisp and focused than he used to be, clearer on what is the essential point here — more confidence-inspiring, not less….”

I’m pretty sure I’ve been watching Joe Biden longer than David Brooks has, and I’m dead certain I know more about baseball than he does, so I must offer this correction. If you must compare Biden to a pitcher, it would not be one who once had a 94 mph fastball (actually, today that’s not very impressive, as most successful pitchers throw at least 96 or so), but rather a journeyman hurler who at his peak could throw maybe 86 or 87 at best, and who has bounced around from team to team as an innings-eating mop-up man for an inexplicably long time, never being more than the guy who barely makes the last slot on the squad out of Spring Training, never given a start in a big game or brought on in relief in a “high leverage situation,” and who holds on to a job by being an upbeat presence in the clubhouse, loyal to his managers, and encouraging to younger, more talented pitchers coming up. There is no baseball analogy to Biden after that, because when pitchers obviously decline in their abilities and those abilities were nothing to get them on a Wheaties box in the first place, they get cut. If they are lucky, maybe they get a job as a pitching coach on a minor league team in Altoona.

[I should mention that the geezer making that horrible pitch in the GIF above is the great Nolan Ryan.]

Almost no pitchers who weren’t Hall of Fame level at their peaks can survive if they lose 7 miles an hour off their fastballs. As it happens, the Boston Red Sox this season learned this the hard way. Corey Kluber was a two-time Cy Young winner, one of the best pitchers in the game, when he threw 93 miles an hour. Then little by little he lost it, had arm trouble, and by last year barely managed a .500 record with a team that played winning ball, the Tampa Bay Rays. They wisely didn’t re-sign him, but the Red Sox did, though Kluber’s best fastball was then about 87. He got clobbered, ending the season with an earned run average over 7, which is the level of a batting practice pitcher.

But Kluber was at least a great pitcher once. Nobody ever thought Joe Biden was a great U.S. Senator. I was writing about what an obvious dummy he was decades ago, and I was far from the only one. I think it was about 2018 when I noticed that what little glint of intelligence that had been in Joe’s eye had vanished, along with his energy level and orientation. I was stunned that he ran for President, stunned that his wife and family allowed him to do it, and I would have been stunned that the Democratic Party nominated him except by that time I realized that it had become so Machiavellian that it would have nominated—oh, pick any celebrity moron—if it calculated that he would attract more votes than the awful group of 2020 election contenders.

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Ethical Quote/Unethical Quote: Two Follow-Ups From Recent Posts

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

New York Times columnist David Brooks and powerful Democratic Senator Robert Menendez both thoroughly embarrassed themselves over the weekend. Brooks subsequently took the ethical approach and admitted that he had behaved badly. Menendez took the opposite approach, and topped his previous unethical response to a scandal with a response that was even worse.

Brooks had complained via Twitter that his $78 airport dinner highlighted the everyday struggles American families face amid ongoing inflation. omitting the fact that most of his charge was for whiskey. The tweet drew widespread mockery and this Ethics Alarms rebuke. Brooks didn’t hold back in his condemnation of his own actions, and said on PBS, “The problem with the tweet — which I wrote so stupidly — was that it made it seem like I was oblivious to something that is blindingly obvious: that an upper-middle-class journalist having a bourbon at an airport is a lot different than a family living paycheck to paycheck. I was insensitive. I screwed up. I should not have written that tweet. I probably should not write any tweets … I made a mistake. It was stupid.”

Got it. It was stupid. Now explain your columns over the last few years…

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Ethics Dunce: NYT Columnist David Brooks

/ Jack Marshall / 15 Comments

I don’t know what possessed fake conservative pundit David Brooks to blow up his credibility on Twitter, now known as X, but he did it. I suppose Brooks was performing a public service for those naive enough to regard his pronouncements as coming down from the mount: Brooks styles himself as an elite intellectual, and what he did was as dunderheaded as any half-sloshed dockworker could aspire to. His tweet was also dishonest, and obviously so; maybe now fewer people will stop regarding his pontifications as worth reading, something I did years ago.

In case you missed this mini-scandal, Brooks posted the photo above that he took with his smartphone, and wrote, “This meal just cost me $78 at Newark Airport. This is why Americans think the economy is terrible.” These are the kinds of impulsive outbursts that social media encourages; I don’t know, maybe Brooks was in a bad mood, or frustrated, or half-sloshed himself. But anyone who has been in an airport restaurant knows that meal didn’t cost $78. It certainly cost too much, because eating in airports, like eating at ballgames, makes you a victim of a captive environment: a pulled pork sandwich and fries with a bottle of beer recently cost me 36 bucks at Nationals Park. Brooks, however, was cheating, and unfortunately for him, the restaurant he smeared exposed him. Good.

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David Brooks, A Trump Derangement And “Bias Makes You Stupid” Case Study

/ Jack Marshall / 39 Comments

New York Times opinion columnist David Brooks should have that famous epitaph tattooed on his forehead.

He was once an independent, erudite, interesting essayist of conservative leanings. Then he accepted big bucks to be the New York Times’ token conservative pundit. Soon, after forced contact with Charles Blow, Thomas Friedman and Paul Krugman, the Times version on the Stockholm Syndrome took over shortly before the election of Donald Trump, whom, to be fair, the tweedy and classist Brooks surely would have regarded as icky even before his re-education by the Times. Today’s model of David Brooks is incapable of objective analysis, He serves a neon-bright cautionary tale of what happens when bias eats away at one’s analytical abilities and credibility.

Take his latest column…please.

It is called “The Sad Tales of George Santos,” but it quickly devolves into one more gratuitous attack on Donald Trump. What it most reveals, however, is how far David Brooks has fallen.

Halfway through this mess, Brooks writes, after stating the obvious about Rep.-elect George Santos,

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