The Quiet American is a marvelous book, or rather, it is one in which Greene’s utter disdain for the reckless incompetence of power gets a near perfect expression. Take this snippet from near the end of the work:
Pyle said, “It’s awful.” He looked at the wet on his shoes and said in a sick voice, “What’s that?” “Blood,” I said. “Haven’t you ever seen it before?” He said, “I must get them cleaned before I see the Minister.” I don’t think he knew what he was saying. He was seeing a real war for the first time: he had punted down into Phat Diem in a kind of schoolboy dream, and anyway in his eyes soldiers didn’t count.
“You see what a drum of Diolacton can do,” I said, “in the wrong hands.” I forced him, with my hand on his shoulder, to look around. I said, “This is the hour when the place is always full of women and children-it’s the shopping hour. Why choose that of all hours?” He said weakly, “There was to have been a parade.” “And you hoped to catch a few colonels. But the parade was cancelled yesterday, Pyle.” “I didn’t know.”
“Didn’t know!” I pushed him into a patch of blood where a stretcher had lain. “You ought to be better informed.”
“I was out of town,” he said, looking down at his shoes. “They should have called it off.”
“And missed the fun?” I asked him. “Do you expect General The to lose his demonstration? This is better than a parade. Women and children are news, and soldiers aren’t, in a war. This will hit the world’s press. You’ve put General The on the map all right, Pyle. You’ve got the Third Force and National Democracy all over your right shoe. Go home to Phuong and tell her about your heroic deed-there are a few dozen less of her country people to worry about.”
A small fat priest scampered by, carrying something on a dish under a napkin. Pyle had been silent a long while, and I had nothing more to say. Indeed I had said too much. He looked white and beaten and ready to faint, and I thought, ‘What’s the good? he’ll always he innocent, you can’t blame the innocent, they are always guiltless. Ail you can do is control them or eliminate them. Innocence is a kind of insanity.’
He said, “The wouldn’t have done this. I’m sure he wouldn’t. Somebody deceived him. The Communists…”
He was impregnably armoured by his good intentions and his ignorance…
“Impregnable armoured by good intentions and ignorance.” That is what will — or at least should be — engraved on David Brooks’ tombstone. And I’m only giving him the props for his intent there out of whatever residual nil nisi bonum remains to me.
Why the vitriol, and memory of stupid wars, with the overwhelming weight of the violence reserved for far away others who don’t look like “us”?
I’m not going to fisk at length, [ETA: I lied] but hoo boy, was Brooks’ effusion the epitome of the awful that forms the beating heart of his work. You could tell it was likely to fly fast and far off the tracks from the topic sentence. Our man David had decided to weigh in on foreign affairs — nay, military strategy! — in the Middle East. As a man who knows very little about not much, leaving the shores of his adopted country is always a risk. As it proved to be.
Actually, it didn’t take any time with the text to trigger the klaxons. The headline does that: “Being Who We Are.”
Hoo Boy again. I leave aside the low-hanging fruit, and refrain from asking if the who “we” are he has in mind are those who meddled in the succession in Iran and Saudi Arabia; those who invaded the Dominican and propped up the Docs, father and son, or those who conspired against Allende and Diệm, or who trained Pinochet’s men…and you get the idea, all the overt and covert bloodshed in the service of real politik.
That’s not, of course, what Brooks has in mind. Rather, its the failure to fully arm Syrian rebels that has him exercised, his ardour fueled by a report in the Wall St. Journal that chronicles the gap between promised weaponry and deliveries. Here’s Brooks:
The rebels asked the C.I.A. for ammunition to take advantage of temporary opportunities, but the C.I.A. sometimes took two weeks to decide. The U.S. gave the rebels money to pay their troops, but they only gave them $100 to $150 for each fighter per month. The Islamic State paid its fighters twice that.
That is to say, Brooks is deeply concerned because he thinks the US has worried too much about handing weapons to people who may turn around and use them on us or our friends. Which is totally not something to worry about because that never happens.
Brooks does admit that there might be just a bit more to the calculation than bean counters at the CIA:
Now, Syria is obviously a viper’s pit in a region where the choices normally range from the appalling to the horrendous. But there are ways to approach problems in this region, and there are ways not to.
OK. Banal though that thought might be, it isn’t on its face completely risible. What, pray tell Mr. Brooks, are the right ways to handle the vexed matter of attempting to influence internecine conflict in the Levant?
Spoiler alert! It’s simple. We just have to stick to our values:
The Middle East is not a chessboard we have the power to manipulate. It is a generational drama in which we can only play our role. It is a drama over ideas, a contest between the forces of jihadism and the forces of pluralism.
Oh, holy shit on a stick. There isn’t a vomit bucket big enough to contain my bile at the “it is a drama over ideas” line. That’s disqualifying full stop. Every single reporter at the Times who has ever worked the Middle East beat — hell anyone there who’s spent time on the ground of any conflict, who’s spent time studying the actual lines of tension, the politics of violence, anything of the substance of what the real people at the point of action are doing — this is the time all of those people are planting faces so forcefully into their desktops that their office furniture now resembles this.
What’s happening in Syria isn’t a drama or a contest. It is a vicious, horrific war in which real people are suffering, acting, performing acts of utter brutality and enormous courage or compassion, trying to live daily life and all the rest. It is not some fantasy of an utterly coddled wealthy foreigner dreaming Kiplingesque dreams in house blessed with vast spaces for entertaining.
But I fulminate. Onwards!
We can’t know how this drama will play out, and we can’t direct it. We can only promote pluralism — steadily, consistently, simply.
Which, on the ground, means…this:
Sticking to our values means maintaining a simple posture of support for people who share them and a simple posture of opposition to those who oppose them.
Uhhh. Not to put too fine a point on it, see Graham Greene above. “a simple posture of support” is what you do when you don’t know what you’re doing and you don’t care. See also the seemingly difficult-for-Brooks-to-grasp concept that people elsewhere have values of their own, and interests, and alliances, and ambitions, and all kinds of things that shape their view of the world and program of action within it. For the ultimate idiocy of the Boo-Yah-Democracy approach to covert or overt military action, see George Bush/Dick Cheney’s wonderful Iraq adventure, 2003-whenever.
Does any reflection on our recent past deter our BoBo?
A rhetorical question. Of course it does not:
It means offering at least some reliable financial support to moderate fighters and activists even when their prospects look dim. It means avoiding cynical alliances, at least as much as possible.
Holy Moly Mother Of FSM! David Effing Brooks wants the United States of American to avoid cynical alliances “at least as much as possible.” Where to begin? (House of Saud?….ed.) Or rather why bother. That “as much as possible” loophole makes the Citizens United decision look like a firewall between money and influence. It is to laugh — but only because we are too big to cry.
But wait! There’s still the punchline:
It means using bombing campaigns to try to prevent mass slaughter.
“Can you say, ‘We had to bomb them to save them?'”
“There! I knew you could.”
IOW: With that the last zombie reincarnated ghost of irony squeaked, and breathed its last.
Snark aside. I cannot properly describe the deep loathing I feel for the moral crater contained within that sentence. Bombing campaigns are occasions of mass slaughter. The armchair warriors of the fighting 101st Keyboard Brigade may love the fantasy of precisely delimited violence delivered from a distance, but dead brides and slaughtered children give the lie to the notion that lasers and remote sensing have somehow enabled US explosives to distinguish on impact between bad guys and bystanders. To belabor the obvious: even when you hit exactly what you want, hundreds or thousands of pounds of high explosive are not exactly precision instruments of state power. Brooks seems ignorant of this fact, or, more likely unbothered. After all, when we stick to our values…
we will fortify people we don’t know in ways we can’t imagine.
And at least some of those will be fortified to think long and hard about the people who just bombed the crap out of them…but I digress.
Over the long term, we’ll make the Middle East slightly more fertile for moderation, which is the only influence we realistically have.
Here we revert to Brooksian fatalism. Odd, but what I think is the bedrock of his reflexive Republicanism. As any action is essentially futile, we must bow to our overlords in this best of all possible worlds. That trade, education, financial maneuvers ….anything might have an impact on ourselves and others seems simply not to have occurred to him. Bizarre.
But you can’t keep a bad thinker down for long. Here’s the capstone of the Brooks’ view of the Middle East:
Ideas drive history.
Not colonial borders. Not contingencies of politics. Not fundamental economic parameters like, for example, youth unemployment or the pathologies of extractive economies. Not…hell — this is the same notion as above. Brooks is too lazy, to intellectually incurious, to persistently ignorant to probe the details of whatever it is that flickers within the limitless sunshine of his spotless mind to engage the issues on which he chooses to opine at any level a micrometer below the surface.
“Ideas drive history”! If a first year undergraduate tried that on in an essay in one of my classes the line would be drowned in a sea of red, and a comment as long as this post would try to explain why cliches are not conclusions. David Brooks, secure from any meaningful scrutiny (he’s bragged about ignoring comments, and he appears to have or brook no real editing) will be telling you how deeply concerned he is on your radio or teevee any moment now. And he’ll be back again twice next week in the most valuable opinion real estate in the English speaking world.
David Brooks. Meet Alden Pyle. He’s got something to say to you.
Inages: Peter Paul Rubens, Massacre of the Innocents, 1611-1612
Francisco de Goya, The Disasters of War, “This is too much!” 1610 and after.
David Koch
but, but.. $100 buys alot of food at Applebees.
Linnaeus
The “Docs” were the rulers of Haiti, although US forces did (and not for the first time) occupy the Dominican Republic in 1965 out of fear of “another Cuba” forming.
Corner Stone
Tell us how you really feel?
Baud
Damn, that’s a lot of words for a Friday night.
jl
Brooks’ column reads like he had written several disconnected paragraphs on perhaps several topics related to recent US policy in the Mideast, Arab Spring, democracy building, and Syria, in a general sort of way. Maybe he had written them out as possible starting points for a column. Then he finally just string them together and submitted that mess as a column, rather than actually writing a column that made any sense.
I forgot, he threw in a short boilerplate bromide cartoon stereotype about Republican and Democratic attitudes towards government too, towards the end. Probably for desperate word count purposes.
JGabriel
David Brooks via Tom Levenson @ Top:
And there you have it. David Brooks’s highest value and most glorious expression of our great American will: Simple Posturing.
Seriously, that simple sentence from Brooks says more about his values than the entire op-ed says about America’s.
Corner Stone
Don’t you fucking tell me about the “skills gap” you motherfucker.
BGinCHI
Poor Tom’s a hot.
Please get back to writing your excellent books and stop reading that shitstain.
Don’t make me pull this country over.
BGinCHI
Let’s do a commenters and FPers lottery.
Winner goes to NYC and punches Brooks in the face and/or nuts (the latter if they can be located).
I’m serious about this.
Baud
@JGabriel:
In all fairness, that sentence sums I up why I vote Dem.
Elizabelle
Similarities between Graham Greene and David Brooks:
They both have Anglo names.
It’s possible both have aunts.
Both lived at some point during the 20th century. (One observed events keenly and wrote incisively; the other … got a column at the NYTimes.)
David Koch
~ David Brooks Apr 9, 2003
jl
@Baud: Funny thing is that, reading it literally, that is pretty much what the US did with the Syrian rebels. We certainly did display a ‘simple posture of support’.
I assume Brooks really means something else by ‘simple posture’. But it’s not the reader’s job to make wild guesses as to what Brooks means. Or is it? In Brooks world, it is a good racket, if you can keep it going.
Wildly guessing, I would say that part of Brooks’ column endorses a GW Bush style ‘hope is a plan’ foreign policy. Good luck with that. Oh wait, we already tried that twice with Dub, in Afghanistan and Iraq. Good luck didn’t happen twice in a row. Huh? Who wudda thunk?
bago
Centrism means killing people we don’t know in ways we can’t imagine.
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/01/drones-are-appearing-on-afghan-rugs/385025/
David Koch
~ David Brooks, Apr 28, 2003
Tenar Darell
So glad you quoted from Greene. I only read The Quiet American within the past decade, and it hammered home that our ignorance is no excuse and our good intentions mean squat. My kindest wish for Brooks is that he someday realizes this, and stops commenting at all.
Roger Moore
Which, as far as I can tell, means that we ought to tell just about everyone in the region to FOADIAF. The number of organized groups in the Middle East who share our values and are fighting right now is negligible. I’d love to see what value Brooks thinks we share with Saudi Arabia.
BGinCHI
@bago: Can’t or won’t?
Baud
@David Koch:
April 2003 was the happiest time in Brooks’s life.
SiubhanDuinne
@David Koch:
That is … simply obscene.
David Koch
~ Warmongering, coward, Neo-Con, chickehawk David Brooks on Mar 7, 2003
David Koch
~ The judgement of history indicting and convicting David Brooks on Mar 17, 2003
Baud
@jl:
His writing gives him plausible deniability if you ever try to accuse him of taking the wrong position.
K488
In several of his novels John Barth wrote about what I think he called the tragic consequences of willful naiveté. Very much along the lines of what Greene was getting at, and what Tom L. is pointing out. David Brooks seems to embody this, to his shame.
jl
I am still trying to figure out what the statement that the Democrats do not believe that government can do anything right in foreign policy means in the context of the decision to support one faction in a vicious civil war inside a failed state, partly controlled by a ruthless authoritarian.
Maybe several years ago we should have supported Syrian rebels who seemed to be more moderate than others. Maybe not. Brooks column adds absolutely no information or anything helpful to evaluating the possible decisions we could have made, at all.
I think he jotted down a few disparate paragraphs as ideas for a column, gave up, strung them together and sent them in. I think that is the best guide to interpreting that near random concatenation of English words.
Kay (not the front-pager)
Yes! This is true! A good way to approach the problems of the region is to be very careful who we arm, and how much. A good way not to is to give massive amounts of unaccountable weaponry to anyone who can charm McCain into thinking they “share our values.”
The man has no imagination. I’ reminded of a quote from Ed Kilgore on Wednesday in regard to Scott Walker:
David Koch
David Brooks celebrating the
liberationkilling of 600,000 Iraqi civilians on May 2, 2003Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@Elizabelle:
I was slightly confused by the headline, too. It’s that David Brooks is auditioning to be a Graham Greene character, not that Brooks is auditioning to be Greene.
I think.
Roger Moore
@Kay (not the front-pager):
It doesn’t even require imagination to realize we should be careful about who we arm; it only requires memory.
burnspbesq
Please come back, Andrew. With your impending departure, these clowns have gone back to hitting us over the head with Bobo, and that hurts a whole lot more.
Karen in GA
Sorry, I had to stop right here, at
just to yell “WTF?!” at the top of my lungs.
Okay, I’ll go back and read the rest of this now.
burnspbesq
Levenson, there is an international treaty that prohibits inflicting this kind of trauma on innocent civilians. Report to The Hague on Monday.
max
@jl: Brooks’ column reads like he had written several disconnected paragraphs on perhaps several topics related to recent US policy in the Mideast, Arab Spring, democracy building, and Syria, in a general sort of way. Maybe he had written them out as possible starting points for a column. Then he finally just string them together and submitted that mess as a column, rather than actually writing a column that made any sense.
They’re connected together by the subjects he is writing around: what he wants done (an invasion of Syria), who he wants to criticize (Obama, for not acting like Bush), what he wants done about it (elect a GOP president), and the camouflaging of his end game (a repeat of 2003 in Syria, circa 2018-19). It’s a response to the fact that Saudi Arabia is run by assholes who support the most vicious terrorists, but for various reasons we really do not want to go to war with them or even annoy them. So the neo-con back in 2001-2003, and which they are still aiming to complete was to go to war with everybody *around* Saudi Arabia, thus bringing an end to the conflict with Palestine, the ending of the ‘Iran threat’, create ultra-cheap oil, and cause the creation of Pro-American democracies all over the Middle East which, in turn would result in Republicans winning all the elections from now ’til eternity. Also, it would build American character and put hair on our chests.
(That sounds like a joke, but that is as accurate a summary as I can make of the plan. It’s a bit hazy on the details because the people writing about it were always quite hazy about how it was all supposed to work.)
max
[‘So Brooks is back to his old tricks, eh? They really think they’re going to win in 2016.’]
Svensker
Thanks, Tom. That was good.
Kay (not the front-pager)
@Roger Moore: Point taken.
fuckwit
@David Koch: Are you Billmon? Bestest use of someone’s own quotes to thoroughly skewer them I’ve seen since he used to blog.
MomSense
Brooks is a fool.
Frankensteinbeck
This David Brooks article is excellent… uh, in the sense that it’s useful.
THERE. Thank you, Brooks. Thank you so much. You have laid out the thought process behind traditional conservative policy. This is terribly confusing to Democrats and other people who at least try to work with facts and reality.
Brooks does not want nuance. Nuance is bad. He wants a line to be drawn between Good and Bad, and Good should be supported in the simplest, most direct way. Results are irrelevant. Both moral and practical complexities are irrelevant – indeed, he grades you obviously inferior for believing they exist. Bush attacked the tyrant. Yay! Tell teenagers not to have sex. Yay! If rich people get richer, they’ll hire more people. Yay! Prayer is great! What do you mean I can’t make prayers part of my job? Boo!
Hell, ‘I’m voting against that scary black man. Yay!’
Results don’t matter. He doesn’t care. They don’t care. It’s an entirely different way of thinking.
Miki
@K488: Graham Greene and John Barth both, on a Friday night, on BJ, with a nice Malbec. Life is good.
srv
You and your ilk were Brooksian before you were not. It’s BJ Dogma that courtesy bombing saved the mass slaughter of Benghazi.
I expect better than rank hypocrisy.
max
Wow. Thanks Koch!
David Brooks, Feb. 28, 2002
max
[‘He just completely does one thing and then goes off in a totally different direction. Like some kind of stumbling drunk or something.’]
Elmo
Ahhhhhh.
Cigarette?
Mike in NC
Sadly, David Brooks will never get to write a State of the Union speech for President Romney.
Zinsky
I really, really dislike David Brooks. He says just enough quasi-moderate things to make you believe he is a decent guy and then shows his true colors by saying some ultra-fascist thing that makes you realize what a lying, plutocratic snake in the grass he really is. I would much rather have a man spit in my face than shove a shiv in my back. I trust David Brooks not one iota.
Mike in NC
Both of the movie adaptations of “The Quiet American” we’re decent.
Bill D.
@Linnaeus: All factual points that you make. However, I read Tom’s line as listing separate actions in a litany of actions, not as related sequential events, as in we did this and we also did that.
Tree With Water
“Bombing campaigns are occasions of mass slaughter”.
There’s a exceptional pictorial/history book of WW2’s Flying Fortresses*, in which is recounted a briefing given newly arrived bomber crews to England. That briefing invariably included a warning to the crews to face the reality of their job; that they would most definitely being dropping bombs on women and children, however inadvertent; and that they would have to live with that fact in the name of duty to country.
But science has advanced leaps and bounds since 1945, to the point we have developed lasers that CAN indeed fit on sharks which can hit a single shrimp-in-seaweed at 20 nautical miles. That is a salient point of David Brooks analysis that you conveniently choose to refute. Shame on you. Brooks is dealing with a 12th level chessboard, while you’re playing tiddlywinks. You’re outmatched, and it’s driven you crazy.
*(I can’t recall the title, but the author’s name was Yablonski- I think).
Corner Stone
@fuckwit: Please. Never, ever insult Billmon by putting this Obama-suckup hack in the same sentence, much less league or category.
Linnaeus
@Bill D.:
Yeah, I can see how you’re reading that. It just looked to me like he was connecting the DR and the Docs, given how the sentence was constructed. But no big deal.
KS in MA
That “simple posture” really is something, isn’t it? I can’t help thinking Brooks must have read “Diary of a Country Priest” (instead of Graham Greene) and believes it should be the basis of foreign policy.
Villago Delenda Est
Not one of the 3000 odd Americans who died on 9/11 were David Brooks or a member of his family.
So, they are just numbers to him. They are not humans, they have no faces, they are nothing.
Brooks exhibits the same tendencies as Stalin without the honest open brutality of Stalin.
raven
@Mike in NC: The second was better.
raven
The Ugly American is good too.
Villago Delenda Est
@burnspbesq: In the words of the Dark Lord, “how quaint.”
Villago Delenda Est
@Roger Moore:
Mammon worship.
Villago Delenda Est
All of Brooks’ notions of the reality of warfare come straight out of the nearest octoplex.
He’s playing to a country that “went shopping” while some (not all, not by a long shot) of their sons and daughters were being permanently damaged, physically and mentally, by the task they were asked to do.
pseudonymous in nc
Brooks reminds me that Americans who pontificate on the efficacy of bombing campaigns really need to have either the cultural or direct memory of being under one. That is, at least, something most Europeans can draw upon.
pluky
@Linnaeus: My dad was in on that campaign in between tours in Viet Nam! Busy we were then.
mclaren
Ways to approach problems in this region: bug out and leave the mideast alone.
Ways not to: everything conservatives suggest.
Tehanu
@Tree With Water:
“Can” (maybe) is not the same as “does.” Sure, maybe that’s possible in some kind of blue-sky daydream, but it seems to be refuted by the multiple photographs of dead civilians and children from our bombings that you can find all over the place. Are you going to tell us next about how robots are creating jobs for blue-collar workers?
Linnaeus
@pluky:
Oh, wow. That must have been….not fun.
jl
@Tehanu: In addition to the problems of ‘can’ versus ‘does’, Brooks seems to think that bombing campaigns in a civil war can reliably do something useful.
I can see how bombing campaigns, for just a hypothetical example, applied to a force of brutal radical ISIS fighters from taking over a town of full of more moderate people who are likely to act as our allies makes sense. In that case, you can bomb the easily identifiable bad guys outside of town, kill very few good guys, and that allows the good guys in town to go and drive the bad guys away.
Oh, wait, that scenario isn’t hypothetical, is it?
Or, I guess you could bomb into the midst of the Syrian civil war in preparation of a US invasion of good guys (that would be us), who would then be welcomed as liberators. That has actually worked in the past. Hey, it might have even worked in Iraq, if BushCo hadn’t totally messed it up (though I personally never supported that idea). Is Brooks supporting a US ground intervention in the Syrian civil war?
Maybe Brooks is advocating bombing places that we think have lots of bad guys. We would just do that for an indeterminate period, as a simple posture of support. Maybe magically, we would only hit bad guys, the good guys would win, and the unknown unimaginable people who win would love us and be great and valuable allies.
On the other hand, maybe a lot of good guys, and gals, and kids, and oldsters, and useful stuff people need in order to live, would get blown up in addition to the bad guys. And since the bombing might not do much good, the people might not see much point in it. In which case people we might not even imagine in the future will hate our guts and turn into bad guys.
But, hey, might work. So lets do it.
Brooks should have stopped at sending them more money and small arms. That idea would not reveal him to be a complete fool.
divF
I read that quote and what followed aloud to Madame divF, who responded tartly, “Maybe Brooks could embroider it on a cushion”.
Always a pleasure to read your work here, Professor.
SRW1
@David Koch:
In, I think, May 2003 I attended Bio2003 in Washington, DC, an international biotech/VC conference. The organizers had hired the then chairman of the GOP, whose name I don’t remember, to give a speech at a reception while some of the participants were still finishing their dessert. He delivered some pretty boilerplate lines about the importance of innovation and government not getting into the way of private initiative. The highlight came when the fellow at the mic told us that he had just seen the President, that W was still mighty steemed about some of ‘our European allies’, and that it would take a while for those strong feelings to abate.
As I said, it was an international conference and there were people from those ‘surrender monkey’ and ‘Old Europe’ countries in the audience. The conversation at our table took a while to get going again after the speech had ended. Glory days.
retiredeng
@efgoldman: My thoughts as well. It’s just that Brooks’ word salads are of the gourmet variety.
Cervantes
@retiredeng:
If by “gourmet” one means “over-priced.”
Howlin Wolfe
@max: It’s a cartoon scenario engendered by a cartoon ideology. It’s no deeper than that.
Howlin Wolfe
@Frankensteinbeck: Nuance is bad when libruhlz use it. It’s deep thought when they do.
Howlin Wolfe
@Bill D.: That’s how I read it, too.
Xjmueller
In some ways, ideas do drive history. I can think of a few:
Gimme your stuff
Revenge!
They insulted our honor
It’ll be a cakewalk
They’re a bunch of savages
Life there is cheap
God is on our side
I don’t think this is what DB was thinking of, but these do drive individuals and cultures. I know this doesn’t happen in a vacuum, but contribute.
JR in WV
This is such good reading on Sunday Morning, as opposed to the ChuckyToddShew. David is so useful as a still, inactive, target, and so useless as a contributor of ideas.
Loved the hosting of David’s best ideas from 2003!! A great job of finding the best morsels of that feast of good ideas imposed on the people of Iraq, and opportunities created for the owners of Iran.
Keep up the good work, Balloon-Juice!
tc
The saddest thing about this is my dad, who is an 80 year old supposedly democrat, thinks Bobo is pretty damn smart and makes good arguments.
Bitter Scribe
it is one in which Greene’s utter disdain for the reckless incompetence of
powerAmericans gets a near perfect expression.FTFY
Sherparick
That last line of Graham Greene describes about 80% of Brooks “He was impregnably armoured by his good intentions and his ignorance…” But another 20% is mendacity (and rises to 100% in the CEO and operating officers of contractors like XE (formerly Blackwater), Haliburtion, Lockheed Martin, etc and their lobbyists on K Street.) Unlike Pyle, they never get close enough to get blood on their shoes.
Comrade Nimrod Humperdink
Tom I love your stuff but this is one of the best things I’ve ever read on Balloon Juice. If I still taught freshman composition at university I’d be tempted to combine it with the column and maybe a second reaction piece with a different point of view and let the kids have at it.
Comrade Nimrod Humperdink
@tc: that’s the power of tone… Reagan did his damnedest to kick everyone that wasn’t white and rich in the collective junk, but he did it with that goofy fucking smile on his face, so people that didn’t pay attention loved him for it.
Jado
@K488:
“…to his shame.”
Brooks has no shame. He is not smart enough to have shame. He is a walking, talking Dunning-Kruger Effect.
Because unless he IS so mortifyingly stupid that it approaches the George W. Bush Stupidity Singularity event horizon, then he is a monster. And we routinely have a monster talk to us on our TV waves.
Please, Dear Jeebus, let him be stupid.