So basically Johnny Rotten wrote the Trump platform decades ago

Old Ben was worried about people like David Brooks

“A republic, if you can keep it”
Ben Franklin, 1787

Allahpundit:

It’s also typical of the “banal authoritarianism of do-something punditry,” of which Brooks is a leading practitioner, that the idea of gridlock horrifies him more than extending the imbalance of power among the three branches.

More great Brooks-smacking:

David Brooks Joins Tom Friedman In Calling For Authoritarian Government

Tom Friedman has long been an admirer of China's version of democracy, which is to not have a democracy.

Yesterday David Brooks moved outside his comfort zone of evaluating the crispness of trouser creases to opine it's time to Yield more authority to the President.

Brooks Looks For Contrarian Points

The Christmas season must be difficult for Times columnists. Apparently holiday fatigue and excess eggnog lead to bad outcomes. Any column by Maureen Dowd could be offered as evidence but this latest laugher from David Brooks reveals a man in need of a few weeks away

A Brooks miscellany from the archives:

Michelle Malkin captures the essence of David Brooks

Ace on Fire

More foolishness from David Brooks

Obama Arrangement Syndrome or why Kathleen Parker will always stand by her man

Just how “Burkean” are the Obamacons?

David Frum is a monster

Bryan Preston

The Fall of David Frum

There’s a malevolence to the way Frum trolls conservatives and exploits tragedy that precludes belief that adulthood would make a difference. He is an adult, who is also a nasty piece of work.

Let's not forget that Frum is a serial offender.

A spectre haunts the sleep of the MSM

The nightmare has a name:

Breitbart!

First, a tale of low bars and double-standards

Ana Marie Cox Thinks Breitbart And His ‘Minions’ Are Bad Bad People

Let’s just get this out of the way right up front: Ana Marie Cox built her career on blogging jokes about anal sex at the reprehensible guttersnipe site Wonkette. She presented herself as a rambunctious youngster, but it turned out she was already pushing 30 and just naturally behaves like a annoying, hyperactive juvenile. Both Time and later the Guardian hired her in full knowledge of this colorful journalistic career.

Now that we’ve established Cox’s bona fides as a scribe and scholar…

(HT: The Other McCain)

Something I wrote back when Ana Marie was Wonkette and reveling in butt sex blogging:

How does that re-virgining process work again?

But what happens when she leverages this blogging gig to reenter the world of serious journalism? Will the CSM write about the scandal of falling journalistic standards at Newsweek? Will the Times editorialize about moral failure at the NYRB? Will Joel Klein scold ABC for putting a shameless, partisan scandal whore on its staff?

I think we know the answer. But it still raises an interesting question. How does the process work? What makes a serious journalist? How can you be one yesterday, not one today, and be restored to grace tomorrow?

It’s not just Time, GQ, and the Guardian who helped AMC get back in the Church of Serious Jounalism. Howard Kurtz has used her for years on Reliable Sources as a moral guide for reporters, editors, and readers.

Next, Patterico shows that David Frum is lower than pond slime.

David Frum Dances on Breitbart’s Grave

David Frum is so gosh-darned proud of his broadside last year about Andrew Breitbart, published the day of Andrew’s death, that he reprints the whole thing in full today. Those who have ever read Frum will be less than shocked to learn that Frum’s reprint is prefaced by a self-aggrandizing paean to his own amazing courage in being willing to parrot clueless left-wing criticisms of a deceased family man.

Patterico understands the true essence of this unfortunate Canadian import:

Frum pats himself on the back so often that his own palm print is permanently embedded between his shoulder blades. I can’t think of a single national figure who is more self-absorbed, other than perhaps Meghan McCain, or Barack Obama. His goal could not be more clear: to suck up to the leftists in power in Big Media, and to gain accolades from those who cluck their tongues at the likes of Andrew Breitbart.

This might seem like a good idea, I guess. It will probably get you invited to the desirable soirees. But I believe people can inherently recognize phonies. And David Frum is a phony.

Michelle Malkin captures the essence of David Brooks

Eddie Haskell Brooks

New York Times columnist David Brooks is the Eddie Haskell of the Fourth Estate. Like the two-faced sycophant in "Leave It to Beaver," Brooks indulges in excessive politeness while currying favor with political authority. He prides himself on an oily semblance of maturity and rational discourse.

David Frum goes from triumph to triumph

David Frum’s new novel is awful

Frum is a former conservative who is now trending liberal and may in fact be headed for the netherworld of Andrew Sullivanville; he has written many good nonfiction books about politics and culture, including my favorite, “How We Got Here: The 70s: The Decade that Brought You Modern Life — for Better or Worse.” The man knows how to write. But “Patriots” is a stinker. The thing is so filled with clichés, bad dialogue and obvious plotting that I’m not sure where to start....

In short, “Patriots” is an alternate take on The David Frum Story. It tells the story of a clueless rich guy who comes to Washington (although Frum was never stupid), is mentored by the conservative movement, and then rebels against that same movement.

RTWT

A new low for David Frum

Given his history that's very, very low.

David Frum: Trayvon Martin, and the backlash against the backlash

 It is bad enough that Frum's "analysis mixes facts that are flat out wrong ("He was 100 pounds lighter than his killer.") and wild conclusions that are unsupported by real evidence ("Martin was hunted down by a trigger-happy bully").

What's especially interesting is how Frum-- rich, white, Canadian-born-- plays the race card to attack America's gun laws and Jacksonian culture.

He finds Florida's gun laws "peculiar" He implies that a majority of the states passed shall issue concealed carry laws as part of a post-Obama "backlash" by "fearful elderly whites in the South."

Is Frum lazy and ill-informed or is he dishonest? It is one or the other because anyone who spends 10 minutes with Google knows that the shall-issue movement has been active and successful for twenty years. It has nothing to do with Obama's election nor is it only a Southern phenomenon.

Howard Kurtz as perceptive as ever

Kurtz on Sunday's Reliable Sources

You had well-known commentators on the right like David Frum, Kathleen Parker, and others

David Frum on Wednesday

I have to recognize that my views are not very representative of the conservative mainstream.

Ace on Fire

This post on David Brook's "second thoughts" is today's must read.

 David Brooks Admits: "I'm an Obama Sap"

Supposedly he's a "conservative," at least on fiscal matters, and ergo should have opposed Obama on those grounds. But for David Brooks, the idea of a man with an impeccably-creased trousers, who spoke with a Bluffer's Guide fluency about Reinhold Niebuhr, who would make our national dialogue possibly sound more like Firing Line than Crossfire, trumped all tangible political goals such as keeping government spending down and limiting government's expansion into new areas which it could screw up.


But no. For David Brooks, a sharp trouser crease trumped a sharp demarcation of the boundary of government intrusiveness.


Consider what this says about David Brooks.

UPDATE:

Don Surber:

In blasting ideology, what David Brooks is saying is that having values, principles and beliefs that you openly state and you defend is somehow wrong. What David Brooks is saying is that we should all have no values, principles or beliefs and just go along to get along because to believe in something is to “paralyze this country.”

What a loathsome, cynical outlook on life. I do feel sorry for him but I also laugh at him because the more he tries to present himself as being above the fray, the more he illustrates that he is below the fray. Two sets of Americans have opposing world views that they are willing to fight for, while David Brooks believes in nothing but political expediency. There is a cowardice in not being willing to fight for something — anything.

G. K. Chesterton: "Tolerance is the virtue of a man without convictions."

Like a bad case of athlete's foot

We just can't get rid of David Frum.

Like his old buddy Excitable Andy, he is often wrong but Rarely in doubt. And he never doubts that the public needs the brilliance of David Frum.

Now he wants to be the arbiter of acceptable political rhetoric.

Apparently, calling some one a socialist is out of bounds, but it is just fine to label people "unpatriotic" if they disagree with the foreign adventures promoted by David Frum.

Stanley Kurtz treats Frum with more respect than he deserves.

David Frum, Speech Policeman

Frum desperately wants to be seen as a serious conservative leader. Yet his stock-in-trade are strident attacks on other conservatives. His treatment of Kurtz's book is bizarre even by Frum's standards.

The announcement made it clear that my book was the result of more than two years of empirical and historical research into Barack Obama’s political past, and would marshal “a wide array of never-before-seen evidence to establish that the president of the United States is indeed a socialist.” Frum, however, didn’t wait to consider my evidence or argument, or even bother to read my book. Instead, he invited a self-described Democratic activist who writes under the pseudonym “Eugene Victor Debs” to attack the very idea of my book — before either had read it.

Frum's actions stand as stellar examples of the hypocrisy and feline thuggishness of the Obamacons.

Is there a better example of "epistemic closure" than attacking a book before you read it?

UPDATE: Kurtz and Jonah Goldberg continue the discussion:

David Frum’s Wrong Direction


Politics Without Labels? What a Silly Concept

Remembering David Frum

I probably should have saved the Leo Amery quote for a "how's that crow taste" smackdown of David Frum. Sort of like this one:

Sliding Further Down the Path of Irrelevance

They all predicted that the GOP was headed towards extinction unless it embraced a more moderate agenda. For the most part the opposite happened, and the result is an electoral “bloodbath” the likes of which none of us has ever seen in our lifetime – just not the one anticipated by Frum and his ilk.

John Hawkins takes David Frum to the woodshed

Long story short, everybody has to make a living. But, I'm not interested in helping people like Frum play this little game where they try to cripple conservatives publicly while coming around on the back end to milk us for money. If Frum wants to be a dancing monkey for the Left, let them come up with the money to pay for the tune.

RTWT. You'll be glad you did.

Ace weighs in.


Little Miss Attila: "Hawkins is saying something that has needed saying for a long time".

I {heart} Mark Steyn

This post was good:

Honor-Rolled

But the caning he gave Conor Friedersdorf is not to be missed:

Correction Sought

Just One Minute weighs in judiciously (which is bad news for Conor "I'm a conservative who matters" Friedersdorf:

Bringing The 'Epic' To 'Epic Fail'

Three quick points;

1. The essential rightness of Steyn's argument is found in his comparison of Matthew Shepherd and Aasiya Hassan (and the media coverage of each murder).

2. When some one starts an argument by calling their opponent close-minded, unthinking, cynical and/or easily manipulated (which is the essence of Friederdorf's "epistemic closure"), they really aren't interested in an honest discussion. He seeks to mark his conservative opponents as unworthy of debate. His audience is the MSM who like his message (see next post) and like "conservatives" who smear popular conservatives (see Frum, David).

3 How can Friedersdorf claim any sort of high ground when he works with and seeks support from Excitable Andy, "The Chief Obstetrician"? Not even Glen Beck has ever been so consistently hysterical and loony.

More Frum Fall-out

Odious Conservatives

A major proposition that I advance in a book that will be published later this month, After the Hangover: The Conservatives' Road to Recovery, is that there exists an odious subgroup of conservatives who since the beginning of the conservative movement have made their way to prominence in the mainstream media by a cheap act. They disparage with great melodrama other conservatives. Liberals love it -- and for a while love the disparagers. In the late 1990s Arianna Huffington exploited this instrument of self-promotion brazenly. For several years David Frum has been doing it haltingly, even timorously. However, in the last two weeks he has been pulling a Huffington with unusual boldness.

First he smeared Sean Hannity. Then he reproached conservative opponents of the Democrats' healthcare monstrosity. Now he is claiming martyrdom at the hands of Arthur Brooks, the head of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) that housed him as a resident fellow for seven years, reportedly at a salary of $100,000 a year. Brooks was willing to let him stay on at AEI but without a salary. Very theatrically Frum(p) quit, and the Liberals pronounced him a great man. My thesis is again vindicated, and you will understand my satisfaction in reporting that in Hangover I have embalmed Frum(p) as a perfect example of the conservative hustler, manipulating Liberal approval. I call his type the Reformed Conservatives (RCs).

Frum’s Firing


By now, many Chronicles readers have no doubt heard that David Frum was fired from his cushy job at the American Enterprise Institute, following an online column claiming that the passage of Obamacare was the GOP’s “Waterloo,” which could have been avoided if the GOP had been more willing to negotiate with Obama. Frum is now charging that AEI tossed him because it was responding to pressure from its donors, a charge eminent AEI scholar Charles Murray has denounced at National Review Online as “despicable,” since it is unsupported by evidence and is calculated to appeal to the leftist media. But if Murray is only now discovering the nature of Frum, he has not been paying attention.

From the beginning, the Canadian carpetbagger has sought to climb the greasy pole by attacking those on his right, in ways designed to curry favor with the left. As an undergraduate at Yale, he joined leftists at Yale in urging the university to take control of the Yale Literary Magazine, then run by future Chronicles editor Andrei Navrozov.

A bad news, good news sort of thing

Last year i wrote this about David Frum:

Frum, on the other hand, is still trying to get on board the conservative-bashing gravy train. We can expect plenty of mischief from eDF as he tries to catch the attention of the MSM.

That turned out to be correct and Frum has become a regular on cable. (That's the bad news.)

The bad news is that he is the leading resercon for a cable news network.

The good news is that it is the ratings-challenged CNN.

The essential Tucker Carlson

William Jacobson notes that Carlson's website The Daily Caller isn't quite living up to its mission statement:

Daily Caller A Failure

A commenter summed up Carlson's career nicely:

But dude, it's Tucker Carlson. He's made a career of being the frat boy liberals have in mind when they talk about Conservatives.

See also:

Tucker Carlson: The willing degradation of the reservation conservative

Frum-smacking: A game everyone can (should) play

The Conservative the Right Loves to Hate

He is a good and energetic man, and has, in the years since he left service at the White House, dedicated himself to being what I call a “polite-company conservative” (or PCC), much like David Brooks and Sam Tanenhaus at the New York Times (where the precocious Ross Douthat is shaping up to be a baby version of the species). A PCC is a conservative who yearns for the goodwill of the liberal elite in the media and in the Beltway—who wishes, always, to have their ear, to be at their dinner parties, to be comforted by a sense that liberal interlocutors believe that they are not like other conservatives, with their intolerance and boorishness, their shrillness and their talk radio. The PCC, in fact, distinguishes himself from other conservatives not so much ideologically—though there is an element of that—as aesthetically.

Ace:

I have a somewhat different take on Frum. I notice that Frum is not actually terribly policy-oriented or policy-informed. He is not a wonk. Or, if it is, he seems to hide it well enough on his blog. I don't see a lot of deep policy analysis on his site.

Frum, of course, is constantly castigating conservatives like Limbaugh for supposedly-simplistic thinking, sloganeering, etc. Not doing their homework. Not pouring over the policy details and arriving at a good policy position, but instead preferring easier, gut-level attitudinal posturing.

The thing is -- That's all that Frum does, too. He may criticize Limbaugh for simplifying arguments into easy-to-repeat gut-level impulses and attitudes, rather than going into great detail about policy, but that's all Frum does, too. Except instead of copping one attitude -- "Don't negotiate; stay firm; remain true to principles" -- he cops the opposite attitude -- "Always negotiate; stay flexible; compromise on principles."

But because his attitude is viewed more favorably by the liberal retardentsia whose approval he so craves, he deems that his attitude is the more sophisticated and intellectualized one.

Here's something i wrote a year ago:

The recent Tea Parties really put the lie to Frum’s posturing. By all rights, he should love this essentially libertarian grass roots movement. His great bugaboo--the Religious Right--is not driving the movement. The Tea Parties focus on economics not the social issues that Frum detests.

But Frum is luke warm. Fox News jumped on the board the bandwagon, you see. The people at MSNBC and CNN are making fun of the demonstrators. People might think that David Frum a dork like Sean Hannity if he supports the Tea Parties.

That really is the bottom line with Frum. He cares a lot about what the right people think.

Not Right as in conservative. Not Right as in correct. No, right as in popular in the cool circles and cool in the popular circles.

Today on Sesame Street: David Brooks

Brooks is turning out to be like Big Bird to Obama's Snuffaluffagus! He's the only one who can see the real Obama and nobody believes him.

Jonah Goldberg in The Corner.

News Flash!!!

David Brooks is still a pompous jerk.

Ace has the best take down.


Follow the discussion at Memeorandum.


I have a theory about why the Times still publishes a dope like Brooks. It goes back to this passage from David Gelernter:

Today's elite loathes the public. Nothing personal, just a fundamental difference in world view, but the hatred is unmistakable. Occaissionally it escapes in scorching geysers. Michael Lewis reports in the New Republic on the '96 Dole presidential campaign: 'The crowd flips the finger at the busloads of journalists and chant rude things at them as they enter each arena. The journalists, for their part, wear buttons that say 'yeah, i'm the Media. Screw You.' The crowd hates the reporters, the reporters hate the crowd-- an even matchup, except that the reporters wield power and the crowed (in effect) wields none.

Drawing Life

David Brooks -- just one more Freddie Uncle from the New York Times.

More foolishness from David Brooks

Obama is "the most talented political figure of the age."

Expertly dealt with by R.S. McCain and Ryan Cole.

David Brooks and the Obama man-crush

Brooks Again

This reminds me of all the pundits who raved about Bill Clinton as a politician ("the greatest of his time", "the best since FDR", yadda yadda yadda). This still gets repeated even though Clinton was way below average by the measures that count. (See here and here).

One of the biggest problems in Washington and in the MSM, is that pundits and political operators substitute consensus for analysis. Most of them just repeat conventional wisdom instead of thinking things through on their own or digging into the data.