Bobo’s Shame
I said below, that I wondered if Bill Kristol was having trouble looking himself in the mirror these days and then lo and behold, I come across this transcript of David Brooks, fellow “reasonable, temperate, believable” conservative, on The News Hour and I realize that somebody is giving out mind altering drugs at Gertrude and Irving’s kaffe klatches. Something is seriously wrong with these people. Get a load of this pile of road apples (emphasis throughout is mine):
DAVID BROOKS: The story that was in the Washington Post by a great reporter by the name of Tom Ricks was that Colin Powell had gotten together with the joint chiefs gone around Rumsfeld, gone to the White House, and persuaded that. My reporting has persuaded me, though Ricks is a fantastic reporter, that that was not true.
JIM LEHRER: Rick covers the Pentagon for the Washington Post. He is a superb reporter.
DAVID BROOKS: And I'm convinced it started with the president who may....
JIM LEHRER: Started with the president...
DAVID BROOKS: After the bombing of the U.N. building, decided to internationalize it, went through an interagency process. Paul Wolfowitz played a key role. I was -- read documents given to Donald Rumsfeld before any of the Colin Powell meetings allegedly took place in which Rumsfeld signed off on the U.N. wording of the U.N. Resolution. I think this all preceded any end run around Donald Rumsfeld. I think it started with the president and was worked by the administration for some of the reasons Mark talked about--
JIM LEHRER: Do you agree with what Mark said? The policy is in tatters and that's why they had to--
DAVID BROOKS: They made an adjustment. It evolved in the way they planned months ago. That's their line. I believe what happened was they realized things were going badly -- not only because they didn't have enough troops and I don't think we are ever going to get French troops. They hoped to get Pakistani, Indian, and Turkish troops. But because they need more money and I think that's an underreported part of the story, they need more money to support Iraq and that's not going to come from France or Germany or those countries - it's going to come from the IMF and the World Bank and the Treasury Department played a major goal in going to the U.N. so they could hopefully get some money from those institutions.
JIM LEHRER: The Treasury said, hey, wait a minute, we can't afford this on our own.
[...]
DAVID BROOKS: Let me disagree in part. This is so important, this is the future of American foreign policy for a generation. We should not think dollars and cents here. We should think like George Steinbrenner when he buys a slugger, he buys six sluggers because he is just going to throw a lot at the problem. I'm afraid the Bush administration and the Congress is thinking dollars and cents when this has to be done right for the Iraqi people. We need to spend what we need to spend. We can talk about the tax cuts and how we are going to fund it later. But I think the administration so far is being penny pinching and not spending what it needs to get the electricity up, to get all the other problems solved that can be solved with money, of which a lot of them can be.
JIM LEHRER: Do you think politically they can get away with that? Do you think the American people would support what you just said whatever it takes, do it?
DAVID BROOKS: Everybody from Howard Dean to Jesse Helms or whoever is on the right now says we cannot cut and run. We cannot fail at that. Democrats have different ideas how to proceed, but everybody agrees except for Dennis Kucinich, that we cannot cut and run. This has to work out or else U.S. national interests will be harmed across the board.
(ed. How fucking convenient this argument is. "We've made this mess and now there's no choice but for you to help clean it up." That may be true, but it certainly doesn't make a very good case for leaving this miserable failure of a president in office any longer than we have to.)
[…]
MARK SHIELDS: This is not a mistake but an error of historic proportions.
JIM LEHRER: Do you agree with that?
DAVID BROOKS: No, absolutely not. They made some misjudgments; they thought there were going to be refugees, that there were going to be food shortages, there turned out not to be, but they under-estimated the extent of Baathist terrorism after the war and now they're making adjustments by bringing in other troops, by reconfiguring the troops and most importantly by training the Iraqis. One of the problems that has been going on in the past several months since the war is that you walk into the headquarters where Paul Bremer sits, there are no Iraqis there. The Americans are running the government as if there are no Iraqis. And it's important, and they're beginning to make this adjustment, too, which is giving Iraqis real power, and that's another thing they're changing.
[...]
DAVID BROOKS: Some people, some of your friends pretend they listen to you and don't. This administration listens to you but pretends they don't. They pretend they are so far above their critics they don't have to hear but then they're really listening.
Good boy, Bobo. Now, sit up pretty.
First, David Brooks should no longer be considered reasoned, temperate or anything else after this completely ridiculous attempt to paint President Vacuous as somehow leading the administration to change course. This is about as believable as Timothy Bottoms’ version of Bush as John Wayne saying, “If some tinhorn terrorist wants me, tell him to come and get me! I'll be at home! Waiting for the bastard!"
Everything we know about Bush suggests that he would rather chew straight pins than change course. It will take a lot more than Brooks' word to make me believe that he “led” the administration to do anything other than help him hitch up his codpiece.
And, I suppose that Thomas Ricks might have been fed a bill of goods by the Joint Chiefs and Colin Powell, but let’s just say that since it’s the White House that's got a credibility gap the size of the grand canyon, I’m going to go with the Republican generals rather than Karl Rove and the editorial board of the Weekly Standard.
This absurdity of the Treasury Department making the case for the UN because of the need to secure loans from the IMF and the World Bank is simply crapola. They have been in Iraq since May making assessments and have been expected to make the necessary loans from the get-go. We have more than a little influence with that group. If there has been an impediment it comes from the Republican party. All they needed to do was have John Snow walk over to the capital building and chat up Jim Saxton.
This is all part of the absurd new meme being tossed about by Wolfowitz and others that this appeal to the UN was part of their plan all along and everything is going just swimmingly. The IMF and the World Bank said early on that they would need some indication that the UN recognized the new government of Iraq. Now, Wolfie and his minions are saying that this UN move is just a natural and expected step in the way to bringing the flowers of democracy to Iraq. In fact, we’re ahead of schedule!
Meanwhile, the bombing and killing of American troops and UN workers and clerics and innocent Iraqis, and the pourous borders and the missing WMD and Saddam sending out tapes exhorting people to resist --- IS IRRELEVANT! Commander Codpiece's astute and unique grasp of foreign policy nuance and concerns in the treasury department are the reason we're going back to the UN after calling them a bunch of useless losers just a few months ago.
Yeah.
David Brooks is a shill. He pretends to be (slightly) disagreeing with the administration and speaks in measured tones, but in the end, he manages to get every single image and talking point out there that the administration wants. Even “Bush the crackerjack leader among men.” How impressively servile.
All liberals should be put on notice to find another “reasonable” conservative that we can trot out when some mannequin like Paula Zahn asks if there are any conservatives they like. (Besides, as Paula did when Al Franken named Brooks, the media starlets are likely to confuse him with David Brock, so it doesn’t really work anyway.)
I nominate Joe Lieberman.
Finally, you’ve got to love Bobo’s inability to name a far-right fringe politician now that Jesse Helms has retired. It's hard, I know.
It's hard because there is no far-right "fringe" in Washington anymore.
They’re all in the administration and the Republican leadership.