David Brooks: Scourge of Satan?

It’s not just that if you draw little horns on his head and give him a goatee, David Brooks starts to look eerily menacing. It’s also that all of his New York Times columns follow the same evil formula: Brooks introduces a high-sounding bit of intellectual, literary, or historical analysis to mask a devious partisan agenda.

The shortcomings in Brooks’ columns are as predictable as his formula. His analysis is always embarrassingly shallow — so superficial he sounds almost mystical. Not down to the level of numerology and the phases of the moon, but close. And his intellectualism is not honest. Invariably its purpose is to confuse, rather than enlighten, the reader.

Today’s column is a case in point (subscription required, sorry). Themistocles, Brooks says, was the more admirable of the Greek generals in the Persian wars because he was devious and duplicitous, in contrast to the honest but less effective Leonidas.

Never mind that the Greeks were illustrating the ironies and complexities of the world — how the qualities we least admire can be the very qualities that save a civilization, and who knows what their specific point was, or even if they had one? The point, in other words, is that they were not issuing prescriptions for qualities to look for in future leaders. (“Note to history, please select the most devious miscreants to lead you. Respectfully, Heroditus.”)

But who wants to discuss the Greeks? They’re just handy implements in Brooks’ toolbox, stardust to dazzle us so Brooks can get to work. He goes on to lament that America tends to select presidents who are “direct, faithful and upright,” and “uplifting.” Then, in the kicker, Brooks argues that this time around we need someone who “understands power, and the subtlety of its use, and who has had direct experience with friends and foes, foreign and domestic,” even if this person is “tainted by scandal.”

Is he kidding? We should be looking for the most devious candidate? Preferably one “tainted by scandal”?

Where to begin with this idiocy? Should we point out that this brainless analysis best supports the nomination of Alberto Gonzalez to be the next President? Or that Brooks misses the real point the Greeks were trying to make, namely that the surficial qualities we might value in a leader can lead us astray? The argument works just as well against the macho former prisoner of war who will continue the self-destructive quagmire rather than see the wisdom of calling our forces home.

What drives me crazy about Brooks is his polished upside-down view of the world, which he shares with Karl Rove. It’s lunacy to say we shouldn’t support Barrack Obama because he’s “upstanding” and “decent,” as if those qualities should make us suspicious and afraid of his candicacy, rather than admiring and supportive.

What’s also frustrating about Brooks’ audacity — his spinning of homilies and his simple-minded presentations of high-sounding rhetoric for the sake of naked partisanship — is that, as Karl Rove has demonstrated, this kind of demon rhetoric tends to work its insidious magic if you don’t call it by its real name. As if there is some strange and mystical power in moronic thinking.

Which, I guess, could lead us to a future column topic, one even more bizarre than the image of David Brooks as a latter-day Beezlebub, involving Paul Krugman in a flowing beard and a white robe.