David Brooks is a schmuck of the highest order.  Here’s a guy who argues, in his latest editorial, that Bush’s pig-headness when it came to rejecting the vast majority of military, Republican and Democratic perspectives on the state of the war in Iraq and – listening to Dick Cheney and a minority of military leaders – forging ahead with “the surge” has, on balance, proven to be the correct course of action.  That, against all the expert opinions, violence has decreased and the Iraqi state isn’t “failed” anymore, it’s just “fragile.”

Brooks even goes so far as to make a historical argument about the propriety of the surge, claiming that the reductions in violence and incremental development of the state in Iraq prove Bush to have been right – even if, on balance, Bush’s pig-headedness hasn’t been a good thing (he says seeming to be oh-so-fair-and-balanced.)  That Brooks knows the associated and ongoing costs to the US military at home, in Afghanistan and around the world, that he knows the fiscal costs of the war, that he knows that the violence has largely been reduced because most ethnic neighborhoods had been ethnically cleansed by the time of “the surge,” that he knows the reduction of violence is in significant part associated with the fact that – on their own – a large number of our Iraqi opponents deciding that we were the lesser of two evils and decided to fight Al Queda in Iraq (utterly independent of the surge), and that he knows the Iraqi government has still not reached the ever-so-lame benchmarks of three years ago all goes without saying – but, of course, he doesn’t indicate that these things are costs and contexts for “the surge’s” “success.”

Furthermore, that he works at the newspaper that tallied the numbers and proved that the total of Iraqi deaths in 2007 represented not even the slightest decrease in numbers over previous years and, therefore, surely knows that, only goes to further indicate the depth of his dishonest schmuckiness.  And lastly, Brooks utterly refuses to acknowledge that this “success” only appears to be increasing Bush’s irresponsible and internationally-isolating chest-thumping about Iran…. Unbelievable. 

I had a professor as an undergraduate – in the early 1980s – who argued that it was really important to read the writings of your political opponents but I’ve gotten to the point that I really have to stop myself from ever reading David Brooks again.  The disingenuousness and faux fairness brings too much bile up from the belly and into my throat.  Lord, I wish there was another paper of record…