David Brooks's Anti-GOP 'Mother of All No-Brainers' Column Gets Mother of All Corrections in NYT

July 7th, 2011 2:46 PM

Tuesday’s notorious column from the New York Times’s “conservative” David Brooks, “The Mother of All No-Brainers,” in which he accused Tea Party sympathizers of having "no sense of moral decency," is getting fulsome praise from staunch conservatives like Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. Here’s Politico:


Reid, on the floor on Tuesday, gave his approval to many of the points Brooks made in his piece.

“I repeat: a conservative columnist said this,” Reid said, according to prepared remarks. “The Republican Party has been taken over by ideologues either devoted to or terrified by Grover Norquist and his no-tax pledge.”

Politico had earlier noted:

In the widely circulated and much-talked-about column, Brooks argues that Republicans have already won many concessions from Democrats in the form of spending cuts and debt reduction. But in recent years, Brooks said, the GOP “has been infected by a faction that is more of a psychological protest than a practical, governing alternative.”

Yet “The Mother of All No-Brainers” was issued the mother of all corrections online Wednesday:


An earlier version of this column misstated the amount of revenue increases needed in exchange for spending cuts. It is a few hundred billion, not million.

So besides understating the amount of tax revenue Democrats are demanding by a thousand-fold, Brooks's excoriation of his "fellow" conservatives was undeniably brilliant.