David Brooks

Conservative radio host Laura Ingraham on Tuesday scolded New York Times columnist David Brooks for his snobby, elitist treatment of the Tea Party.

Ingraham began her admonishment, "Your judgment on the Tea Party has been fairly brutal" (video follows with transcript and commentary):

Picking up on an argument made by economist Mark Zandi -- whom the Washington Post described as “an architect of the 2009 stimulus package” and who last year pushed for a second stimulus bill -- ABC’s Christiane Amanpour on Sunday morning, presuming there is an ongoing “recovery,” plugged a This Week roundtable topic:

Up next, Washington's answer to the job crisis. Will the deep budget cuts on the table stick a fork in the recovery?

In the subsequent segment, Amanpour forwarded: “$61 billion in budget cuts. Mark Zandi says 700,000 jobs will be lost.” Panelist Chrystia Freeland, global editor-at-large for Thomson-Reuters, agreed: “I think he's right.”

Echoing Amanpour’s theme, over on Meet the Press NBC’s David Gregory cited a poll to show “people want that focus on immediate job creation,” not budget cuts, “and that gets the President's point, which is you've got to get the balance right. You can't grow if you keep cutting so much.”

The March 7 Newsweek (NewsBeast) features an article titled "David Brooks Wants to Be Friends," but there's more bridge-burning than friend-making in this interview with James Atlas. Of course, he came up in Washington through conservative opinion journalism from the National Review, the Wall Street Journal editorial page, and The Weekly Standard, but "something has changed." Conservatives are now more uncivil. Well, either that -- or his paychecks are now signed by PBS, NPR, and The New York Times:

But Brooks insists that something has changed in the past decade. Political discourse had grown coarse, he laments. Gone is the civilized era when “you had liberals and conservatives instead of Republicans and Democrats,” a time “before the parties devolved into teams,” each espousing its own “values” in voices grown increasingly shrill. For a high-profile journalist, he seems eager to keep his head down—it’s not a posture easy to maintain when he’s on TV every Friday night and his byline appears twice a week on the op-ed page of The New York Times.

“One of the toughest things about being a columnist is that people hate you,” he said. Hate is perhaps too strong a word; it’s not a sentiment Brooks tends to evoke in people. On the contrary, his balanced views are seen as strengths, not weaknesses.

New York Times columnist David Brooks published a truly must-read piece Tuesday about what's going on in Wisconsin.

Unfortunately, out of some odd desire to appear balanced, Brooks advanced the totally erroneous liberal meme that Governor Walker's budget repair plan exempted cops and firefighters because they typically support Republicans:

On the PBS NewsHour Friday night, the show's liberal commentator, Mark Shields suggested the Republicans have no one to challenge Barack Obama: "The reality of the CPAC meeting is that there's 11,000 people there at the hotel registered for this conference. They're a constituency in search of a candidate. There is -- I mean, usually, it is a candidate looking for a constituency. They want to beat Barack Obama, but they don't have anybody."

In 2007, liberal commentators treated the Democratic field like an embarrassment of riches. They couldn't even be truly embarrassed by Dennis Kucinich. But now the Republicans have "nobody."

Naturally, PBS's allegedly conservative commentator David Brooks agreed: "I personally think there are really very few plausible candidates." He joked that Donald Trump would be the GOP nominee, then suggested Sen. John Thune was promising...because he was "an extremely good-looking guy." He said John McCain likes to say if he had Thune's face, he'd be president. Shields also slammed CPAC for failing to discuss Egypt all day:

The Washington Post has added a new conservative blogger to its stable, one that NewsBusters readers should be familiar with.

Only three days into her new position, Jennifer Rubin has made it clear she has no intention of toning down her criticism of mainstream media darlings like New York Times columnist David Brooks:

Politico's Mike Allen on Monday told Laura Ingraham the only way to do a piece about what Washington insiders are really thinking is to get anonymous opinions from unnamed sources unwilling to go on the record.

Less than 24 hours later, New York Times columnist David Brooks showed Allen how wrong he is in an article about what Republicans are feeling heading into Tuesday's midterm elections complete with the names of those offering opinions:

The Washington Post's E.J. Dionne said Sunday that NPR is one of the best news organizations in the world and challenged anyone to find evidence the radio network is the slightest bit liberally biased.

To prove his claim, Dionne hysterically pointed out to his fellow "Meet the Press" panelists that whenever he's on NPR, he's often countered by "conservatives" - like New York Times columnist David Brooks (video follows with transcript and commentary):

At the end of Friday night's PBS NewsHour, anchor Judy Woodruff asked their political analysts Mark Shields and David Brooks about NPR's firing of Juan Williams. Shields said "NPR made a serious mistake...and I think they did it in a terrible way, by a telephone call without a personal chance to explain himself. You know, I think it's given the right wing a tremendous opening to attack NPR, which I hate to see happen, because I think it's a valuable public institution."

Brooks disclosed "I work at NPR somewhat" (as part of a similary analyst duo with liberal Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne). Brooks agreed with Mark about the firing and its lack of personal contact. "I think what was said is perfectly within the bounds of debate." But then he insisted NPR has achieved sensible centrism in recent history:

And the damaging thing to me is NPR's worked really hard over the last 10, 20 years to become a straight-down-the-middle network. I'm not sure they were decades ago, but not they really are. And now because of this unfortunate episode, they're beginning to get some ideological baggage again, and that's damaging.

As the Democrat-loving media pile on California Republican gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman over the illegal alien status of her former housekeeper, a strange thing happened at the New York Times Friday: columnist David Brooks published a positive piece about the former eBay CEO.

In fact, "The Austerity Caucus" never mentioned this new scandal that has most mainstream media members doing backflips.

Instead, Brooks presented a surprisingly even portrait of an extremely intelligent woman always ready to spout off facts about an issue with lightning speed:

New York Times columnist David Brooks on Friday defended the Tea Party from many of the criticisms commonly uttered by mainstream media members.

In so doing, he took a couple of slaps at the conservative movement that continues to usher in surprising election results across the fruited plain.

By the end of "The Backlash Myth," Brooks went so far as to say "the Tea Party doesn't matter."

But prior to this point, there were positives not typically reported about this group, especially on the pages of the New York Times:

If a RINO is a Republican In Name Only, let's coin a new acronym for David Brooks: RINYTO: Republican In New York Times Only.  For only in the Gray Lady's bailiwick could Brooks be considered much of a Republican.

Take his current column in the Times.  Brooks warns Republicans on the verge of regaining power that it would be nothing short of a "tragedy" if they were to oppose . . . more government and higher taxes.

This is a sad time to be David Brooks, the New York Times house conservative. The souring economy (along with other poor administration decisions) has caused a big drop in the popularity of his beloved Barack Obama with his party facing electoral disaster at the polls this November. So what to do? Why, engage in fantasy by writing an alternate history in which an all-wise Obama cuts taxes and vetoes big spending plans passed by the Democrat congress. Here is some of the comedy gold Brooks dreamed up in his alternate history universe:

...He told his aides to put away the history books and reject the New Deal comparisons. Unlike in 1932, Americans today have a raging distrust of Washington, he observed. Living through a crisis caused by excessive debt, they will viscerally recoil at the prospect of federal debt without end. “Somehow,” Obama concluded, “we have to address the crisis without further terrifying the American people.”

The stimulus package, he continued, should rely heavily on cutting payroll taxes. This, he argued, will send a quick jolt to the economy without concentrating power in Washington. It will deliver a sharp psychological boost to the middle class. It might even be bipartisan. Obama noted that John McCain had a $445 billion stimulus plan along these lines and his fellow Republican senator, Mel Martinez, a $713 billion plan.

New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote an article Tuesday largely about the success America has had rebuilding Iraq without ever mentioning the name of former President George W. Bush.

To be sure, "Nation Building Works" also addressed some of the failures: the absence of "social trust," the lack of doctors and engineers, as well as rampant corruption to name a few.

But in a column published the very day President Obama is to address the nation about Iraq, it seems particularly odd that the man at the helm when America invaded - and who against public sentiment as well as the will of the current White House resident orchestrated a surge of military forces in 2007 largely responsible for the success of this mission - is conspicuously absent:

On the same day the Commerce Department dramatically revised down second quarter Gross Domestic Product estimates, New York Times columnist David Brooks published a stinging rebuke of Obama economic policies.

"The American stimulus package was supposed to create a 'summer of recovery,' according to Obama administration officials," wrote Brooks.

"Job growth was supposed to be surging at up to 500,000 a month," he continued. "Instead, the U.S. economy is scuffling along."

Scuffling is putting it mildly, for it was announced Friday that the GDP only grew by a pathetic 1.6 percent last quarter which was down from previous estimates of 2.4 percent.

With this in mind, Brooks' column was not only spot on, but a surprising indictment of everything the Obama administration has done since Inauguration Day:

With all the conservative columnists out there, if you were looking for an author to represent the right-wing view in a new Crossfire-like program, would you choose Kathleen Parker who lately has largely presented herself as a Republican In Name Only? 

According to the New York Post, that's exactly what CNN is considering.

Not only that, but her liberal opponent is rumored to be -- wait for it! -- disgraced former New York governor Eliot Spitzer.

Here's what the Post published Friday concerning this matter:

NPR All Things Considered anchor Robert Siegel was helping liberal Washington Post columnist E. J. Dionne knock conservatives (even Democrats running as conservatives) on Friday. Siegel volunteered that the newest House Democrat, Mark Critz, was elected by being "anti-health care."

Sigh. Dionne tried to make the special elections sound like a great week for liberals:

DIONNE:  I didn't know tea gave you a hangover, but I think Rand Paul's victory in Kentucky has already given Republicans -- 

SIEGEL: He won the Senate nomination.

DIONNE: -- he won the Senate nomination. And already, his rather pure strains of libertarianism is causing Republicans trouble. He seems to be against the public accommodations section of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that banned discrimination at lunch counters and hotels and the like. So, that's going to be an interesting race to watch.

David Brooks seemed to be having a coherency challenged moment during his latest scheduled conversation with fellow New York Times columnist, Gail Collins. First Brooks excused what Connecticut senatorial candidate Richard Blumenthal falsely claimed about being a Vietnam combat veteran as an "accident":

As for Blumenthal, my guess is he survives his little brush with mendacity. The Connecticut Democrat accidentally said he was a combat veteran, when in fact he never served in Vietnam. Could happen to anyone!

A moment later, Brooks reversed course and admitted that Blumenthal lied but, eh, no big deal:

The claim is dishonorable, but everybody expects politicians to lie. One of the odd perplexities of an angry moment is that expectations are so low, politicians end up surviving scandals that would kill them in happier times.

“This is a damn outrage,” a disgusted David Brooks, the faux conservative columnist for the New York Times, declared on Sunday’s Meet the Press reacting to Republican Senator Bob Bennett’s loss Saturday at Utah’s Republican convention which chose two others to compete in a June primary for the seat. Brooks fretted he was punished for being “a good conservative who was trying to get things done” by “bravely” working with Democrats on health care and supporting TARP. “Now,” he repeated, “he's losing his career over that. And it's just a damn outrage.”

Sitting beside Brooks on NBC’s roundtable, liberal Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne Jr,. a former New York Times correspondent, saw “almost a non-violent coup because they denied the sitting Senator even a chance of getting on the primary ballot.”

Over on Fox News Sunday, NPR’s Juan Williams expressed exasperation: “This is evidence of how the American political center is losing, on the right wing of the party a guy like Bob Bennett, who is a right-wing conservative, is being driven out because he’s not sufficiently conservative?”

ABC’s Jake Tapper brought Rudy Giuliani aboard This Week to address the handling of the Times Square botched bomber, but wouldn’t let him go before bringing up Bennett’s defeat as proof of an intolerant GOP: “Are you worried at all that the Republican Party is not only growing more hostile to more liberal to moderate Republicans such as yourself, but also conservative Republicans who are shown to, at least shown an ability to work with Democrats?”

As congressional Democrats press on with their attempts to get financial legislation reform passed, a key component has been lacking from the debate: how to handle the government-sponsored enterprises Fannie Mae (NYSE:FNM) and Freddie Mac (NYSE:FRE). 

Although some Republican lawmakers have cried foul over the fact nothing has been included in a bill sponsored by Senate Banking Committee Chairman Sen. Chris Dodd, (D-Conn.), President Barack Obama's administration has vowed to pursue reforming the GSEs ... eventually. 

However, despite a long history of alleged corruption, close ties to the current administration and a recent $10-billion extension of "emergency aid" to Freddie and Fannie in the deadest possible part of the news cycle, these two entities have gone relatively unnoticed by the news media, with a lion's share of the spotlight given to Wall Street bogeymen like Goldman Sachs (NYSE:GS).

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The Friday night discussion with Mark Shields and David Brooks on the PBS NewsHour was surprisingly heated. First, anchorman Jim Lehrer seemed to suggest the liberal lingo when the "no" votes were "problem Democrats," as opposed to the Pelosi Democrats: 

Where are the -- what -- who are the problem Democrats left right now? We know about the Stupaks and the anti-abortion folks. Who else?

Shields insisted that come the fall, no one will be talking about the process the Democrats used to pass a health-care bill, but Brooks said deem-and-pass was "so repulsive, I'm out of my skin with anger about it." Here's how it unfolded:

New York Times columnist David Brooks says that what Vice President Joe Biden told NBC's David Gregory Sunday concerning the trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in New York City doesn't pass the laugh test.

"What Joe Biden said on ['Meet the Press'] today will be laughed at around the Arab world."

Maybe even more shocking, speaking during the panel discussion segment that followed Biden's interview, Brooks agreed with some things former Vice President Dick Cheney spoke about concerning this matter on ABC's "This Week."

"The KSM trial has become a total mess. What Joe Biden said today on the program doesn't pass the laugh test," Brooks said. "[T]he second thing I think Cheney's actually right about is Mirandizing."

Brooks amazingly continued: "[S]ay we'd captured the 9/11 guys on September 10th, or one of them, should we have read that guy his rights and given him a lawyer? No. We should have tried to get some intelligence out of the guy" (video embedded below the fold with transcript):

Former Wall Street Journal editor Al Hunt (now with Bloomberg News) expressed grave pessimism about the Democrats on PBS’s Charlie Rose show Wednesday night, to the point where he said they need to jam through a health bill, or lose the House.

AL HUNT: They’re going to have to persuade the House to pass the Senate bill...you have to persuade some liberals to swallow hard. I spoke to Nancy Pelosi today. The votes are not in there in the House today. That`s the job of Barack Obama and Rahm Emanuel.

DAVID BROOKS: That`s not the message though I heard from the speech. I heard the "Let's go gently into the good night."

HUNT: If that happens, David, I guarantee the Republicans will win the House of Representatives.

BROOKS: But he didn`t say "We’re close. Let`s just jam it through." He said "Let`s begin again, let`s hear some ideas."

The talk even shifted – on PBS, the supposedly urbane network -- to "tea baggers" ruining the Republican brand:

The Media Research Center's "Best Notable Quotables of 2009: The Annual Awards for the Year's Worst Reporting" are garnering some media attention of their own. MRC President Brent Bozell drew laughs from the gang on Fox & Friends this morning as he reviewed a few of the winners, but other journalists have also found the awards worthy of coverage:

The American Spectator's Quin Hillyer, who participated as a judge of this year's awards, wrote a December 11 column going over the quotes "that particularly enraged/amused/befuddled me" even before the official results were tallied. Hillyer observed:

Sometimes you must wonder how some members of the establishment media live with themselves. Their double standards are so egregious, as is their refusal to observe the boundaries between straight news and opinionizing (to coin a word), and as are their utter contempt for and viciousness against those anywhere to the political right of them, that one would think there is no way they retain any conscience at all.

What’s on the mind of media types this Christmas season? Obama’s “great” speeches and the “atrocity” of Sarah Palin and Sen. Joe Lieberman, says New York Times columnist David Brooks, an Obama supporter and Palin-basher whose neo-liberal outlook nevertheless places him at the right end of the paper's cavalcade of liberal opinion writers.

In his weekly Wednesday “Opinionator” exchange with fellow columnist Gail Collins at nytimes.com, Brooks provided a peek into a typical media Christmas, that is, “holiday” party:

He began with self-mockery:

Brooks: Tis the season for holiday parties, which means I’m spending a lot of time with the Beltway establishment. Let me tell you, you people who live outside the beltway are completely out of touch. We in the D.C. establishment are a wonderful group of really smart and intelligent people and if you guys don’t let us micromanage your affairs, you don’t deserve the happiness and wealth we could provide.

Collins responded with some sarcasm of her own from a liberal viewpoint:

Good Morning America on Monday began a week of coverage on Sarah Palin’s new book by repeatedly fact checking claims from the Republican and highlighting a attack by the liberals’ favorite "conservative," New York Times columnist David Brooks. Reporter Kate Snow asserted that "even conservatives are on the attack" against Palin.

She then played a clip of Brooks, who has previously gone after Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and others: "Yeah, she's a joke. I mean I just can't take her seriously. The idea that this potential talk show host is considered seriously for the Republican nomination, believe me, it'll never happen."

The roundtable members on Sunday's This Week derided or dismissed Sarah Palin, with David Brooks, the putative conservative columnist for the New York Times, declaring “she's a joke” and insisting “Republican primary voters just are not going to elect a talk show host” -- leaving it to PBS's Gwen Ifill, of all people, to come to her defense as a fellow woman.[MP3 audio available here]

Left-winger David Corn yearned for how she will damage Republicans while the Washington Post's Bob Woodward agreed with Brooks and George Will wondered: “Some conservatives think they have found in Sarah Palin a Republican William Jennings. Why they would want somebody who lost the presidency three times I do not know.”

The derogatory take from David Books on the November 15 This Week with George Stephanopoulos on ABC:

Yeah, she's a joke. I mean, I just can't take her seriously. We've got serious problems in the country. Barack Obama's trying to handle war. We just had a guy elected Virginia Governor who's probably the model for the future of the Republican Party, Bob McDonnell. Pretty serious guy, pragmatic, calm, kind of boring. The idea that this potential talk show host is considered seriously for the Republican nomination, believe me, it will never happen. Republican primary voters just are not going to elect a talk show host.

The next time you read or hear a member of the mainstream media complaining about how much of the blogosphere engages in lurid sensationalism and is not to be taken seriously, then just point them today's New York Times column, Cellphones, Texts, and Lovers, written by house "conservative" David Brooks.

Yes, today is election day in several parts of the country but Brooks shuns any analysis of these races in favor of delving into the lurid world of cellphone sex from the pages of the Times opinion section which, with his column, reads more like something lifted from a sleazy sex periodical found at dented curbside machines or from web sex sites:

Since April 2007, New York magazine has posted online sex diaries. People send in personal accounts of their nighttime quests and conquests. Some of the diaries are unusual and sad. There’s a laid-off banker who drinks herself into oblivion and wakes up in the beds of unfamiliar men. There’s an African-American securities trader who flies around the country on weekends to meet with couples seeking interracial sex.

...the diarists “use their cellphones to disaggregate, slice up, and repackage their emotional and physical needs, servicing each with a different partner, and hoping to come out ahead.”

The liberals inside the taxpayer-funded PBS sandbox know how to keep looking down their noses at their competitors in conservative talk radio and TV. Once again, on Friday night’s NewsHour, the supposedly opposing duo of Mark Shields and David Brooks offered their shared revulsion of any Republican spokesman to the right of Sen. Lindsey Graham.

It started when NewsHour anchor Judy Woodruff asked their reaction to former Vice President Dick Cheney accusing Obama of "dithering" on Afghanistan. Sheields called Cheney a "gift." Brooks lamented that the Republicans lack leaders that sound exactly as moderate as he is:

I always wish it was John McCain or Lindsey Graham or somebody of that nature who was leading the charge.

The Republican Party has a terrible problem of who its spokespeople are. It tends not to be the best voices in the party. Lamar Alexander, senator from Tennessee, said he completely understood why Obama was taking his time to make this decision. And instead of those voices getting prominence, you get Dick Cheney, you get Rush Limbaugh, you get Glenn Beck. That's part of a larger problem.