New York Times columnist David Brooks is the Eddie Haskell of the Fourth Estate. Like the two-faced sycophant in "Leave It to Beaver," Brooks indulges in excessive politeness while currying favor with political authority. He prides himself on an oily semblance of maturity and rational discourse.
But the phony "conservative" back-stabber, who has spent the last four years slavering over Barack Obama like a One Direction groupie and trashing the tea party like an MSNBC junkie, isn't fooling anyone.
Lately, Brooks has been given to dispensing passive-aggressive advice to GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney. His column this week titled "Thurston Howell Romney" called Romney "a kind, decent man" — and then shredded him to pieces as a "country club" elitist who "doesn't know much about the culture of America," "knows nothing about ambition and motivation," and is "running a depressingly inept presidential campaign."
Eddie Haskell Brooks, along with fellow GOP bubble-dwellers Peggy Noonan and Bill Kristol, eagerly piled on Romney over his "secret video" remarks contrasting the nation's makers and takers. Liberal outlets embraced these chin-pulling tools — elevating them as "key" Republican voices who speak for the right.
Despite the best efforts of the Democratic-professional media complex to gin up faux-rage over Romney's remarks, however, several polls show that voters agree with Romney's fundamental critique of the indulgent Democratic politics of victimhood, identity and dependency. Yep, Brooks has the pulse of mainstream America — direct from his hallowed bubble at the Fishwrap of Record.
Brooks shares all he knows about "ambition," "motivation" and the "culture of America" through regular appearances with the insular clique of conservative-bashing snobs at taxpayer-supported "PBS NewsHour." A cursory glance at Brooks' biography shows that he has spent the majority of his life in New York City and Washington, D.C. He has worked for a raft of employers from The Washington Times to The Wall Street Journal to The Weekly Standard to The New York Times.
But unlike Romney, Brooks has never actually run a business of his own, managed a massive private entity, governed a state or overseen a campaign for national office.
He does have quite an impressive record, though. If by record you mean sucking up to empty suit Barack Obama, mocking grass-roots conservatives as "teens" and defending his cocktail party mates in establishment journalism.
In 2009, the liberal New Republic published the bodice-ripping "story behind the Obama-Brooks bromance." The magazine reported that "two days after Obama's 'The Audacity of Hope' hit bookstores (in 2006), Brooks published a glowing Times column. The headline was 'Run, Barack, Run.'"
Brooks also recounted his first encounter with his Democratic crush. "I remember distinctly an image of — we were sitting on his couches, and I was looking at his pant leg and his perfectly creased pant," Brooks said, "and I'm thinking, a) he's going to be president and b) he'll be a very good president."
The purported conservative columnist's public display of affection for the radical Democratic candidate bordered on obscene. "I think he's more talented than anyone in my lifetime," Brooks gushed. "I mean, he is pretty dazzling when he walks into a room." Brooks revealed that he considered Obama's Chicago campaign mastermind David Axelrod a "hero." Axelrod returned the love, calling Brooks a "serious public thinker" in an era of "insipid, instant commentary and one-hour news cycles."
In the fall of 2008, Brooks swooned over Obama's Ivy League "achievatrons" taking over Washington: "Already the culture of the Obama administration is coming into focus. Its members are twice as smart as the poor reporters who have to cover them, three times if you include the columnists. They typically served in the Clinton administration and then, like Cincinnatus, retreated to the comforts of private life — that is, if Cincinnatus had worked at Goldman Sachs, Williams & Connolly or the Brookings Institution."
Wait, he wasn't not done:
"So many of them send their kids to Georgetown Day School, the posh leftish private school in D.C., that they'll be able to hold White House staff meetings in the carpool line. And yet as much as I want to resent these overeducated Achievatrons (not to mention the incursion of a French-style government dominated by highly trained Enarchs), I find myself tremendously impressed by the Obama transition."
Less than three years later, Brooks acknowledged he had been an "Obama sap." He admitted that he fell for the administration's stimulus propaganda:
"When administration officials called around saying that the possibility of a double-dip recession was horrifyingly real and that it would be irresponsible not to come up with a package that could pass right away, I believed them. ... But of course I'm a sap. When the president unveiled the second half of his stimulus it became clear that this package has nothing to do with helping people right away or averting a double dip. This is a campaign marker, not a jobs bill."
Not just a sap. A willing tool, too. Brooks copped to sitting on Obama's private admission to him that the "shovel-ready" promise was a crock. "The projects just didn't exist. They couldn't do it. They couldn't find them," he said on "PBS NewsHour" — more than a year after Obama told him.
Gee, Wally, why isn't Eddie Haskell Brooks giving this corrupt administration and its Titanically inept "achievatrons" the business?
Michelle Malkin is the author of "Culture of Corruption: Obama and his Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks & Cronies" (Regnery 2010). Her e-mail address is malkinblog@gmail.com.
