Lest Bobo Feel Left Out…

27 comments February 4th, 2008at 11:52am Posted by Eli

AlterNet’s Nick Bromell has a most excellent takedown of NYT’s other dishonest conservative op-ed wanker. The money shot:

Because later columns never acknowledge the existence of the earlier ones, Brooks never reveals how often he has changed his position on such important matters. No plasma of mental activity connects these different pieces. No single mind moves from one to the other. They could have been written by six different people, for six different newspapers, about six different wars. Only when you put all six together do the sharp outlines of six very different policy recommendations emerge into view: focus on political transition, focus on economic reform, focus on ideological struggle, focus on military action, focus on revising the Constitution, focus on the tribes and local leadership.

The obvious purpose of Brooks’s willful amnesia is that it allows him to dodge responsibility. But it also gives him a more subtle advantage: unfettered by anything he has written before, he is free to surf the wave of time as it breaks onto the shore of the future. Because neither he nor his underlying convictions are definitively located, he can claim implicitly to be ahead of everyone else. That’s exactly what he’s signaling with those little words at last and finally when he writes, “Now at last the smartest analysts and policy makers are starting to think like sociologists. They are finally acknowledging that the key Iraqi figures are not in the center but in the provinces and the tribes.” He doesn’t explicitly claim that he was thinking like a sociologist before they were, because for Brooks there is no before. Instead, his phrasing ambiguously implies that the “smartest analysts” have caught up to his unlocatable position over the horizon – out in that unnamable vector beyond the end of history.

We have always been at war with Mideastasia. And I have always been right about it.

(h/t Caro Kay)

Entry Filed under: Media,Republicans,Wankers

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