Brooks boldly goes where no Bushite has gone before

In his weekly appearance alongside Mark Shields on the News Hour last night, David Brooks said that it’s time for conservatives to stop the “happy talk” on Iraq and engage in a serious discussion about the war and how to win it. Now let me think. It’s been over two years since the U.S. and its coalition partners toppled Hussein, and almost two years since the terror insurgency began. During those two years any reasonably observant, logical person would have noticed that the Bushites’ unceasing happy talk on Iraq did not remotely correspond with the reality on the ground. I personally have written literally scores of blog entries since 2003 agonizing over the unreality of our constant “victory” statements and the fact that we have no strategy plausibly aimed at victory. Yet Brooks, the most prominent “conservative” commentator in the mainstream media, waited until now, June 2005, to venture the bold, cutting-edge opinion that it’s time to stop “the happy talk”? It took him two years to acknowledge this painfully obvious point? This is an index of the extent to which discourse among “conservative” intelligentsia is paralyzed by a combination of ideological dogma and loyalty to a smug unthinking president—a president who, as I have said, is not only witless in himself, but the cause of witlessness in others.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 18, 2005 02:51 PM | Send