David Brooks has stars in his eyes. His kind of people are in charge and won’t it just be a happy day when all those Ivy League-educated brains start pumping out the IQ power!
Jan. 20, 2009, will be a historic day. Barack Obama (Columbia, Harvard Law) will take the oath of office as his wife, Michelle (Princeton, Harvard Law), looks on proudly. Nearby, his foreign policy advisers will stand beaming, including perhaps Hillary Clinton (Wellesley, Yale Law), Jim Steinberg (Harvard, Yale Law) and Susan Rice (Stanford, Oxford D. Phil.).
…
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. 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.
Oh sure, David, we believe how much you want to resent them. After months of whacking people who weren’t educated in Ivy League schools as ignorant cousin-kissing bumpkins, you expect us to believe that he really, really wants to hate the folks you’ve been slobbering all over the whole time.
I may not be a Yalie, David, but I’m not a moron. Which is why this paragraph nearly made me choke on my oatmeal this morning.
Conservative legal experts have a high regard for the probable attorney general, Eric Holder, despite the business over the Marc Rich pardon.
Do they now? Okay, David, I’ll bite. Name two.
I’ll stop addressing this post to Brooks now, because there’s no chance he’ll read this and if he does, it’ll only provide fuel for his next column on how mean other conservatives are to kindly old him.
Truth is, though, he really is living in a fantasy land. There is no way, given Holder’s opinon of your Second Amendment rights, his apparent ignorance of what happened with Elian Gonzales even though he was deeply involved in the case, his basic honesty, his basic knowledge of hate crimes (even though he was pushing for new hate crime laws), or his belief that speech on the internet should be restricted and regulated, that any conservative legal expert is going to give Eric Holder anything but the most grudging and caveat-intensive approval.
I understand that plenty of people still consider David Brooks an important voice within the conservative movement. I have a hard time believing that the guy who wrote that column can have anything useful to say about conservatism. I suppose perhaps we could listen to what he says, then do the exact opposite, but that’s about all.
(via memeorandum)
Tags: Barack Obama, Conservatism, Conservatives, Eric Holder, Second Amendment
