Look Out! David Brooks has a Tendency!

I don’t think there’s enough Bactine in the world to soothe the burn that Stacy McCain put on David Brooks this morning. I can’t really give you a fair excerpt here, so head over and read it all.

David Brooks earned himself a bit of journalistic fame because the only position he’ll take is is that he won’t really take a position. He’s become a parody of moderation, a real-world example of Futurama’s President of the Neutral Planet who, when faced with certain death, only wanted to tell his wife “Hello”. Listen to his battle cry.

Those of us in the moderate tradition — the Hamiltonian tradition that believes in limited but energetic government — thus find ourselves facing a void. We moderates are going to have to assert ourselves. We’re going to have to take a centrist tendency that has been politically feckless and intellectually vapid and turn it into an influential force.

Lean slightly in a forward direction, men, and some day we may be a force!

The man can’t even summon the backbone to call centrism a movement. It’s a “tendency” that has occasional aspirations of becoming a strong leaning, and maybe even — centrists will need to sit down for this one and keep their heart pills handy — a trend!

Good Lord, can’t you just feel the excitement? It’s like everything went all plaid there for a minute in Brooks’ bland beige world. I wonder if he needed a cool cloth for his fevered brow after taking such a bold, decisive stance!

I once ate a meal in Punxatawney, PA that, I swear, had no taste at all. It was supposed to be chicken-fried steak, gravy, mashed potatoes, and corn and indeed it looked like exactly that. Except it had almost no color. The corn was yellow-ish, and everything else was a tired beige color that didn’t look bad but hardly looked good. When I took a bite, I nearly spit the food right out of my mouth because the human tongue is meant to taste something when food hits it, good or bad. I threw it out after a tenative second bite because it was clear to me that something was very badly wrong with it. Brooks is the intellectual equivalent of that meal and we can’t help but react accordingly to his purposeful blandness.

As you may have guessed, I have no respect for Brooks and his soulmate in centrist neutrality Christopher Buckley, who this week also found himself utterly twitterpated to find that Barack Obama and his Democratic brethren, to quote Coach Dennis Green, are who we thought they were. I can’t accuse them of having the courage of their convictions because they didn’t have any convictions in which to be courageous, except one. They could agree to take a bold stand against the scurrilous g-dropping of the most popular and exciting person the Republican Party has put on a national ticket since Ronald Reagan. That turned out to be a brilliant move that now leaves them sucked dry and cast aside by the left and on the wrong side of a bridge to the right they burned with glee just a few months ago. And yet they persist in their delusion that taking a bold stance against taking bold stances is going to be the wave of the future. Let me know how that turns out, guys, assuming you can pull together the forward momentum to make a telephone call.

Stacy is well and truly ticked off at Brooks and I don’t blame him one bit. He’s pulling down 300 large a year from the New York Times while the newspaper is circling the bowl and wating our time with the same thoughtless porrige column after column. If I were a professional journalist, I’d be ticked, too.

UPDATE: Linked by Ed Driscoll.

Other Posts of Interest:

• I Say “Terrorist”, You Say Whatever
• Enough with the Scary Talk!
• Silver Linings for Obama, Courtesy of the NYT

Tags: Christopher Buckley, David Brooks, New York Times, Stacy McCain

Category: Oh, THAT liberal media., The Social Issues