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March 22, 2006
"The Eternal Sunshine of David Brooks's Mind"
Awesome piece by Daniel Radosh deconstructing the selective memory of conservative pundit David Brooks - the guy on PBS and the New York Times Op-Ed page who's supposed to be the "thinking person's conservative." Brooks wrote a piece praising the conservative punditocracy for its supposedly sober, prescient response to the end of the conventional portion of the Iraq war. But thanks to the miracle of the Lexis/Nexis database, Radosh is able to go back and track down multiple examples of Brooks himself leading the cheering section back in 2003. "Let the over-exhuberance recommence!" he wrote after the taking of Baghdad, in a piece which goes on to scold all the doubters and naysayers.
You could get away with this in the days of Pravda, where they'd airbrush old photos of gatherings of Soviet leaders to hide the faces of those who'd been purged. It's a lot harder to rewrite history in the internet age. But people still try - just the other day, Bush claimed in his press conference that we only went to war after Saddam "kicked out the inspectors" - a patent falsehood obvious to anybody who was awake just three years ago. Thankfully, the American people don't appear to be buying it - hence, the bogglingly low approval ratings - 33% in a recent Pew poll.
Posted by tedf at March 22, 2006 10:19 PM
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