Mr. Pierce Mercilessly Takes Down Mr. Brooks (et al): How Humility Insists On Deceit

[kpete]

Our Mr. Brooks:
In which we learn one can teach humility without having any.

Prologue: This weekend, at a graduation ceremony, I heard David Gergen quote David Brooks. At which moment, I believe, human existence passed over the event horizon of white-guy faux-wisdom. Everything went beige and I woke up in the middle of a road.

Present Day:

..................

"Listen," his note said, "This is horrible. It's like I never left. In fact, it's like it's 2002 all over again, and that was a nightmare. Everybody, dressed up in toglike Vikings, eating with their hands, screaming imprecations to Jupiter and mumbling in Latin about Carthage. I thought we were done with that. I thought that was part of Master's going off to teach Humility to undergraduates. What a nightmare. I'm going out on the fire escape and lick my balls for an hour. MH"

It seems that Brooks has noticed that people are talking again about the war for which he so enthusiastically shook his moneymaker back during the Avignon Presidency. So, naturally, it's time for a Professor of Humbleology to cover his own sad-sack ass. (Especially since Paul Krugman kicked said ass pre-emptively yesterday.) Mistakes, it seems, were made. The spectacle is ungainly and obscene.

There's a fable going around now that the intelligence about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction was all cooked by political pressure, that there was a big political conspiracy to lie us into war. That doesn't gibe with the facts. Anybody conversant with the Robb-Silberman report from 2005 knows that this was a case of human fallibility. This exhaustive, bipartisan commission found "a major intelligence failure": "The failure was not merely that the Intelligence Community's assessments were wrong. There were also serious shortcomings in the way these assessments were made and communicated to policy makers."

This is a dodge unworthy of a grounded eighth-grader. Nobody ever said all the intelligence was faked or stovepiped. (Also, the Robb-Silberman Report was specifically designed not to explore the question of ginned-up intel: Silberman does not mention that the commission he chaired did not even investigate whether the Bush administration manipulated intelligence: Senate Republicans refused to allow the commission to investigate this matter, fearing it would harm Bush's reelection prospects. Indeed, Silberman himself wrote in the report at the time, "Our executive order did not direct us to deal with the use of intelligence by policymakers, and all of us were agreed that that was not part of our inquiry.&quot The fraud and deception was baked into the whole process, and the fraud and deception was deployed only in specific instances when it was most dearly required. And what Brooks utterly fails to confront is the contempt for actual expertise played into the rosy scenarios promulgated by know-nothings like David Brooks. The whole enterprise was an exercise in deceit and unreality. He ate it up with a spoon. It is time for Brooks and for people like him to shut up about it. Rand Paul, god help us, is right about this.

http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a35092/david-brooks-and-history-have-a-disagreement/?click=welcome-ad

[KamaAina]

1. "the Avignon Presidency"!