I used to respect David Brooks, the veteran opinion author for the New York Times. He seems to read everything and his erudition, I assumed, extended into all of his areas of interest and informed his writing as did his seemingly conservative-to-moderate political sensibilities. But lately I have noticed a tendentiousness to what he says, even a conservative dogmatism that is not only destructive of his credibility, it brings his character into question. I have written to him once or twice at The Times, and of course I make no assumptions with regard to whether he even noticed my attempts to contact him, but on those occasions I pointed out to him that Social Security has never added to the federal deficit or the national debt except to the extent that the federal government has had to pay back the principal on bonds representing loans made under compulsion of statutory law by the Social Security Trust to the federal general fund. Thus, Social Security has no more contributed to the national debt or the deficit than has the Chinese government or any of the many sovereign investment funds that buy U.S. Treasury instruments. But Brooks doesn't need me to tell him that. All he has to do is inform himself as to the Social Security statutes, including the 1939 amendments to the Social Security Act, which wouldn't require of him that he spend as much time on the process as he does on reading ten pages of any of the arcane tracts that he seems to relish enough to cite them in his op-ed pieces. If he's going to reference obscure academicians and policy wonks, why not refer to something objective like the statutory law on this particular subject of interest to which he returns over and over again. But instead of informing himself, he persists in his ignorance in that regard, and last Friday, along with his false claim that President Obama had never proposed a way to avoid the sequester, he reiterated the conservative canard that reforming "entitlements" like Social Security was the only way to successfully address our deficit spending problems. That's two falsehoods in one column...two too many, and neither one excusable or justifiable, but both of them too big to ignore. You can read The President's deficit reduction proposal on the internet at the White House website, just as you can read the Social Security statutes at various websites including Social Security's; it would be easy to know the truth. And because such is the case, I can draw no conclusion other than that Brooks is willing to engage in bald mendacity in service of his conservative cause, which renders him nothing more than another conservative shill for a point of view that serves only those who don't need serving anymore. Brooks is just another hack for the Rcc (Republican conservative complex). I feel bereaved.
It is true that later in the day...after his column had been read by enough people who apparently pointed out to him the availability of the Obama deficit reduction plan...he published an addendum to his column...a half-hearted, perfunctory sort of P.S....admitting that the deficit reduction plan was on-line for anyone to read, but excusing himself for his shameful, deceitful failure to acknowledge it by distinguishing it from a plan to avert the sequester specifically, as if reducing the deficit weren't the raison d'être for the sequester in the first place. It was nothing but caviling...reliance on a distinction without a difference...to justify his blatant intellectual dishonesty. A guy who thinks and writes like that isn't someone whose work I want to read, so I'm off David Brooks for the foreseeable future, but if I can't read Brooks for an honest opinion anymore, what Rcc columnist can I read. I like to hear a balance of opinions in politics. Listening only to my own preachers and the other members of the choir leads to insular thinking, and that in turn leads to taking the wrong turn once in awhile...sometimes more often than that. The problem is that conservative columnists are so busy fooling themselves that they can't help trying to fool everyone else. Even those on television...especially the most popular ones...are intellectually dishonest, partly because so many of them lack the education necessary to inspire critical thinking. Dana Loesch is an example, as is Rush Limbaugh. Neither one of them even bothered to get a bachelor's degree, not that a degree makes one a critical thinker, but in the course of getting one you can't help but be exposed to some of them, and thus at least knowing what critical thinking looks like, and therefore recognizing, one hopes, when you're not doing it. But if you listen to people like Loesch and Limbaugh speak you can hear that neither one of them is even interested in analysis. They are megaphones for the truly dangerous among their partisans, like Karl Rove before his fall from grace (which was not a function of a change in his thinking but only of its failure to yield results), whose motives I still don't understand. I can't trust their thinking because neither one of them seems interested in anything but the opportunity to amplify the party's point of view, no understanding or analysis necessary. They seem more fixed on self-promotion than progress toward a true understanding of how things work, and while self-promotion doesn't seem to be Brooks' purpose, his failure to acknowledge the truth suggests the same kind of intellectual sloppiness, if not disingenuousness that the others carry as cardinal traits from generation to generation. Given that people like Glenn Beck are the best the tier of conservative thinkers below Brooks can offer, I suppose we should be thankful to The Times for bringing him to us, but if he's just the Ivy League version of those other conservative apologists, what of significance really distinguishes him, and more importantly, what does he have to offer us?
Your friend,
Mike
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