From the column Brooks published just a few days ago:
"Dean grew up on Park Avenue and in East Hampton. If he's a rural person, I'm the Queen of Sheba."
And if Bush is, as Brooks characterizes him in today's column, "the cowboy out of the West," then Brooks must be the Queen of Da Nile?
Ogged, Brooks botched it tone-wise (the ending is just screechingly awful), but as I read it "This is a policy based on candor, and therefore it is a mess" is not ironic, nor is 'mess' in inverted commas. Surely you agree that part of what's gone wrong in the administration involves misplaced, impolitic giving-folks-a-piece-of-one's-mind. And surely you agree that the policy in question is a mess. Maybe you're questioning the 'therefore,' but he needn't be read as claiming that's the only cause.
My reaction was that Brooks was ventriloquizing (and, alas, cutesifying) Kristol and Kagan's recent piece. Is that what you mean by 'hack'? Your title suggests you read the column as surreptitious praise. I don't.
IA, of all the sentences in the column, you pick the one on which I would defend Brooks? I think there he's channeling international attitudes. That said, his denial that Dean could be considered rural was just plain wrong, and an interesting window into his (America's?) understanding of authenticity.
But Ted, you bet I read the column as praise, or at least as absurdly charitable spin. I would just submit to you two facts: 1) upisdownism has become a common and well-understood phrase during this administration's tenure and 2) Brooks says their problem is that they're too honest.
In short, Brooks is presenting GWB as the good honest man, unschooled in the European ways of deception and hypocrisy, who thinks that when we say we're going to do something, then we do it, damn it all. Just recall the rationalizations this administration has offered for: steel tariffs, the repeal of steel tariffs, war, tax cuts, the moratorium on stem cell research, the Patriot Act, etc. and etc. Also recall the months long charade that preceded the war, with GWB saying Saddam could still avoid war, when the decision to invade had been made long before. There is no credible, no-hackular way to say that this administration's problem is a surfeit of honesty.
Yeah, I had to read the thing a few times to understand what was going on-- thinking, as I did, that no one could say with a straight face that the Bush administration's chief problem is that it's too honest. So surely Brooks can't mean that. Ted's point is well-taken: part of the problem is a lack of tact, diplomatic nicety, etc. But it's very clever to take this as an excess of honesty.
Oh, let me continue my Andy Rooney moment by nothing that the craptacular Al Gore ending was something special: it emphasizes the value of honesty by perpetuaing a lie, viz., that Gore is particularly medacious, as politicians go.
This was hermeneutically tough for me, since I believe that honesty is a virtue and that its status as a virtue entails that "honesty taken to a reckless extreme" is an oxymoron. I don't think you can count as honest unless you exercise appropriate reck (here, reck=tact).
So by 'honesty' I assumed Brooks meant only candor, which is not a virtue but a mere disposition. (Of course, that rendered some of his formulations pleonastic.) Hence I thought the piece was a criticism of Bush for letting candor, a virtue when it expresses honesty, degenerate into a vice.
I agree that Brooks is trying to have it both ways with 'honest' and that that's slimy (perhaps that's the same as hack). But Brooks should be given some credit for criticizing, and in personal terms, a president whom he generally admires -- however wrongheaded the admiration.
I was more struck by how a virtue-centric conservative like Brooks could be so confused in his usage of a virtue-term.
I see where you're coming from, but I don't think even the "candor has degenerated into vice" reading works. Let's make a distinction between a policy that lacks virtue (let's call it vicious, what the hell) and a policy that is ineffective. Do you really read Brooks to be saying that Bush is vicious and therefore ineffective? On the contrary, Brooks is saying that the Europeans and previous administrations were vicious and therefore effective and that, given the viciousness of the rest of the world, Bush needs to be more vicious (not the simple, honest man that he is).
Brooks mocks everyone but Bush.
without sullying itself with the Iraqi peasants actually trying
without committing the faux pas of actually enforcing them
Bush scandalized the world by announcing his desire to enforce the U.N.'s resolutions
Poor George Bush, good and decent man in a corrupt and fallen world; but when you're the President, sometimes you have to dance with the devil.