David Brooks's
latest is worth looking at if only as the sleazy counterpoint to his
hatchet-job on Dean last week. While Dean is slippery, Bush's problem is that he has "too much candor."
The obvious problem with this column is its blithe neglect of the increasing record of lies, half-truths and deliberate blindness that allowed this war to take place - starting with, say, intelligence that was systematically ignored in order to prop up a faulty world view. Plenty of back-stabbing (remember Rumsfield's betrayal of Blair?) neglected as well.
Beneath this, there's another more troubling -- but also more revealing -- problem. This is the way that Brooks mistakes unilaterlism (and, finally, the
aggression which always results from unilateralism) for candor. He writes:
The administration's fundamental problem is that it is not very good at dealing with people it can't stand. The men and women in this White House are exceptionally forthright. When the come across someone they regard as insufferable, their instinct is to be blunt. They seek to be honest rather than insincere, to not sugar things up but to let these people know how they really feel.
Brooks's problem, in brief, is that, as George Orwell wrote of an infinitely more distinguished writer, he's "the kind of person who is always somewhere else when the trigger is pulled." By far the most consequential result of this "bluntness" is actually murder and death - in the form of the soldiers who are doing the dirty work of carrying out Bush's simple-minded machismo. At the end of the day, Brooks has merely identified the qualities which lead Bush to want to attack - and finally to kill, to eliminate - those people whom he "can't stand." Spurn our most long-standing allies, shunt people off into a prison camp at the end of the world, send young soldiers to kill and to die. This dishonorable kind of "candor" inevitably leads to violence -- and Bush, like his Grey Lady columnist, will always be somewhere else (flight suit and turkey delivery nonwithstanding) when the triggers are pulled.