In his television appearances and even his occasional book, David Brooks plays the part of a moderate conservative, an evenhanded sort of likeable guy who can even be funny. In his NY Times columns he removes the disquise to reveal an assiduous partisan hack. He may dress up the smears in intellectual rhetoric, but underneath it all is a Hannity hyena, another GOP attack dog.
The latest case in point accuses Kerry of being anti-democracy because of something he said to Andres Oppenheimer of The Miami Herald about Cuba's Varela Project, the petition signed by more than 30,000 Cubans to hold a referendum on free elections. Castro countered it by arresting scores of dissidents and sentencing them to long terms in prison.
Kerry said that while he has supported the Varela Project in the past, it "has gotten a lot of people in trouble, . . . and it brought down the hammer in a way that I think wound up being counterproductive." '(the ellipsis is Oppenheimer's)
From this simple statement, Brooks weaves a despicable GOP prayer cloth of pure propaganda, accusing Kerry of not advancing democracy, saying that his comment "is a harpoon directed at the morale of Cuba's dissidents." Brooks never even mentions that Kerry formerly supported the Varela Project, nor that Kerry's record on human rights is vastly superior to Bush's by any standard. Shameless. Anyone interested should read Brooks for themselves, but check out the original Oppenheimer article first.
In fact, the only mention of Bush at all is when Brooks says that "Carter, Reagan and George W. Bush all turned, in different ways, against this approach. They understood that democracy advances security, kowtowing to dictators does not. Most of all, they didn't want to conduct a foreign policy that would make them feel ashamed."
Here's what Oppenheimer said in his article about Kerry and Bush:
Kerry's strongest weapon to woo the Cuban exile vote may lie in drawing attention to the Bush administration's greatest liability on the issue: its lack of international support to launch almost any diplomatic initiative to bring about change on the island.
"I want to work with the international community to increase political and diplomatic pressure on the [Fidel] Castro regime to release all political prisoners, support civil society and begin a process of genuine political reform," Kerry said.
What does that mean? I asked.
"We've had a number of years in which the international community has refused to really be part of our efforts to deal with Castro," he said. "I think American credibility is so difficult abroad with respect to Iraq and other areas, that it will be very complicated for this administration to get any kind of cooperation."
Oppenheimer goes on to say that Kerry is right; that the Bush administration has turned much of the world against the United States and that has direct consequences on any democratic initiatives in Cuba.
Now, as he says, when the U.S. calls for stronger international support on Cuba, few listen. He relates how a recent Latin America & European summit didn't even "mention the killing of 104 prisoners in Honduras that same week, nor the executions in Cuba, nor the fact that Castro has sentenced peaceful opponents to decades in prison for things such as possessing a typewriter or distributing leaflets."
When I asked a democratic South American president whether the summit shouldn't criticize human rights abuses everywhere, he shrugged and said, "Iraq changed everything."
You won't find any of this side of the coin in Brooks' piece. That would be too evenhanded even for such a moderate and likeable right-wing attack dog.