Noam Scheiber, who's usually one of the non-racist, non-right-wing, non-insane holdouts at TNR has a classic TNR apologia for David Brooks. Even the Liberal New Republic doesn't think Brooks deserves the mean, nasty, unfair
takedown he received at the hands of Sasha Issenberg. Scheiber seems to think that Issenberg suffers the same problems as Brooks in glossing over inconvenient details.
In my mind, the real question here is why this otherwise thin anti-Brooks piece is resonating so much, particularly with liberals and other journalists. I think it has something to do with a sense of ideological betrayal on the one hand, and jealousy on the other.
Inconveniently for Scheiber, however, our problem with Brooks isn't jealousy or betrayal. It's anger that Brooks' fabrications are chalked up to journalistic license in writing an appealing and dramatic story, when apparently the slightest departure from fact is a shocking sin when done by liberals (see Gore, Al). Brooks was grossly wrong about that whole price-of-meals thing. Instead of saying "people don't pay more than twenty dollars for dinner in Red America" Brooks stated that he had meal after meal ordering the most expensive meal on the menu and was repeatedly incapable of spending more than twenty bucks. That's a lie. Not that he should have, but Jayson Blair didn't get away with that kind of fabrication.
Brooks' columns consistently reflect the kind of laziness or worse that Issenberg points out in his piece. For instance, in his prolonged shriek about Richard Clarke, Brooks refers to Clarke's charges as "shrill partisanship" without actually refuting them and showing us how visionary and wonderful Bush's anti-terror policy was. It's the same slap-on-the-smear crap that the whole Republican Attack Machine is pulling, yet Brooks gets the Scheiber defense as some sort of higher-minded intellectual.