The Hate Show
The FCC gets hammered with complaints when Bono uses an expletive as an adjective, but Savage keeps getting new shows to say things like this. Now, I’ll defend his right to say it, but how bad does it have to get before something (else) really tragic happens?
Malkin is doing something similar online, only with specific names and phone numbers.
Values.
UPDATE: Ezra Klein weighs in from the perspective of a fellow pundit. One with, like, ethics.
April 21, 2006 at 9:00 am
The best part was the “out-of-control lesbian feminist movement.” I think he’s got mommy issues.
April 24, 2006 at 12:37 am
Savage has certainly decided to carve out his turf on the far edge of what’s acceptable. I can’t really imagine anyone going farther out. Of course he’s not alone. It’s tempting but tricky to get into the psychology of the thing. How much is simply unregulated “shock jock” demagoguery gone bad and how much is, you know, authentically disturbed behavior. I, unlike Charles Krauthammer and David Brooks, will decline to suggest I know. But it’s a dark corner of our discourse, no doubt about it.
April 24, 2006 at 12:47 am
I actually just wrote a paper on Brooks and how he loves to sit the fence to keep his “base” and also to keep his job at the Times as the “compassionate conservative.” It centers around his flip-flopping (had to use the term) on the Iraq war. Good times.
April 24, 2006 at 8:06 am
Brooks is great at this; a lot of people I know who one would think to be nominally liberal really tip their hat to him for his even-handedness, presumably not having read through (or seen through) some of his more egregious water-carrying. I’d love to hear a couple of examples or conclusions if you’d be willing to share them.
How do you judge when someone is being deceptively “balanced” or they’re just honestly muddle-headed? I think at some point the strategery becomes evident, and Brooks has carved out a very sweet spot as the righty even a lefty can love (in a sense, it’s the complementary other bookend of Joe Klein’s truly bizarre “I’m Just a Lonesome Democrat” act). “He makes some sense!” Er, yeah. If you’re Ken Mehlman.
April 28, 2006 at 4:17 pm
In March 2003, as Bush prepared for war with Iraq, Brooks came out in favor of the war using the pretext of WMDs. “(Bush) is a man of his word. He expects others to be that way too. It is indisputably true that Saddam has not disarmed. If people are going to vote against a resolution saying Saddam has not disarmed then they are liars.” A year and a half later, in October 2004, Brooks went on the defensive into damage-control mode after no weapons of mass destruction were found: “The fact that Saddam had no W.M.D. in 2001 has been amply reported, but it’s been isolated from the more important and complicated fact of Saddam’s nature and intent. But we know where things were headed. Sanctions would have been lifted. Saddam, rich, triumphant and unbalanced, would have reconstituted his W.M.D. Perhaps he would have joined a nuclear arms race with Iran.”
Brooks cannot even decide whether the Iraqi people want democracy or not. “Some of the best reporting out of Iraq suggests that many Iraqis have stared into the abyss of what their country could become and have decided to work with renewed vigor toward the democracy that both we and they want,” Brooks writes in May of 2004. How can anyone argue with that? But when just two weeks later Brooks is confronted with the idea that some pundits (who he’ll later say knew the war was going to be hard-fought) think democracy is antithetical to how the Muslim world wants to govern itself, Brooks questions if they really do want democracy. “It’s an epic gamble. Because, let’s face it, we don’t know whether all people really do want to live in freedom. We don’t know whether Iraqis have any notion of what democratic citizenship really means. We don’t know whether they hear words like freedom, liberty and pluralism as deadly insults to the way of life they hold dear.”
Brooks’ above comments in the spring of 2004 came a year and a half after he attacked many Democratic thinkers about their positions on the $87-billion plan to rebuild Iraq. In October 2003, many people, mostly Republicans, were still optimistic about how the Iraq war will turn out. Many still are optimistic. Brooks obviously didn’t feel the need to align with any Democrats on any Iraq issues at the time, he even said the Democratic Party was teetering on the brink of “full-bore liberal isolationism.” So somewhere between October 2003 and May 2004, when Brooks’ first columns about his own disenchantment with the Iraqi war surfaced, Brooks changed his mind and began to write columns to appeal to both Democrats’ sense of infuriation at the war and Republicans’ hopes for salvaging something positive out of the war.
So what happened between these times that could have changed Brooks’ point of view on the war? On April 1, 2004, four American ex-special forces soldiers working as security contractors in Fallujah were killed, their bodies were dismembered and hung from a bridge over the Euphrates river. The New York Times ran a picture of the mutilated corpses on the front cover of their newspaper to much controversy. But Brooks remained firm, calling those Democrats who thought Iraq would soon find itself in the middle of a civil war or nationwide rebellion “Chicken Littles.” Four days later, Brooks ran his column saying that mistakes were made in Iraq. Four weeks later, Brooks wrote that America was unique in that “No other nation would have been naive enough to do it (Iraq) this badly.” Can we ever get a true feeling of where David Brooks stands on any issue if he is going to muddle up every stance he has with contradictions?
On March 16, 2006 as America prepared to mark the third anniversary of the war with Iraq, Brooks wrote a column about how wrong administration officials got it when they decided not to send more troops to Iraq: “Debate inside any administration is less sophisticated and realistic than the debate among experts outside. The people inside have access to a bit more information. But they are more likely to self-censor for fear of endangering their careers.” Could the same be true of Brooks himself? In Brooks’ October 18, 2003 piece, he said that Democrats like then presidential candidate Wesley Clark were “too mealy-mouthed to take a stand either way” on the question of Iraq reconstruction money.
SORRY IT’S SO LONG, I PULLED SOME BODY PARAGRAPHS OUT OF MY PAPER. –Andrew
April 28, 2006 at 4:21 pm
Brooks is perhaps himself too mealy-mouthed to take any firm position for fear of it hurting his career.