Tis a Pity He's a Whore -- UPDATE

Our Mr. Brooks today:

This experience should have a chastening influence on the advocates of smart power.
...

Perhaps we don’t know enough, can’t plan enough, can’t implement effectively enough to coordinate nation building with national security objectives.

The peace and security timetable is measured in years or decades. Development progress, if it comes at all, is measured in generations.

Our Mr. Brooks in 2003:

"In certain circles, it is not only important what opinion you hold, but how you hold it. It is important to be seen dancing with complexity, sliding among shades of gray. Any poor rube can come to a simple conclusion -- that President Saddam Hussein is a menace who must be disarmed--but the refined ratiocinators want to be seen luxuriating amid the difficulties, donning the jewels of nuance, even to the point of self-paralysis."

Glenn Greenwald in Salon, September, 2009):

...
All of this would be a fascinating study for historians if the people responsible were figures of the past. But they're not. They're the opposite. The same people shaping our debates now are the same ones who did all of that, and they haven't changed at all.

They're doing the same things now that they did then.

When you go read what they said back then, that's what makes it so remarkable and noteworthy. David Brooks got promoted within our establishment commentariat to The New York Times after (one might say: because of) the ignorant bile and amoral idiocy he continuously spewed while at The Weekly Standard. According to National Journal's recently convened "panel of Congressional and Political Insiders," Brooks is now the commentator who "who most help[s] to shape their own opinion or worldview" -- second only to Tom "Suck On This" Friedman. Charles Krauthammer came in third.

Ponder that for a minute.

Congratulations, graduate: you now know everything you need to know about being a Big Time Professional Conservative Public Intellectual!

As your name is called, please come forward to collect your diploma.

UPDATE: Matt Taibbi tracks how Neocon Hack Chunky Bobo (Ross Douthat) has followed exactly the same, sniveling arc as Neocon Hack Bobo Classic.

Out of Power, Right-Wing Hawks Turn Dovish

...
Look, people are entitled to have changes of heart. They are also entitled to learn from experience. And most importantly, people are entitled to be wrong. We all are, from time to time. And if people like Ross Douthat emerge from the experience of observing the Iraq and Afghanistan fiascoes finally understanding “the bluntness of war as an instrument of state” and the “difficulty of predicting” any war’s “long-term consequences,” that’s great. I applaud it.

But I don’t buy it. What happened back in ’02 and ’03 isn’t can’t be summarized as simply as a simple policy disagreement that Douthat, through the folly of inexperience, happened to be on the wrong side of. The mere fact that the Douthats of the world supported the war wasn't what made them so obnoxious.
Much more important was the shameless witch-hunting of antiwar voices, and the impugning of the patriotism of people who advocated the very sort of caution Douthat now claims to endorse. Douthat, remember, contributed to the National Review’s obnoxiously-titled “Kumbaya Watch,” pitched as “the latest in anti-American commentary from the left.” In that column he hounded critics of the president and/or those who didn't advocate immediate war against the Muslims, and wondered aloud about the political bias of organizations like ABC News (they wouldn’t let their reporters wear American flag lapel pins!).
The recent conversions to the cause of foreign-policy prudence by people like Douthat would be obnoxious even if they were believable. It’s easy to respect the position of someone like Ron Paul – he’s been against the war from the start, and for the same reasons throughout.
But people like Douthat didn’t start becoming pacifists until a) the occupation of Iraq went south, helping derail the Bush presidency, and b) Barack Obama became president and started taking ownership of new adventures in places like Libya. Before then, he was just another jingoistic twit doing the “Gooble, gooble, one of us!”chant on the march to war.
And let's be honest. Even a child could have seen, back then, that the whole WMD thing was, transparently, total bullshit and a canard – that they were going in to Iraq anyway, for other reasons, no matter what the intelligence said or didn't say. I mean, for God's sake, Bush was trying to convince us that Saddam was going to use unmanned drones to spray poison gas over American cities – drones that would have been launched from Saddam's giant secret fleet of aircraft carriers, apparently. What adult person actually believed this stuff?
All of this was obviously ridiculous at the time, but when anyone tried to point that out, people like Douthat put us on "Kumbaya watch," questioned our allegiances, called us Muslim collaborators, etc., etc. Now they want to talk about prudence and the "long-term consequences" of war? Bite me.

The only thing Taibbi omits is that, like Bobo Classic, Chunky Bobo also rode his sneering, chest-beating, America Fuck Yeah! Yellow Elephant credentials to a cushy sinecure at the Liberal New York Times.

Because that is the media we have now.