Andrew Sullivan has an Opinion

Departing momentarily from the mechanical efficiency of his "Beinart says but Ross disagrees..." format, Andrew Sullivan ventures an opinion:

"I know Straussians. Straussians are friends of mine. David Brooks is not a Straussian."

Not like I give a damn which brand of perfume Mr. Sullivan wants to dab on this particular turd today, but card-carrying Straussian or not, Our Mr. Brooks certainly rutted happily with them during those all but forgotten (by Conservatives) Good Old Days when being blindly pro-Iraq War was a resume builder and to get in on the GWOT Media Gravy Train all one had to do was call out Liberals as filthy, America-hating fifth columnists a little bit louder than the rest of the mob.

Card-carrying Straussian or not, the fact that David Brooks and Strauss Superfan Bill Kristol (jump to the 5:00 mark)

each parlayed their fierce Yellow Elephant warmongering and lapdog loyalty to Operation Endless Clusterfuck into gigs at the "New York Times" was one of the most powerful lessons we filthy, America-hating fifth columnists learned during those ugly years.

Learned way down deep in our bones.

As with the Iraq War, most Conservative public intellectuals like Mr. Brooks maintain their place in the food chain by continually rewriting American history and the history of Conservatism through a series professionally-useful lies.



As with the Iraq War, these lies are repeated constantly and are virtually never challenged by the Very Serious People in the media, who also find them professionally-useful.

As with the Iraq War, Mr. Brooks freaks right out whenever reality penetrates the antiseptic fantasy of his carefully constructed Barbie's Dream House America.

As with the Iraq War, Mr. Brooks walls up his nearly aphenphosmphobic disdain for the real concerns of real people behind an unshakable faith in government ruled by Very Serious plutocrats and Neoconservative elites who all just happen agree with David Brooks.

As with the Iraq War, all of this is very well documented, including Mr. Brooks' famously full-throated support for the means and ends of Mr. Paul Wolfowitz, yet another Leo Strauss Superfan and poster-boy for the blind, smirking, catastrophic arrogance of the Cult of Neoconservativism (from March of 2005):

Giving Wolfowitz His Due

Let us now praise Paul Wolfowitz. Let us now take another look at the man who has pursued - longer and more forcefully than almost anyone else - the supposedly utopian notion that people across the Muslim world might actually hunger for freedom...

Mr. Brooks also saw fit to use this same column to call out anyone who stood in way of he and Wolfie's Glorious Cause as bitter, anti-Semitic babies:

Let us look again at the man who's been vilified by Michael Moore and the rest of the infantile left, who's been condescended to by the people who consider themselves foreign policy grown-ups, and who has become the focus of much anti-Semitism in the world today - the center of a zillion Zionist conspiracy theories, and a hundred zillion clever-Jew-behind-the-scenes calumnies.

Which would almost certainly have been a public bed-shitting of career-killing proportions for a mere mortal, but as has been amply documented time and again, year after year, there is literally no failure or fraud or fuck-up so spectacular that it can put a dent in Mr. Brooks career as America's Leading Conservative Public Intellectual.

All we are given to know is that he is protected from his many flops and failures from on high by the Prince of Darkness and, as with the Iraq War, no one on the Right appears to care about it in the slightest because any-fucking-thing is permissible as long as as it pisses off those god-damned America hating Liberals, right?

All of which sounds pretty damn Straussian to me.

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