David Brooks is Not Amused

By WikiLeaks.

Nope.

Not at all.

From the NYT:

...
Far from respecting authority, [Julian] Assange seems to be an old-fashioned anarchist who believes that all ruling institutions are corrupt and public pronouncements are lies.
...

For someone with his mind-set, the decision to expose secrets is easy. If the hidden world is suspect, then everything should be revealed. As The New Yorker reported, WikiLeaks has published technical details about an Army device designed to prevent roadside bombs from detonating. It posted soldiers’ Social Security numbers. This week, the group celebrated the release of internal State Department documents with a triumphalist statement claiming that the documents expose the corruption, hypocrisy and venality of U.S. diplomats.

For him, it’s easy. But for everyone else, it’s hard. My colleagues on the news side of this newspaper do not share Assange’s mentality.
...

As journalists, they have a professional obligation to share information that might help people make informed decisions. ... At the same time, as humans and citizens, my colleagues know they have a moral obligation not to endanger lives or national security.

The Times has thus erected a series of filters between the 250,000 raw documents that WikiLeaks obtained and complete public exposure. The paper has released only a tiny percentage of the cables. Information that might endanger informants has been redacted. Specific cables have been put into context with broader reporting.

Yet it might be useful to consider one more filter. Consider it the World Order filter. The fact that we live our lives amid order and not chaos is the great achievement of civilization. This order should not be taken for granted.

This order is tenuously maintained by brave soldiers but also by talkative leaders and diplomats. Every second of every day, leaders and diplomats are engaged in a never-ending conversation. The leaked cables reveal this conversation.
...

The quality of the conversation is determined by the level of trust. Its direction is influenced by persuasion and by feelings about friends and enemies.

The quality of the conversation is damaged by exposure...

The WikiLeaks dump will probably damage the global conversation. Nations will be less likely to share with the United States. Agencies will be tempted to return to the pre-9/11 silos...

...
This fragile international conversation is under threat. It’s under threat from WikiLeaks. It’s under threat from a Gresham’s Law effect, in which the level of public exposure is determined by the biggest leaker and the biggest traitor.
...

David Brooks again underscores his lack-of-amusedness in his "Conversation" with Gail Collins today:

"They [The WikiLeaks] are bad for the world because they destroy trust, which isn’t in great supply to start with, and I wish the establishment still had enough self-confidence to marginalize this sort of behavior and protect the social ecology."

Poor, old Establishment; a multi-trillion dollar budget, control of every major gummint and financial institution on Earth, enough weapons to blow up half the Solar System, and they still can't muster enough horsepower to put those fucking hippies in their place.

But no surprise here, right?

You have another, Very Reasonable column by America’s Greatest Conservative Public Intellectual righteously defending a World Order which, in turn, permits America’s Greatest Conservative Public Intellectual to make a very good living defending it.

And as long as you only read David Brooks' Disneyfied, G-Rated fairy-tale version of "The Prince", that World Order is fairly simple to understand.

For example, its cast of characters is conveniently short and easy to divide into Black Hats and White Hats: there are Hero Journalismists who are constantly balancing their "moral obligations" against the public's right to know a few, saucy details about what the World Order had for lunch today and who it's dating; there are Noble Civil Servants (both armed and unarmed) who silently work behind the scenes to keep the gears and cams of the World Order humming smoothly along; and there are filthy, little Leakers who are (at best) anarcho-simpletons or (at worst) traitors, and always, always a proxy for the specter that has haunted David Brooks his entire adult life -- the Eternal Hippie who smells bad, needs a haircut, has weird sex (with the lights on fer Chrissake!) and wants to smash the System and bring down that nice President Nixon President Reagan President Bush President Cheney for no good reason!

And the mission of this World Order? Why, that's even easier to understand!

Like the Loving but Stern Daddy, the World Order merely wants whats best for you, kitten. Which, in this case, means making it possible for America’s Greatest Conservative Public Intellectual to drive to and from the Applebees of his choice without being attacked by Osama bin Laden.

Which, again, is very reasonable: Hell, after a hard day subverting the youth of America and questioning various dominate paradigms, even a dirty fucking hippie such as myself would like to be able to enjoy a nice Applebee's riblet basket, slice of Sizzling Apple Pie and a frosty adult beverage in peace and quiet, unmolested by al-Qaeda.

And as long as we are willing to act like good little Conservatives and collectively ignore the spectacularly inconvenient realities of recent American history prior to, say, 2008, then David Brooks' fairy tale of How The World Works hangs together really well.

Sadly, we are not good little Conservatives , but rude little Liberals who remember how completely David Brooks' fairy tale fell apart when the issue at hand was not the Myers-Briggs of world leaders, but the invasion of Iraq.

When the Hero Journalismists were agenda-pushing liars like David Brook's former New York Times colleague Judith Miller, and Wingnut sock-puppets like "Jeff Gannon"

(no, we haven't forgotten le Gannon.)

When the filthy, little Leakers were powerful Bush Administration hatchet-men like Scooter Libby, Karl Rove and Dick Cheney.



When the Noble Civil Servants were a diplomat named Joe Wilson who was trying to keep us from invading the wrong country, and a CIA operative named Valerie Plame, who was working undercover to save Mr. Brooks' favorite Applebees from being blown to atoms by keeping loose nukes from falling into the hands of groups like al-Qaeda.

Hmm. Let's see. Noble Civil Servants trying hard to keep us from getting blown up by nuclear-armed terrorists...and help us avoid pitching the world into a decade of avoidable anarchy by starting an endless, bloody war in a major Middle Eastern country based on lies, deluded ideology and a truly staggering ignorance of the local history and culture?

Wow! Sounds like just the kind of prudent actions the World Order would love! And just the sort of chaos-aversion strategies that America’s Greatest Conservative Public Intellectual now insists "should not be taken for granted."

So how did America’s Greatest Conservative Public Intellectual react to L'affaire Plame?

Funny you should ask.

America’s Greatest Conservative Public Intellectual and Defender of the Establishmentairian Faith described these events...

... as follows.

The scandal itself, according to David Brooks, was a "farce."

Ending the Farce

"In retrospect, Plamegate was a farce in five acts. The first four were scabrous, disgraceful and absurd. Justice only reared its head at the end."

(In other words, in Brooks' reckoning, "Justice only reared its head" when Scooter Libby's sentence was commuted.)

To continue...

Per America’s Greatest Conservative Public Intellectual, Joe Wilson was...

"...the charming P.T. Barnum of the National Security set, an inveterate huckster who could be counted on to wrap every actual fact in six layers of embellishment. "

Regarding the people who got screwed and the political hit job that the Bushies ran on them?

"By the start of Act Three, nobody cared about the outing of a C.I.A. agent. That part of the scandal disappeared. And all that was left of Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame were the creepy photos in Vanity Fair."

And far from being a filthy, little Leaker, Scooter Libby was an honorable guy who paid for his own lunch, fer Chrissakes! (from "The News Hour"):

DAVID BROOKS: I went to lunch with Scooter Libby twice when he was -- and he told me...

JIM LEHRER: What were the dates of those?

DAVID BROOKS: Well, what struck me was, A, he told me nothing. I didn't even know what he was ordering half the time.

DAVID BROOKS: And he was incredibly discrete.

And the second thing that always struck me is, he would pay in cash. Usually, you can buy somebody lunch if it's up to $20. But he would insist on following the law to the stickler of the detail. He would always put down a $20 bill.

Bush's critics?

"Of course, the howlers howl. That is their assigned posture in this drama. They entered howling, they will leave howling and the only thing you can count on is their anger has been cynically manufactured from start to finish."

The lasting effect of the Bush Administration's treasonable behavior?

"The farce is over. It has no significance. Nobody but Libby’s family will remember it in a few weeks time. Everyone else will have moved on to other fiascos, other poses, fresher manias."

All of which simply underscores what every rude little hippie already knows.

That behind his carefully cultivated firewall of Perfect Bland Reasonableness, David Brooks is just awful; just another spiteful, lying Conservative hypocrite with unlimited access press credentials.

And that David Brooks' World Order can be a very Nice Conservative Daddy who only wants what's best for you...

...right up until you cross it in any substantial way. At which point you can expect to have your throat ripped out, your family destroyed and your shattered body tossed into some back alley of history, where the last thing you will see in this life is David Brooks, hoisting up his 1,000 starched Centrist skirts and petticoats to take a piss on you.