David Brooks

James Taranto: "The Left's Nervous Breakdown"

David Brooks: "The Milquetoast Radicals"

Real Clear Politics: "Obama 'Heartbroken' NBA Season Will Be Delayed"

Multiple times in recent weeks, President Obama has justified the need for higher taxes by saying that Warren Buffett pays a lower tax rate than his secretary. Of course, this is a preposterous talking point (especially since Buffett owes hefty amounts of back taxes going back nine years).

In his New York Times column today, David Brooks writes that Republicans opposed to tax hikes as a part of a debt limit deal "have no sense of moral decency." The column happens to include a rather conspicuous typo:

One big problem conservatives face in trying to develop and implement effective public policy is that conservative thinkers have gotten used to operating in an intellectual milieu that assumes activist government is the answer to every question.

It seems to me that when Paul Ryan can get both David Brooks and Rush Limbaugh enthused, he's really on to something:

David Brooks and Rep. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin had a great debate at AEI today over the proper size and scope of the federal government. The debate originated with a WSJ op-ed that Ryan and AEI's president, Arthur Brooks, wrote in September. Brooks responded to their argument in one of his NYT columns. Then the two sides agreed to meet and discuss their differences in front of a public audience.

Classic David Brooks:

It was the winter of 2007. Dr. Faustus, the famous left-wing philologist, was sitting in a coffee shop in despair over the Bush-Cheney regime and the future of his country.

Suddenly, Mephistopheles, who happened to be the provost at his college, appeared, sipping a double mocha frappuccino. He sat down next to Dr. Faustus and casually asked him if he would like to be granted any five wishes in exchange for his immortal soul.

It just gets better from there.

Yesterday David Brooks wrote a cheerful column on why the United States, despite everything, remains in a strong position heading into the mid-twenty-first century. Sometime yesterday afternoon, I was struck when I noticed that Brooks's column had received more than 500 comments. Apparently pointing out the good news is controversial!

Here's Brooks's argument: "The U.S. is on the verge of a demographic, economic and social revival, built on its historic strengths. The U.S. has always been good at disruptive change. It’s always excelled at decentralized community-building. It’s always had that moral materialism that creates meaning-rich products. Surely a country with this much going for it is not going to wait around passively and let a rotten political culture drag it down."

Fox News Channel's Bret Baier interviewed President Obama today. It wasn't what you'd call a friendly encounter. Baier, concerned that the president was filibustering, repeatedly interrupted the chief executive. Obama quickly grew frustrated. Before long, the look on his face suggested he was wondering why he agreed to the interview in the first place.

On Friday, David Brooks wrote a column likening the Tea Partiers to the 1960s-era New Left. "Members of both movements believe in what you might call mass innocence," he wrote. "Both movements are built on the assumption that the people are pure and virtuous and that evil is introduced into society by corrupt elites and rotten authority structures."

Then, over the weekend, Jonah Goldberg wrote a compelling rebuttal: 

One of the reasons all of this is relevant is that the basic arguments and outlook of the Tea Parties are simply and profoundly different from the outlook of the New Left. The Tea Partiers are not in any meaningful sense Rousseauians. They certainly don't reject original sin in any serious way. And I suspect if you asked many of them they would say that the American people deserve their share of blame for the financial mess we're in. They do believe, I would bet, that America is a basically decent nation that has drifted into a kind of soft-despotism or Nanny-statism. But that vision isn't Rousseauian, it's De Tocquevillian.

Read the whole thing, as they say.

Nancy Pelosi is still fighting to pass the health care bill through reconciliation. Nate Silver makes the political case for why the Democrats should follow her lead:

The near-term political case for passing health care, again, is not that the bill is magically going to become popular over the next eight months. Rather, it's that the Democrats are already in such bad shape among independents -- partly, no doubt, because of their bungled handling of what has become an unpopular health care bill -- that they may as well go ahead and give their base something to get excited about. Seriously, the Democrats' approval rating among independents in 19 percent. What more do they have to lose?

Here's the problem with this analysis: "The base" was as excited as it was or is ever going to be about the health care bill in the Massachusetts special election. The stakes were extremely high, and the choice was binary. Defeat Scott Brown and health care passes; elect Scott Brown and it dies. As you may recall, Scott Brown won.

Pew: "The only recent midterm campaigns when anti-incumbent sentiment equaled its current levels were in 2006 and 1994 – which culminated in elections that changed the balance of power on Capitol Hill."

The survey goes on to note that the GOP remains unpopular, while Obama's approval rating remains higher than George W. Bush's and Bill Clinton's. For now.