http://www.balloon-juice.com/?&paged=2

“I will vote for Democrats and little L libertarians and isolationists until the crazy people aren’t running the GOP. The threat of higher taxes in the short term isn’t enough to keep me from voting out crazy people and voting for sane people with whom I merely disagree regarding policy. Hillarycare doesn’t scare me as much as Frank Gaffney having a line to the person with the nuclear football or Dobson and company crafting domestic policy.”

Brookishness, v. To conflate two disciplines at a superficial level so that dinner party conversations could continue in the spurious belief that matters of moment were being discussed while the port was passed.

With all due respect:

1. Shouldn’t the spelling be “Brooksishness?”

2. Isn’t “Brook[s]ishness” a noun, rather than a verb?

A. Brooks (proper noun)
B. Brooksish (adjective; (e.g.) resembling or characteristic of Brooks)
C. Brooksishness (noun; (e.g.) the state or quality of being Brooksish)

Examples: fool, foolish, foolishness; child, childish, childishness.

http://www.msu.edu/~defores1/gre/sufx/gre_suffx.htm

If these observations are correct, a verb is needed to fit your definition.

Your comment is excellent, in my view.

What you probably didn’t realize is that this post is very likely anti-Semitic, at least judging by the rather broadened definition offered up by Brooks in his latest piece in the Times “Neo-Conservatives Don’t Exist, And/Or Are A Code Word For ‘The Jews’”. Due to the yeoman’s work done by Bob Somerby, Josh Marshall, and many, many, others, I am spared the task of having to explain why this is a stupid thing to say. This is just as well, as anyone who doesn’t know this without being told is probably not really worth talking to…
For in the final analysis, the sad decline of David Brooks is society’s fault – yours and mine – for tolerating this nonsense for all this time. Because when you come right down to it, we wrote that George W. Bush is “too honest”, that it’s a good thing we didn’t plan for the aftermath of the war, and we have just accused ourselves of anti-Semitism for not agreeing with Dick Cheney or something.

There’s a bunch of links in there too. If you want to read something that is as keenly relevant and precient now as it was then (i.e., the precise opposite of Brooks’ dogshit), then check it out.

Many will doubt this, but Bush is a smart and compelling presence in person, and only the whispering voice of Leo Tolstoy holds one back.

Only Tolstoy? And this during the 2004 election:

The coming weeks will be so tough because the essential contest—of which the Swift boat stuff was only a start—will be over who really has courage, who really has resolve, and who is just a fraud with a manly bearing.

John Kerry apparently was the “fraud with a manly bearing.”

I like this one from November 4, 2003 because it also has a Friedman unit in it:

Somehow, over the next six months, until the Iraqis are capable of their own defense, the Bush administration is going to have to remind us again and again that Iraq is the Battle of Midway in the war on terror, the crucial turning point where either we will crush the terrorists’ spirit or they will crush ours.
The president will have to remind us that we live in a fallen world, that we have to take morally hazardous action if we are to defeat the killers who confront us. It is our responsibility to not walk away. It is our responsibility to recognize the dark realities of human nature, while still preserving our idealistic faith in a better Middle East.

Good versus evil, with a identifiable turning point. How Burkean. I went to write a letter to the editor, and then went, “Oh, fuck it.”

a mix of banality and bullshit.

A lot of conservatives are repositioning themselves in the expectation of (probably) a Democratic President and (possibly) a permanently weakened Republican Party.

This is a good thread. Hittin’ the nail on the head.

Like Heraclitus said, in a tortured way, brooks/rivers always contradict themselves. David Brooks is living up to this spirit, torturing us with each utterance he makes.

But you know, an alternate universe. Like the one in which entropy is reversed and people grow younger every day.