Mirror Mirror

Posted on June 20, 2008 by Timothy Burke

I think if you did a search-and-replace on this David Brooks column, substituting the columnist’s own name every time he mentions Obama, it would be a pretty apt description of Brooks’ calculatedly dishonest approach to commentary.

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6 Responses to Mirror Mirror

  1. Alan Jacobs says:
    June 20, 2008 at 10:36 am

    Tim, what do you mean by “calculatedly dishonest”? If you had said “inconsistent” or “incoherent” I think I’d know what you mean, but why “dishonest”?

  2. Timothy Burke says:
    June 20, 2008 at 2:03 pm

    Because some people are inconsistent in ways that strike me as sincere or unknowing–either because they’re really trying hard to live up to contradictory principles that demand opposing commitments, or because they’re trying to think their way through problems that pull them in opposite directions–and I don’t think Brooks is inconsistent for those reasons. I think he’s inconsistent on purpose, instrumentally, as a manipulator. Which strikes me as dishonest, and calculatingly so.

  3. Alan Jacobs says:
    June 21, 2008 at 10:49 am

    Thanks, Tim. I agree that the distinction between kinds of inconsistency is valid and important; I’m just not confident that I can tell the difference.

  4. Bill McNeill says:
    June 21, 2008 at 6:18 pm

    I see something less pernicious and more trite in this particular article: paint by the numbers contrarianism. The common wisdom is that Obama is the second coming of
    Adlai Stevenson, so Brooks starts his column by asserting the opposite and then riffs until his word count is filled.

  5. north says:
    June 21, 2008 at 10:51 pm

    I think he??s inconsistent on purpose, instrumentally, as a manipulator.

    Correct.

  6. Doug says:
    June 23, 2008 at 5:53 am

    In which, for anyone who hasn’t seen it, David Brooks is carefully filleted over steak and lobster in rural Pennsylvania. Leitmotif: “There’s just one problem: Many of his generalizations are false.”

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