Matt Taibbi: Onward Christian Soldiers
December 27th, 2009
I’m always
afraid to write about
David Brooks, because I worry that
my attitude toward this guy is colored by certain
strong feelings I have about his appearance — he just looks
like a professional groveler/ass-kisser, and every time I see him in public
I have to fight off visions of him home at night in his Versace jammies,
feverishly jacking off with one hand while caressing in
the other an official invitation to, say, a White
House event, or a Harvard Club
luncheon.
Brooks
is the kind of character
who has thrived everywhere he’s lived
throughout human history; it’s incredibly easy to imagine
the nebbishy, hairy-kneed Gaius Domitus Brooksius strolling
through Rome and swelling with pride over his new
appointment to the post of Senior Licker
of the Caligulan butt
crack.
A week
ago or so a friend pointed
out Brooks’s recent toadyist masterpiece,
Obama’s Christian Realism, but I didn’t read it until today,
not wanting to get upset over the weekend. It’s a pretty awesome piece
of apologia, one whose seeming purpose is to hang a cloak
of nobility on Obama’s escalation of the Afghan war.
The Cliff’s Notes version of the Brooks
argument would go something
like this:
1. A hundred
years ago, then-Princeton University
president John Hibben used to admonish his graduates:
there is good and evil inside
all of us.
2. Evil is
foreign despotism, the regimes of
Stalin and Hitler being good examples. Goodness is Americans
committing troops to replace those
governments with
democracy.
3. After Vietnam,
that kind of armed goodness became
“unfashionable,” as lily-livered domestic peaceniks
regrettably lost sight of just how good we are
and how evil the evil out
there is.
4. Barack
Obama is dispensing with the
secularist discomfort with military commitment
by committing more troops to Afghanistan, thereby restoring
our faith in America’s essentially Christian
mission to spread goodness
through force.
…Sometimes
it’s hard not to marvel at the
amazingly flexible nature of American propaganda.
George Bush openly sold the invasion of Iraq as an absolutist exercise
in Christian goodness versus non-Christian evil — remember his famous dictum
that “God is not neutral” in our fight for justice and freedom — and for
his trouble was roundly bashed as a fundamentalist lunatic
among the very people Brooks is pitching this
column to, educated east coast
liberals.
Now
Obama is quietly tiptoeing
up to the same sorts of policy decisions, and in
rushes David Brooks, as willing an official mouthpiece as this
country has ever had, and pitches exactly the same
ethical argument as justification for
Obama’s moves.
…The schtick
here is all about painting the
opponents of military intervention as cynics who
lack moral confidence, perhaps because
they lack the backbone of
Christian belief.
…What’s
most disgusting about Brooks
is that he has it backwards. “Cynicism” is invading
a country for the sorts of reasons that have guided the United States
in most of their interventionist actions since World War II. There is an American kid
in Afghanistan who is going to die tomorrow because Rahm Emanuel doesn’t
want his boss to have to answer toughness questions from
somebody like Brian Williams in a 2012 electoral
debate. And I’m the
cynic here?
