David Brooks is an Ass

New York Times columnist David Brooks is an ass in both senses of the word; a hole through which noxious waste is routinely emitted and a braying donkey, offending the ears every time he opens his mouth. He is the Washington beltway’s babble-master, wrapping his never-ending defense of elite white men with the eloquence of a Victorian era English professor.

It is no surprise that Brooks detests Bernie Sanders. On Friday night’s PBS NewsHour, Brooks said that Sanders doesn’t understand America’s working class, suburban voters, blacks or Latinos. This from a man so cloistered in his world of white privilege he routinely blames the poor (code for minorities) for being poor, as if they are a subspecies that lacks the correct set of genes to hold down a job that pays more than seven dollars an hour.

Brooks is America’s mouthpiece for the status quo. Sanders is a threat to the status quo. Ergo, Brooks hates Sanders. Not to mention that Sanders is a democratic socialist where Brooks is the champion of laissez-faire capitalism. But for the defender of this country’s rich and powerful to say Sanders doesn’t understand the working class, blacks or Latinos is like Rush Limbaugh saying Obama doesn’t understand what it’s like to be an African American. It’s a claim that is so divorced from reality, and comes from the mouth of a man who routinely characterizes the working class as lazy whiners and blacks or Latinos as moral and intellectual inferiors, that it should make everybody’s head explode.

David Brooks is an ass. In a just world he would be editing recipes for the Daily Shopper, not writing opinion pieces for the New York Times.

The mainstream media gets one right

It’s a rare moment in time when a member of the mainstream media goes off the corporate-approved script and speaks the truth to power. The New York Times did just that yesterday in an editorial calling on Obama to order a criminal investigation of top Bush administration officials who authorized torture after 9/11. And to its credit, the Times’ editorial was unequivocal. There was no hemming and hawing, no “equivalency” nonsense, no slippery rhetorical escape hatch for the accused. The editorial was short and sweet: Investigate the bastards.

On a similar note, Dick Cheney has been on a media campaign for the last few weeks trying desperately to put the lid back on the box of torture charges. For all his sneering and cranky expletives, many of Cheney’s statements on the subject have been labeled mostly or completely false by fact-checking organizations. Saddam Hussein did not have a 10-year relationship with al-Qaeda. And yes, detainees captured under the war on terror are covered by the Geneva Convention.

I applaud the New York Times editorial board having the courage to call for an investigation into our government’s use of torture. I wish that Obama had the same level of courage to actually carry out what justice demands, but I wouldn’t put any money on that bet. Who knows? Maybe he’ll surprise me too.

Discovery of Iraq chemical weapons does NOT vindicate Bush

Yesterday’s New York Times investigative piece on chemical weapons found in Iraq is a bombshell of an article, but not for the reasons that many conservatives would have you believe.

As an article in today’s Salon and other publications point out, there are two very solid reasons why this revelation is not vindication for those who are crying, “Bush was right. Saddam did have chemical weapons.” The primary point to make is that the chemical weapons our military uncovered in Iraq were pre-1991, degraded chemical munitions that were buried during the Iraq-Iran war and forgotten about. These corroded weapons were not useable and definitely not part of an ongoing WMD program by the Iraqi government. Ironically, many of the weapons were built with the assistance of Western companies

The second point that should be clear to even the dimmest conservative pundit is that a number of these buried caches were found during our invasion of Iraq and after, yet there was not a peep about them from the Bush Administration. If they had found proof that Iraq actually had an active WMD program, don’t you imagine there would have been trumpets blaring and hearty rounds of “I told you so” from Bush and the right-wing media? The Pentagon has admitted that the chemical weapons they found, “Were not the WMDs we were looking for when we went in this time.”

And that brings me to the most disturbing revelation in the Times article. Not only were these weapons not “the WMDs we were looking for,” the Pentagon would not even acknowledge they were found at the time, and even went so far as to deny medical treatment for troops injured during the excavations. Instead of a ticker tape parade down Broadway celebrating the discovery of WMDs, the Pentagon was throwing a blanket over the operations and pretending the weapons didn’t even exist.

George Bush’s invasion of Iraq was a disaster that keeps on giving, and the more we learn about it, the clearer it becomes that this was the largest, and most costly, military blunder in U.S. history.