One of the first emails that came in this morning was from a reader warning me to brace myself before looking at Brooks’ latest column, and boy was he right. McBobo’s latest canard is that opposition to the appointment of John Bolton as UN ambassador is coming primarily from one-world utopians who in their heart of hearts want to abolish national borders and create a world governing authority, but gosh darn it, this tough-talking Bolton fellow stands in the way of their squishy-headed dream.
Oy.
Brooks doesn’t content himself with building straw men. Brooks builds straw populations. Brooks brings forth straw galaxies out of the inchoate darkness of what is clearly an overactive imagination. He seems to believe that, by spinning these ideological fantasies out on the op-ed page of the Times, he can give them form and substance — turn his straw men into gold, if you will.
And within each column, there is invariably at least one demonstrably false assertion, and Brooks does not disappoint today:
We will never accept global governance, third, because we love our Constitution and will never grant any other law supremacy over it. Like most peoples (Europeans are the exception), we will never allow transnational organizations to overrule our own laws, regulations and precedents. We think our Constitution is superior to the sloppy authority granted to, say, the International Criminal Court.
Okay, this is just forehead-slappingly stupid, as anyone who’s paid the slightest attention to international trade agreements like NAFTA and GATT is well aware — our love of the Constitution aside, we already have effectively given transnational organizations the ability to overrule our laws and regulations. (Here’s one quick example for the inevitable doubters in the audience.)
The intellectual banality of this man astounds even a simple uneducated cartoonist such as myself.
Oy.