Brooks’ columns invariably remind me of Roy Edroso’s recurrent line about Jonah Goldberg, which I am paraphrasing from memory and probably mangling: this is the stupidest thing he has ever written, until the next thing he writes. Still, this morning’s was a real contender.
The most idiotic campaign punditry in recent days has been the assertion that the Iraq war as an issue is so over. Like, so last summer. It reached a climax today, Tuesday, with David Brooks’ column in The New York Times declaring that we are now in the “postwar” period. Brooks calls this suddenly “a postwar election.” The public, he suggests, is changing from “a war mentality to a peace mentality,” exhausted by “the war over the war.”
Postwar? Peace? Try telling that to the soldiers in Iraq, and the families whose kids are still coming home minus a limb or part of their brain. Last I checked we were still spending billions of dollars a month Over There and I haven’t heard about any bases, or the grand embassy, being dismantled.