David Brooks' Political Non Sequitors

      Thanks to my friend and reader, Nanue, who is also a reader over at Angry Bear where Mike Kimel writes, I came across this post over at "doghouseriley" that Nanute says is one of his favorite sites. I certainly like the post Nanue referred me to on David Brooks and Newt Gingrich that I wrote about in my last post about Gingrich and Brooks.

      http://diaryofarepublicanhater.blogspot.com/2011/12/gingrich-no-darling-of-conservative.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+DiaryOfARepublicanHater+%28Diary+of+a+Republican+Hater%29

      The more you read from Brooks, the more absurd he sounds. His political analysis is one long list of non sequitors. While Brooks is ultimately not going to support Newt, he has great admiration for him"

      "Though his ideas stray, his most common theme is that government should intervene in crucial ways to create a dynamic, decentralized, low-tax society."

       http://doghouseriley.blogspot.com/2011/12/shorter-david-brooks-i-agree-with.html

        For the government to "intervene" will require more spending and higher taxes somewhere. Ends and means are mutually exclusive.

        He approvingly quotes Gingrich in 2007: "It’s not a point of view libertarians would embrace, but I am more in the Alexander Hamilton-Teddy Roosevelt tradition of conservatism. I recognize that there are times when you need government to help spur private enterprise and economic development.”

        Where's the beef? Gingrich has a record as a legislator-until he was run out of politics in 1999, which makes his resurrection here a little ironic; he was the party's albatross in the late 90s but will be their savior now seems to be the idea-show me the legislation he has passed that indicates he supports such Hamilton-Roosevelt conservatism. He talks like Hamilton now and again, he has governed like Dick Armey. This is after all the guy who shut down the government because Clinton slighted him on Air Force One.

      Listen to Brooks gush: "Of all the major Republicans, the one who comes closest to my worldview is Newt Gingrich. Despite his erratically shifting views and odd phases, he continually returns to this core political refrain: He talks about using government in energetic but limited ways to increase growth, dynamism and social mobility"

    Again he uses these words from time to time, there is no record of him passing any bills that he used government to increase growth, dynamism, and social mobility. Unless he means the disastrous telecommunication deregulation he pushed in the 90s. Though it's "dynamism" was fairly flawed and short lived and it sure didn't create any social mobility.

     "This was not one of Gingrich’s passing fads. It is one of the most consistent themes of his career. His 1984 book, “Window of Opportunity,” is a broadside against what he calls the “laissez-faire” conservatism — the idea that government should just get out of the way so the market can flourish. As he wrote, “The opportunity society calls not for a laissez-faire society in which the economic world is a neutral jungle of purely random individual behavior, but for forceful government intervention on behalf of growth and opportunity.”

      Still despite all that Brooks and Gingrich share in Hamiltonian conservatism, Brooks cannot support Gingrich. "In the first place, Gingrich loves government more than I do. He has no Hayekian modesty to restrain his faith in statist endeavor. For example, he has called for “a massive new program to build a permanent lunar colony to exploit the Moon’s resources.” He has suggested that “a mirror system in space could provide the light equivalent of many full moons so that there would be no need for nighttime lighting of the highways.”

      "I’m for national greatness conservatism, but this is a little too great."

       National greatness conservatism: do you see now what I mean by non sequitors? I mean that phrase is wholly meaningless. It's clear why Brooks would admire Gingrich-his talk of " forceful government intervention on behalf of growth and opportunity" is as meaningless out of the mouth of Newt as out of the mouth of Brooks. It's just a way to package conservative ideas as "centrist" or in some way acknowledging that some level of "government activism" is desirable, but in reality Gingrich's record as a legislator shows no legislation that he has passed that in any way increased this government activism.

     Brooks talks about national greatness but nothing in his shallow pop political philosophy can be called "great." It is shallow and enables him to essentially take the conservative line though in a slightly different packaging. That's what Newt's rhetoric amounts to as well. Again Brooks has to finally demur on Newt:

      "As nearly everyone who has ever worked with him knows, he would severely damage conservatism and the Republican Party if nominated. He would severely damage the Hamilton-Theodore Roosevelt strain in American life."

      As I suggested yesterday I'll take George Will's criticism of Newt over Brooks any day of the week. Brooks' whole rationale is vapid and shallow. Listen to his praise of Newt:

       "this approach has led Gingrich to support cap-and-trade energy legislation to combat global warming. It has led him to endorse universal health care coverage. It has led him to support humane immigration reform. He enthusiastically backed Jack Kemp’s efforts to fight poverty, the precursors to compassionate conservatism."

       Right we saw compassionate conservatism and what was more in evidence during the 8 years of W. Bush the conservatism or the compassion? I recall how Clinton defined compassionate conservatism: 'what it means is this: I like you! I care about you, I really do, and I wish I could help you: But I can't."

      You can rest assured that in Brooks' national greatness conservatism the national greatness part has the same place as compassion had in compassionate conservatism.

      Yet it's the other side of Mr. Brooks' above quote we really should push back on. This claim that he endorsed universal health care coverage. Really? Then why is he currently advocating the current Republican party line that demands that the Affordable Health Care Act (AHCA) be repealed?

      I sure hope he doesn't say because of the individual mandate being unconstitutional and wrongly forcing Americans to purchase health insurance against their will-as though it is forgotten now the individual mandate before it was ObamaCare, before it even became RomneyCare, was GingrcihCare.

      If he were for universal health care he would not be running on ending AHCA but rather expanding it. This by the way is my criticism of leftist opponents of AHCA as well. If they really feel it's insufficient they should seek to expand it. They also ignore the fact that when FDR passed his Social Security Act, only 5% of Americans were initially eligible. Then as now it took 5 years till Social Security started as well so there was plenty of time for conservative lawsuits in front of the Supreme Court, etc. Compared to this Obama's bill actually covers up to 60 percent of the previously uninsured.

    It may be too that some liberals don't like the individual mandate either and this is understandable. Yet they should keep in mind that the lawsuits against the mandate pushed by Republican governors are all done in bad faith. They don't want to improve AHCA they want to gut it.

    The rationale for the mandate should be kept in mind: to keep all the new poor, sick recipients will drive up the premiums for the middle class recipients. Whether or not this was the best solution is debatable but it was a solution. I thinking the fact that up to 30 million previously uninsured Americans will be insured is justification enough. I will never get the anti-Obama liberal view from people like Firedoglake's Jane Hamsher that it would have been better to have passed nothing even if tens of millions of previously of the uninsured would now have insurance.

    Her push to "primary" Democrats-and Bernie Sanders- that voted for AHCA and her demand to go back to the drawing board-which was the exact talking point the GOP was using back then-has always made me wonder what her true interests are. But even if she is not a closet Republican, as a liberal this position makes no sense. Particularly as you can always improve on AHCA. I know some argue that the 30 million number may be high but whatever it will be it will be much higher than the initial 5 percent that received social security.

   Anyone who desired universal health care or simply more health care should use AHCA as a starting point rather than demand its demolition with a hope of starting a better bill from scratch at some indeterminate point in the future. History seems to suggest that a window of opportunity to get something done on health care comes about once every 20 years or so. I see no reason to wait till 2030 in the belief there will be a better bill to be passed then.