Ruh roh... looks like Driftie's favorite Republican turd polisher David f-ing Brooks hasn't been kissing Rush Limbaugh's boots well enough to pass the wingnut purity test. Tsk...tsk. The panel on Fox News Watch questions whether the New York Times op-ed columnist is even a conservative while discussing the paper's "lack of balance". Rather ironic given that this is coming from anyone at ClusterFox in the first place, and Scooter Libby's buddy Judith Miller who helped Dick Cheney sell the Iraq invasion on the front page of the New York Times is one of the panelists. Wow.
Welcome to David Frum's world Mr. Brooks.
DougJ at Baloon Juice made a good point about the little dance that "respectable conservatives" are playing with the rabid right wing of the party.
In another good piece on the state of journamalism, Marc Ambinder proposes something that won’t work:
Rather than end my disquisition on a complaint or a tale of misery, I want to provide a constructive bit of advice as to how we can begin to revivify the honor to which we used to hold truth-tellers. Consider the narrow point that conservative criticism of President Obama is unusually and often bafflingly, even embarrassingly facile. There are plenty of conservatives who recognize this. I can name six: Ross Douthat. Matt Lewis. David Frum. David Brooks. Conor Friedersdorf. Liz Mair. There are many more. But they have no incentive to police their own side. The moment they speak out, they’re branded as apostates, and the conservative movement narrows even further. An impoverished opposition is bad for democracy. I subscribe to the Brendan Nyhan/Robert Frank notion that social shaming may well be a valid way for fact-checkers to convince more than a handful of people that the other side is simply wrong. Frum has done a serviceable job in calling out his fellow conservatives, but he does not possess the power or the infrastructure to shame people who cross a line. As Nyhan proposes, when someone like Frank Gaffney, who still gets invited to major events by reputable people, implies that President Obama a Muslim, he should be shamed into hiding by his fellow conservatives. (Shaming by liberals, or mere corrections, won’t work, and will often promote the myth).
It’s a silly suggestion, people like have Frank Gaffney have no sense of shame and neither do their fellow travelers at the Weekly Standard and National Review. I’m not even sure that Douthat et al. do.
The current system seems like a pretty comfy set-up for conservatives. The crazies can make money off their radio shows and Regenery books and wingnut welfare. The “respectable conservatives” can be hailed as VSPs for their occasional mild, mealy-mouthed criticism of the crazies.
Why change it over a small thing like shame?
The one thing Doug failed to note is that whether they're "respectable" or not, they're all playing the same game and all supporting the same bankrupt conservative ideology. The "respectable" ones aren't any better than their wingnut brethren in that regard.
