David Brooks on Donald Trump

"Donald Trump is epically unprepared to be president. He has no realistic policies, no advisers, no capacity to learn. His vast narcissism makes him a closed fortress. He doesn’t know what he doesn’t know and he’s uninterested in finding out. He insults the office Abraham Lincoln once occupied by running for it with less preparation than most of us would undertake to buy a sofa.

Trump is perhaps the most dishonest person to run for high office in our lifetimes [I would disagree here--Hillary is that]. All politicians stretch the truth, but Trump has a steady obliviousness to accuracy." David Brooks

David Brooks--a conservative who was dead wrong about Obama

"Two personalities inhabit New York Times columnist David Brooks, who, like Christopher Buckley, is a friend. One personality is that of the idealist. On Inauguration Day, the idealist in Brooks claimed that Barack Obama was “a pragmatist, an empiricist” who intended “to realize the endof- ideology politics.” The other personality inhabiting Brooks is that of the realist. It takes a lot to rouse the realist. Trillions of dollars, in fact.

“There is evidence,„ Brooks wrote in early March [2009] about Obama’s $3.6 trillion budget, “of a party swept up in its own revolutionary fervor. . . . We end up with deficits that are $1 trillion a year and stretch as far as the eye can see. . . . Federal spending as a share of GDP is zooming from its modern norm of 20 percent to an unacknowledged level somewhere far beyond.

“Those of us who consider ourselves moderates—moderate-conservative, in my case—are forced to confront the reality that Barack Obama is not who we thought he was.”

A couple of implications are worth noting. The first is that a deep, recurring pattern of American life has asserted itself yet again: the cluelessness of the elite.

[Christopher] Buckley, [David] Gergen, and Brooks all attended expensive private universities, then spent their careers moving among the wealthy and powerful who inhabit the seaboard corridor running from Washington to Boston. If any of the three strolled uninvited into a cocktail party in Georgetown, Cambridge, or New Haven, the hostess would emit yelps of delight. Yet all three originally got Obama wrong.

Contrast Buckley, Gergen, and Brooks with, let us say, Rush Limbaugh, whose appearance at any chic cocktail party would cause the hostess to faint dead away, or with Thomas Sowell, who occupies probably the most unfashionable position in the country, that of a black conservative.

Limbaugh and Sowell both got Obama right from the very get-go. “Just what evidence do you have,” Sowell replied when I asked, shortly before the election, whether he considered Obama a centrist, “that he’s anything but a hard-left ideologue?” "

Hey, Big Spender | Hoover Institution

David Brooks is not a bold thinker

What passes for criticism in a NYT Op-Ed column left me speechless. David Brooks actually writes that after pulling off amazing things in the first 16 months, Obama's become bogged down. The oil spill is a turning point. Huh? No Mr. Brooks, Obama cooked his goose by attempting to "fundamentally transform the country." His campaign promise.

• The health care bill was agonizing, and he did that first instead of addressing the jobs problem.
• It barely squeaked through with no one knowing what was in it, and even with all the MSM like NYT, WaPo and WSJ rooting for it, and his deadly monotonous speeches, it has turned out to be a bust with 70% of American voters not wanting it.
• He dawdled and crept along on the Afghanistan decision last summer, and God only knows how much that set a resolution back. I think he's addressed the war maybe three times in 16 months.
• His national security, anti-terrorism plan has become a joke because all he knows how to do is rename the problem so that the words, Muslim, Islam, jihad and terrorist don't appear in any media reports.
• He criticizes the Arizona SB1070 without ever having read the bill--a more serious rerun of the
•  Gates/police problem last summer where he called out the police without ever learning the facts.
• The ARRA has done zip, nada, zilch in restoring the economy--we had loads of evidence from FDR in the 1930s that this government take over doesn't work, but he did it anyway.

Just where is the "bold movement" of which you wrote, Mr. Brooks?

"For the past 16 months he has been on nearly permanent offense, instigating action with the stimulus bill, Afghan policy, health care reform and the nearly complete financial reform. Whether you approve or not, this has been an era of bold movement.

But now the troops are exhausted, the country is anxious, the money is spent and the Democratic majorities are teetering. The remaining pieces of legislation, on immigration and energy, are going nowhere. (The decision to do health care before energy is now looking extremely unfortunate.) Meanwhile, the biggest problems are intractable. There’s no sign we will be successful in preventing a nuclear Iran. Especially after Monday’s events, there’s no chance of creating a breakthrough in the Arab-Israeli dispute. Unemployment will not be coming down soon. The long-term fiscal crisis won’t be addressed soon either."

Op-Ed Columnist - The Oil Plume - NYTimes.com