David Brooks gets evicerated

New York Times Death Spiral Watch (Yet Another David Brooks Edition)

Michael Berube speaks to conservatives:

[Y]ou could take poor flailing David Brooks as a model. One day after this humble blog suggested that high-end conservative pundits will slurp down any old slop they’re fed by the party, Brooks was slopping out this review of Sarah Palin’s debate performance:

this debate was about Sarah Palin. She held up her end of an energetic debate that gave voters a direct look at two competing philosophies. She established debating parity with Joe Biden. And in a country that is furious with Washington, she presented herself as a radical alternative. By the end of the debate, most Republicans were not crouching behind the couch, but standing on it. The race has not been transformed, but few could have expected as vibrant and tactically clever a performance as the one Sarah Palin turned in Thursday night...

Only a week later, having realized to his horror that writing columns like this will soon deprive him of dinner-party conversation with sane people, Brooks has decided to call Palin a “fatal cancer to the Republican party.” Now that’s the way to throw someone under the couch, folks—if you want to maintain some sense of self-respect as a Serious Person.

Here is Brooks:

David Brooks: [Sarah Palin] represents a fatal cancer to the Republican party. When I first started in journalism, I worked at the National Review for Bill Buckley.... He thought it was important to have people on the conservative side who celebrated ideas, who celebrated learning. And his whole life was based on that, and that was also true for a lot of the other conservatives in the Reagan era. Reagan had an immense faith in the power of ideas. But there has been a counter, more populist tradition, which is not only to scorn liberal ideas but to scorn ideas entirely. And I'm afraid that Sarah Palin has those prejudices. I think President Bush has those prejudices...

Every time the New YorK Times publishes a column by David Brooks, a fairy has its wings torn off by a predator and dies of blood loss.