A pretty stunning indictment coming from David Brooks.
Brooks, if you don’t know, has been a conservative commentator for… geeze… decades?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Brooks_(commentator)
I used to really enjoy watching him on the PBS Newshour when they would partner him with the late Mark Shields (now with Jonathan Capehart).
From Abraham Lincoln to Franklin D. Roosevelt to Ronald Reagan and beyond, Americans fought for freedom and human dignity and against tyranny; we promoted democracy, funded the Marshall Plan, and saved millions of people across Africa from HIV and AIDS. When we caused harm—Vietnam, Iraq—it was because of our overconfidence and naivete, not evil intentions.
Wow. This motherfucker thinks Reagan was actually good on the AIDS issue‽ No wonder he didn’t “see this coming;” he’s a genuine moron!
Reagan wasn’t good on HIV-AIDS.
George H. W. Bush wasn’t either.
But George W. Bush was.PEPFAR was Baby Bush’s baby.
I don’t think the passage you quoted was intended to say that Reagan was good on HIV-AIDS, but rather that America ended up being good on HIV-AIDS.
Also, blaming Iraq on naivete? How actually naive do you have to be to believe that? Good lord…
There were two kinds of people in our movement back then, the conservatives and the reactionaries.
No Mr. Brooks, you were all reactionaries. Just because MAGA doesn’t go around quoting Edmund Berk doesn’t mean that they don’t understand him, perhaps better than you. What did Burke advocate for if not for the French Revolutionaries to be brought low and for the kings to be restored?
You’re heroes resent extending political power to the bourgeoisie, so please stop talking about what conservatives thinkers want to do for the “working people”. Fuck off.
If I recall correctly, Burke expected the French Revolution to eat itself and turn tyrannical … which, y’know, it did. He was right about that.
A stunning piece of analysis, all the more so coming from a conservative. A nice reminder that not every one on the conservative side is a ruthless moron.
He caused this. He cheered dick cheney and the extreme presidential powers theory. He cheered the conservative justices that broke the constitution. This is his fault.
This guy starts out the article claiming that “Ronald Reagan… saved millions of people across Africa from HIV and AIDS.” Are you sure he’s not a moron, because he looks like one to me!
My favorite quote from this:
"But conservative intellectuals didn’t take this seriously enough. In large part, I think this was because we looked down on the Dartmouth Review mafia, whose members had included Laura Ingraham and Dinesh D’Souza. Their intellectual standards were so obviously third-rate. I don’t know how to put this politely, but they just seemed creepy—nakedly ambitious in a way that I thought would destroy them in the end.
Instead, history has smiled on them. A prominent publisher of right-wing authors once told me that the way to sell conservative books is not to write a good book—it’s to write a book that will offend the left, thereby causing the reactionaries to rally to your side and buy it. That led to books with titles such as The Big Lie: Exposing the Nazi Roots of the American Left, and to Ann Coulter’s entire career. Owning the libs became a lucrative strategy."
