Wednesday, October 8, 2008

David Brooks, Of All People, Agrees With Me

In previous posts (here, here and here), I lamented the choice of Sarah Palin and the blatant anti-intellectualism the choice represented. Today, David Brooks, the conservative commentator, voiced his agreement with that position:
[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. And Buckley famously said he'd rather be ruled by the first 2,000 names in the Boston phone book than by the Harvard faculty. But he didn't think those were the only two options. 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.
Man, I never really thought I could honestly look to David Brooks for political backup. Alas, the world is melting, so who knows what's next?

For those of you interested in seeing the way that politics, religion and other topics of the times used to be discussed on television, I present to you one of the most fascinating locations on the internet:

Mike Wallace

Mike Wallace interviews some of the greatest minds in a most compelling manner. All of these interviews are worth a watch, but the ones with Reinhold Niebuhr and Frank Lloyd Wright are particularly compelling. Whatever happened to nationally televised dialog like this? Charlie Rose and Jim Lehrer, arguably the best we have to offer, simply don't cut it by these standards.

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