In an especially vile and dishonest column in today's NY Times, David Brooks once again presents a lie as an unchallenged fact - and then proceeds to base his entire argument on its unassailability. In this case, instead of mentioning that an overwhelming majority of Americans are in favor of a public option, he takes the opposite view and says:
The public has soured on Obama’s policy proposals. Voters often have only a fuzzy sense of what each individual proposal actually does, but more and more have a growing conviction that if the president is proposing it, it must involve big spending, big government and a fundamental departure from the traditional American approach.
Driven by this general anxiety, and by specific concerns, public opposition to health care reform is now steady and stable. Independents once solidly supported reform. Now they have swung against it. As the veteran pollster Bill McInturff has pointed out, public attitudes toward Obamacare exactly match public attitudes toward Clintoncare when that reform effort collapsed in 1994.
Ugh. Leave it to David Brooks to twist the truth into the biggest lie of our time.
People are not losing faith in Obama because he's pushing for true healthcare reform. We're losing faith in him because he's negotiating away reform before it even gets written into a bill. There is no groundswell against spending. That is an astroturf public relations stunt cooked up by lobbyists. We voted for change and now it looks like we are simply going to get double-crossed again, that's why Obama's numbers are falling. Brooks, as usual, has it exactly backwards. Count on David Brooks to always come up with the cleverest sounding spin that justifies the corporate agenda. That is his job and he seems to relish it. One useful thing you can count on when you read a David Brooks column: the truth can be found 180 degrees opposite of whatever he says. And to think: president-elect Obama was nice enough to meet with this snake before he took office. Ugh. It just goes to show, there's no point in wasting your time being nice to snakes.
This particular low-down snake needs to have his head lopped off with a shovel.
Here's the rest of the column, if you can stomach it.