Half-Wit Pundits

When you carry water for the president, you can look incredibly foolish. I wonder if David Brooks will be able to salvage any credibility as an independent thinker (let alone the intellectual he once fancied himself to be). From Meet the Press, Brooks notes that even now, at this late date, Bush's confidence in his imperial powers is undiminished:

And the second thing which impressed me about that meeting, his faith in his own power, the power of the presidency to change the world, he has not budged on that. And so you might think that’s strong leadership, you might think he’s deranged. But, but his basic attitude, I think, has not changed....

I would still think he thinks the fundamentals are, are true, that in the long run he’ll be proved right, and that’s kind of remarkable.

Rare is the American--half-wit pundits included!--who do not admit that Bush has lied and likely broken laws in order to protect his power. And seven years in, he doesn't see anything wrong with that. But when Brooks is questioned about Russ Feingold's proposal to censure the president (which is to say, exercise the Congress's Constitutional right to contain the executive), Brooks responds:

I think a big tactical mistake from a Democratic perspective. There are 30 Republican senators who are desperate to get away from President Bush. They’ve been pushed back toward President Bush by, one, Harry Reid making this more partisan, and a censure resolution would make it hyper- partisan. So I think it would be huge for the whole political landscape if those Republicans drifted away from Bush. But it’s not going to happen if there’s censure resolutions, if it’s a partisan debate.

Hoy. Brooks blames the Democrats for partisanship here and believes it's their duty to back down in order to preserve some kind of comity, despite having just acknowledged that the president is disconnected with reality and may be deranged. Yet any sense of irony eludes him--as always.