The world still has its problems, but it no longer seems to be building toward some larger crisis. The atmosphere of fear and conflict has at least temporarily abated. With the change in conditions, the election of 2008 is beginning to feel like a postwar election. American voters are coming out of the shells constructed after Sept. 11th and are looking for a new normalcy. They’re looking for something entirely different.
--snip--
It’s clear that voters are not only exhausted by the war, they are exhausted by the war over the war.
Along with this line of crap, we have to force our eyes past the word "zeitgeist" twice.
David Brooks inhabits a universe where the on-going occupation of Iraq, as well as our losing efforts in Afghanistan, no longer exist. Sadly for this inept cultural commentator, the American people just don't live up to his expectations.(N.B.: The poll was conducted by and the results appear in the same paper as Brooks' column; does he even read his own publication?)
More people cite the Iraq war as the most important issue facing the country than cite any other matter, and though 38 percent say the dispatch of extra troops to Iraq this year is working, a majority continue to say that undertaking the war was a mistake.
As Matthew Yglesias writes in his comment on Brooks' stupid column:
[M]edia elites who control the debate questioning process don't want to talk about the war.
The Nixon White House tried to make Watergate disappear in the summer and fall of 1973, after Nixon fired Erlichmann and Haldeman (or was it Haldeman and Erlichmann?). Apparently, he thought tossing his two closest aides to the wolves would save his Administration. It didn't work out that way for him.
Each day, I think our national political reporting has reached about as far down as it can get. Lucky for my own sense of outrage, there's always David Brooks ready, willing, and able to write something this damn stupid to remind me that there is no bottom to the pit of stupid into which we have plunged.
