David Brooks has a piece in the Picayune which exemplifies the conservative head-up-the-wrong-part of the anatomy view of the world. Time will not allow full treatment from me this morning, but happily Paul Krugman has already deconstructed this mess for us. Please click on the link below, and enjoy.
The Conservative Hot Tub Time Machine
There are two comments I would like to squeeze in, however. First, Brooks says early in his excretion that "America became great ... because its citizens possessed certain vigorous virtues: self-reliance, personal responsibility, industriousness and a passion for freedom."
Just when did this greatness start to arise, about a hundred years after the Founding, when the slave holders were forced by a war to embrace some of this overstated love of freedom, and when the owners of slaves, like Jefferson and other Founders, could no longer produce red-headed, dark-skinned off-spring by forcing themselves on the enslaved young girls who caught their fancy?
Also, Brooks later claims that American education started to fall behind the world standard about 30 years ago. I don't know where he gets his numbers, probably his rear-end where he gets everything else he commits to writing, but if you accept that timely reference, then recognize that it coincides perfectly with the start of the so-called Reagan Revolution and the end of the era of "big government."
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