From his excellent blog I just discovered: As long as I’m dissing right-of-center Times columnists (affable and noncrazy though the two of them are), consider a sentence from today’s David Brooks offering.
Brooks is ruminating complacently about Donald Trump, whom he places in “the realm of Upper Blowhardia.” Trump, he writes, is one of those “supremely accomplished blowhards” who “offend some but also arouse intense loyalty in others” by saying “obnoxious things that others are only permitted to think.”
Then this:
Thus, there has always been a fan base for the abrasive rich man. There has always been a market for books by people like George Steinbrenner, Ross Perot, Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh, Bobby Knight, Howard Stern and George Soros.
George Soros? The guy whose imaginative nurturing of civil-society institutions in central and eastern Europe helped bring down the Soviet Communist empire? Who has probably done more than any other private citizen anywhere to bring about peaceful democratic change everywhere? Whose books, which sell modestly, are serious treatments of economics, philosophy, and world politics? Who has devoted some eight billion dollars to the advancement of human rights, education, public health, and freedom of expression, here and abroad?
I’m quite sure that Brooks knows Soros doesn’t belong on his list. He just threw in Soros’s name because he needed a liberal—for political “balance,” to protect his right flank. It’s a little like when Bush threw in North Korea to keep the Axis of Evil from being exclusively Muslim. Only worse, because North Korea really is evil, whereas Soros has nothing in common with that crowd of bullies and charlatans.
Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/hendrikhertzberg#ixzz1MGmUElga
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