David Brooks and Jennifer Rubin

I've been critical of both of them, but recently Brooks has gone farther off the deep end while Rubin has talked sense. I will submit the following as a comment to Ledeen's Brooks piece.

Brooks has abruptly swung from Polyanna smugness to what he thinks is Kierkegaardian despair.

And he still doesn't get it:

But I persist in the belief that government is more fundamentally messed up than ever in my lifetime. Barack Obama campaigned offering a new era of sane government. And I believe he would do it if he had the chance. But he has been so sucked into the system that now he stands by while House Speaker Nancy Pelosi talks about passing health care via “deem and pass”...

Ah yes, the noble well-intentioned leader is undone by his sinister advisors. Poor Kaiser Wilhelm! Poor Chiang Kai-shek! Poor President Obama!

Where does the buck stop? Or don't they talk so simplistically in the intellectual stratosphere that Brooks inhabits?

I have a degree of sympathy for Brooks, but I fear that he has ruined himself and abetted great damage to the country in the process.

Rage and despair each have their attractions under the circumstances, but neither is constructive. IMHO Jennifer Rubin strikes the right note:

I personally am not out on a ledge. (But then I never bought the whole Obama campaign whoop-de-do.) Should this pass, I have infinite faith that the American people will deliver a mortal electoral blow to those politicians who thought they could shred anything to get their way. And then bit by bit — or in one fell swoop — the elected replacements for the shredders will rip out ObamaCare. So there’s no reason to be morose. Elections are great corrective exercises, and one is just around the corner.