Proof that Nobody Pays Attention to David Brooks
On Tuesday, 16 March, David Brooks wrote in his column that the Spanish voters who booted the conservative government out of office last weekend, were just a bunch of weak-willed appeasers. Included in his simplistic screed was this little gem:
If a terrorist group attacked the U.S. three days before an election, does anyone doubt that the American electorate would rally behind the president or at least the most aggressively antiterror party? Does anyone doubt that Americans and Europeans have different moral and political cultures? Yesterday the chief of the European Commission, Romano Prodi, told Italy's La Stampa, "It is clear that using force is not the answer to resolving the conflict with terrorists." Does he really think capitulation or negotiation works better? Can you imagine John Kerry or George Bush saying that?
Besides the specious argument that a government that had failed in its duty to protect the populace would necessarily be rewarded in the polls, this paragraph had a major problem. Prodi didn't exactly say that.
To his credit, Brooks tried to make amends. On Saturday, 20 March, David Brooks appended a correction to his column:
In Tuesday's column I quoted the European Commission's president, Romano Prodi, telling the Italian newspaper La Stampa that force was not the answer to terrorism. I was relying on an Agence France-Presse translation, which was incorrect. Prodi actually said force should not be the only answer to terrorism. He said terrorism would not abate until the Israeli-Palestinian dispute was resolved.
And, today Cathy Young penned a column for the Boston Globe in which she heads toward the fanciful notion that a plurality of Spaniards preferred the social democrats to the conservatives that lied not only about the 11 March bombings but also about links between Iraq and al-Qaeda. She even cites a libertarian, writing in the same libertarian magazine that employs her, who dispels the notion that the spanish voters were just appeasers.
But she finds that the oft-trod path of sliming Europeans was just too compelling. then she drops the ball—and cites, you guessed it, the original quote that Brooks did.
Poor David Brooks! Even the columnists in the Boston Globe, which is owned by the New York Times, can't be bothered to read his columns!
Labels: Boston Globe, Cathy Young, David Brooks
