New Year, Old Brooks

What better way to ring in FFB's new decade than with the first of what I'm sure will be many tenuous-10s columns by David Brooks (to which I would link if this remote locale Mac had the appropriate settings)? The ponderous one works up quite a sweat about how much American attitudes have changed over a half century, falling from our wise, Niebuhrian, Christian realist recognition that all human institutions have limitations to out present state of pee-pantsification over a lone underpants bomber who couldn't bring down a plane but seems to be bringing down our collective sense of national confidence. . . or something.

Poor David Brooks. Reality stares him so squarely in the face, and he so resolutely wets himself and calls it an atmospheric disturbance. Lost on Brooks is that we, as a nation, are not panicking in the face of this incident. I have yet to see any mass call for more intrusive security precautions. Or invasions of Nigeria and/or Yemen, save wrong-way Joe, the Senate fingervane. Oh I'm sure we would have been even MORE resolute back in the early 1950s, you know, back when Truman was so popular for all that buck stopping bravado, and when no one ever fell for McCarthyite madness. Here, in our wimpier age, support for President Obama appears unchanged or even slightly improved. Indeed, the only mass hysteria detectable to the naked eye appears to be the exclusive province of the Republican Party. Not its voters, just its elected officials. And, for risk of being called "partisan," doesn't it seem that their hysteria has been (a) baldly opportunistic and self-interested, and (b) utterly predictable? But why pluck out the mote in your own eye, when you can cast mote aspersions onto the great eye of America. After all, the GOP is "America," isn't it?