And now David Brooks decides that it is time for him to triangulate by making false, flimsy, and flagrantly spurious pro-Trump arguments: Yastreblansky: No More Mister Nice Blog: It takes a thief: "David F. Brooks finally starting to give in to his inner sycophant, as he contemplates Donald Trump's and Michael Cohen's histories with organized crime. Maybe it's a feature-not-a bug!...
...The Brooks hypothesis is that just as it takes a thief to catch a thief, so it takes somebody who's practiced on Fat Tony Salerno to equip a chap to deal with Kim Jong-un, Xi Jinping, and Ayatollah Khamenei, and the Trumpian triumphs of recent weeks demonstrate that. Not that Brooks is advocating the Trump doctrine!
Please don’t take this as an endorsement of the Trump foreign policy. I’d feel a lot better if Trump showed some awareness of the complexity of the systems he’s disrupting, and the possibly cataclysmic unintended consequences. But there is some lizard wisdom here.
It's just the Douthat electric slide: "I'm not saying, I'm just saying."...
Brooks cites Thomas L. Friedman as saying Trump's battle with China is "a fight worth having", but not Friedman's comment that Trump's doing it completely wrong....
The Revolutionary Guards who didn't even try to conceal their glee in the leadup to Trump's [Iran] announcement... and are now congratulating themselves that diplomacy is over (that missile attack on Israel looks like a kind of celebration—"Ding dong, the deal is dead!")...
Apparently it's "elitist" to want everybody to have a good education, or a chance to drink a nice Pinot noir, I suppose because it's asking people to be less like themselves, whether we're talking about our own distressed "white working class" voters or thuggish and fanatical foreign leaders. We should instead attempt to be more like them in dealing with them, thugs when we're talking to North Koreans and insensitive about women and people of color when we're talking to hillbillies. I want to do something with this curious symmetry in Brooks's view of Asian dictators and Appalachian shopkeepers, but it isn't ripe yet.
My own opinion is that it does not take a thief to catch a thief, nor does it take a Trump to catch a Kim. A thief will just steal stuff, and a Trump will just try to figure a way to take a cut from the negotiations (I'm sure he's dreaming of a golf course in the Joseon countryside). The hope that Trump could be qualified to save us just by being such a shitty person is not very well founded.
#shouldread
#acrossthewidemissouri
#betterpresscorps
