On David Brooks

Over at InstaPundit, Glenn Reynolds makes a shrewd observation about David Brooks that seems to me worth rescuing from the stream of links. Glenn writes:

WHEN WOMEN COMPLAIN ABOUT THE DISAPPEARANCE OF CHIVALRY, I’m prone to point out that chivalry was a system, one that imposed obligations of behavior on women and girls as well as on men. Likewise, when David Brooks complains that Edward Snowden is an unmediated man, I must note that in the civil society Brooks invokes, Presidents and other leaders were also mediated; they were not merely checked by Congress, courts, etc., but they were also checked by themselves, and a sense of what was proper that went beyond “how much can I get away with now?” Obama, too, is unmediated in that sense. That Brooks couldn’t see beyond [Obama’s] sharply-creased pants to notice that when it was apparent to keen observers even before the 2008 election is not to his credit. If the system of civil society has failed, it is in no small part because its guardians — notably including Brooks — have also failed.

Brooks’s New York Times op-ed column on Snowden is here. Brook’s infatuation with Obama, to which Glenn alludes with respect to Brook’s admiration of Obama’s “sharply-creased pants,” is memorialized in Gabriel Sherman’s 2009 New Republic article.

UPDATE: Ann Althouse responds to Glenn here.

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