The further sad saga of David Brooks

Did I ever say nice things about Big Pundit David Brooks?  I'm afraid I did.  I don't know what came over me.

Really, occasionally, I really did think he had some worthwhile observations.  I've even heard him say a couple of things the last few months that I at least imagined were kind of insightful.

But it just gets sadder all the time with the conservative Mr. Brooks.  Can anyone explain to me what this means from his Looking Through Keyholes New York Times 04/27/04?

Some people in other places may like to look through keyholes to see women in their underwear. We here in the political class like to look through keyholes to see what happens when a bunch of alpha males (and females) with the jobs we wish we held sit around a table and curse about people not in the room. After two years of Iraq obsession, many of us couldn't tell you what the Dawa Islamic Party stood for if our kids' Sidwell admissions depended upon it, but the frisson we feel hearing the nasty words Colin Powell said behind the back of Douglas Feith! C'est délicieux!

Don't get me wrong. I love living in Washington. I still think it is the least superficial of the interesting American cities, owing to our inability to experience sensual pleasure. But over the past few months it has come to resemble one of those decadent triviality pits, like Paris in the 19th-century French novels.

Washington is "the least superficial of the interesting American cities, owing to our inability to experience sensual pleasure"?  Am I totally clueless?  Or is he alluding to some side effect of Oxycontin?  Some of his columns are weirder than other.  But the "secular trend," as the economists would say, is defintely toward the stranger and stranger.

The column was trying to defend the Bush Administration's Iraq policy.  I think.

Maybe that's the problem.  Defending the increasingly indefensible requires a rapidly increasing amount of fantasy.  Weird fantasy.  Maybe Brooks should chat with Chuckie about his fantasies of soldiers, preachers with rabies and nekkid virgins.