Tag: David Brooks

NPR's Audie Cornish speaks with David Brooks of The New York Times and E.J. He laid out a very good case on obstruction but felt he couldn't charge him because of the Justice Department rule that says you can't indict a president. CORNISH: Let me let David jump in here because you looked at this existentially, that there are a broadly kind of three-pronged threat, looking at Russia being one of them, Julian Assange and WikiLeaks another and then the White House itself, Donald Trump. He's always trying to interfere with investigations, do things that are against the rules. And so that undermines our sort of governmental infrastructure. The Russians are undermining our informational infrastructure by introducing falsehoods into the public debate. CORNISH: I want to go back to the attorney general's press conference. BROOKS: Well, I'd given him faith that he was being accurate in what was in the report. There have been some more moves among Senate Republicans. DIONNE: Well, yeah, that's two, right, exactly - maybe David, too.

The Kavanaugh hearings, he wrote on Friday, constituted an “American nadir.” You often hear such phrases from people who think the biggest problem with the Kavanaugh battle is that the participants weren’t more courteous and open-minded. Implying, as Brooks, Flake, and Collins do, that America’s real problem is a lack of civility rather than a lack of justice requires assuming a moral equivalence between Brett Kavanaugh’s supporters and Christine Blasey Ford’s. If tribal implies unthinking or inherited group loyalty, then Democrats and Republicans were actually more tribal in the mid-20th century. The parties are so bitterly polarized not because they’ve become more tribal but because they’ve become more ideological. The “tribalization” of American politics, Brooks argues, “leads to an epidemic of bigotry. There is no equivalence between the “bigotry” faced by preppy lacrosse players and that faced by black males. Similarly, there is no equivalence between the “bigotry” faced by men accused of sexual assault and the “bigotry” faced by women who suffer it. In April 1963, seven white Alabama ministers and one rabbi wrote a letter to Martin Luther King Jr.. The problem that the Kavanaugh struggle laid bare is not “unvarnished tribalism.” The problem is that women who allege abuse by men still often face male-dominated institutions that do not thoroughly and honestly investigate their claims. Brooks, Collins, and Flake may decry the “tension” this exposes.