At Huffington Post, Marty Kaplan observes that David Brooks appears, well, a tad bit irony-challenged, if he's capable of writing the following stinging denunciation of the Muslim Brotherhood without ever entertaining the notion that he might well be writing about the leaders of his own beloved GOP:
Members of the Muslim Brotherhood are defined by certain beliefs. They reject pluralism, secular democracy and, to some degree, modernity.... When you elect fanatics... you have empowered people who are going to wind up subverting democracy.... Many have absolutist, apocalyptic mind-sets.Kaplan adds:
Brooks warns that when anti-modern, anti-pluralist, anti-secular, anti-fact candidates are elected, "they are always going to centralize power and undermine the democracy that elevated them." Can he actually say that without thinking of the laws rolling back women's rights that Republican governors and Republican legislators in Wisconsin, Ohio, North Carolina and Texas are railroading without due process in the dead of night? Without recalling the laws preventing young people, poor people and people of color (i.e., leaning Democrat) from voting that are being rammed through by Republican statehouses and Republican chief executives in Maine, Pennsylvania and around the country? I know that the human mind is deft at dealing with hypocrisy -- cognitive dissonance is the polite term for it -- but this is neurologically miraculous.
And Mr. Kaplan is absolutely right.