David Brooks, in his March 19,2012 essay, When the Good Do Bad a meditation on the Robert Bales massacre in Afghanistan, cannot resist the moment’s potential for taking the moral/intellectual high road, as he interprets it. Brooks regularly entertains the notion that he is public moralist and his readers are his pupils. Pupils that need the guiding hand of his superior intellect wedded to a keen moral sensibility. It is larded with pithy observations on the human condition and the inescapable sinfulness of the human person, when you sweep away the moralizing rubble: Mr. Brooks is a Puritan through and through.

I write this just after the publication of some startling and potentially revelatory information regarding Mr. Bales published by the Huffington Post and featured on Democracy Now of March 27, 2012. Here is the link to the Democracy Now video:

http://www.democracynow.org/2012/3/27/pentagon_stays_silent_on_whether_suspect

Mr. Brooks does not allow himself the humility, the luxury that a cultivated silence could bring, in the face of seemingly ‘random’ acts of violence. An observer can sometimes only wait in silence for empirical evidence to manifest itself. The admission of a demonstrable ignorance is the bane of the pundit?

Political Observer