Political Cynic comments.

Some selections from Mr. Brooks long apologetic for the Nazi Front Man Zelensky, in an almost breathless, or better yet a wan pastiche of historical style:

The cameras mostly focused on Volodymyr Zelensky during his address to Congress on Wednesday night, but I focused my attention as much as I could on the audience in the room. There was fervor, admiration, yelling and whooping. In a divided nation, we don’t often get to see the Congress rise up, virtually as one, with ovations, applause, many in blue dresses and yellow ties.

Sure, there were dissenters in the room, but they were not what mattered. Words surged into my consciousness that I haven’t considered for a while — compatriots, comrades, co-believers in a common creed.

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Zelensky and his fellow Ukrainians have reminded Americans of the values and causes we used to admire in ourselves — the ardent hunger for freedom, the deep-rooted respect for equality and human dignity, the willingness to fight against brutal authoritarians who would crush the human face under the heel of their muddy boots.

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Zelensky was not subtle about making this point. He said that what Ukraine is fighting for today has echoes in what so many Americans fought for over centuries. I thought of John Adams, Frederick Douglass, Theodore Roosevelt, George Marshall, Fannie Lou Hamer, the many unsung heroes of the Cold War.

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This liberal ideal has been tarnished over the last six decades. Sometimes America has opposed authoritarianism with rash imprudence — the Bay of Pigs, Vietnam, Iraq.

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American policy has oscillated between a hubristic interventionism and a callous non-interventionism. “We overdo our foreign crusades, and then we overdo our retrenchments, never pausing in between, where an ordinary country would try to reach a fine balance,”

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Finding the balance between passionate ideals and mundane practicalities has been a persistent American problem. The movie “Lincoln” with Daniel Day-Lewis was about that. Lincoln is zigging and zagging through the swamps of reality, trying to keep his eye on true north, while some tell him he’s going too fast and others scream he’s going too slow.

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For his part, Biden doesn’t fit the romantic “West Wing” fantasy that many progressives have in their heads.

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The military struggle in Ukraine might turn grim in the coming months, but both men are partly responsible for a historic shift in the global struggle against brutality and authoritarianism.

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I’ll skip to the last two paragraphs of Mr. Brooks’ long moralizing apologetic for Zelensky:

On his first foreign trip since the war began, Zelensky came to America. It’s a reminder that for all the talk of American decline, the world still needs American leadership. It’s a reminder that the liberal alliance is still strong. It’s a reminder that while liberal democracies blunder, they have the capacity to learn and adapt.

Finally, Zelensky reminded us that while the authoritarians of the world have shown they can amass power, there is something vital they lack: a vision of a society that preserves human dignity, which inspires people to fight and binds people to one another.

Like so many of his fellow Neo-Conservatives, Mr. Brooks has no military experience, except as an apologist for American National Security State. What Reader can forget Mr. Brook’s ‘The Collapse of the Dream Palaces’ Iraq War Propaganda with it’s hero ‘20-year-old, Joey Tabula-Rasa’ ? This was War Propaganda at it’s most dull-witted, and Mr. Brooks’ ticket to the ‘Big Time’!

Or his most recent war mongering essay of July 15, 2021 under the title: ‘The American Identity Crisis’ The final paragraph of this essay Brooks almost bares his fangs, against what used to be named fellow travelers, like Trump, and the unnamed ‘Left’!

If we’re going to fight Trumpian authoritarianism at home, we have to fight the more venomous brands of authoritarianism that thrive around the world. That means staying on the field.

Political Observer