David Brooks' latest attack on Ted Cruz is a new low for him.
It's not a new low for the New York Times which regularly pays people like Charles Blow, Paul Krugman, Frank Bruni, Ross Douhat, Thomas Friedman and Gail Collins to write columns. The only thing all these people have in common is their mediocrity and complete lack of original ideas and/or style. It's strange to remember when the New York Times was known for William Safire. Now it's known for Easy Listening liberalism. And David Brooks meshes perfectly with this Extra Lite Soy panel that's meant to be read with NPR playing in the background. That includes his latest cynical, cheap attack.
In 1997, Michael Wayne Haley was arrested after stealing a calculator from Walmart. This was a crime that merited a maximum two-year prison term. But prosecutors incorrectly applied a habitual offender law. Neither the judge nor the defense lawyer caught the error and Haley was sentenced to 16 years.
Eventually, the mistake came to light and Haley tried to fix it. Ted Cruz was solicitor general of Texas at the time. Instead of just letting Haley go for time served, Cruz took the case to the Supreme Court to keep Haley in prison for the full 16 years...
The case reveals something interesting about Cruz’s character. Ted Cruz is now running strongly among evangelical voters, especially in Iowa. But in his career and public presentation Cruz is a stranger to most of what would generally be considered the Christian virtues: humility, mercy, compassion and grace. Cruz’s behavior in the Haley case is almost the dictionary definition of pharisaism: an overzealous application of the letter of the law in a way that violates the spirit of the law, as well as fairness and mercy.
It probably won't surprise you that David Brooks ridiculously mischarachterizes the case.
Deciding the guilt or innocence of the prisoner should remain the job of the state trial court whenever possible, and in most cases a grant of relief in federal court should send the case back there for retrial. That was the principle that Ted Cruz asked the Supreme Court to review. Saying "Cruz took the case to the Supreme Court to keep Haley in prison for the full 16 years" implies that he took the case there merely to change the result in this particular case. That implication is false...
After full briefing and argument, the Supreme Court agreed with Cruz's position by a 6-3 vote. Justice O'Connor wrote the opinion. Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer joined it. Does this reveal something interesting about Justices Ginsburg's and Breyer's characters?
It says that David Brooks is a hack who read something some liberal friend posted from Salon or Raw Story and decided to build an article around it without checking the facts. That's not new.
But David Brooks, who is at least in theory Jewish, though there has been talk of him converting to Christianity, is lecturing Ted Cruz about Christianity and accusing him oh 'pharisaism', which if Brooks were at all literate, he would know means accusing him of being an Orthodox Jew... a group that Brooks has praised in the past. But who needs consistency anyway. As solicitor general though, Ted Cruz had to defend technical legal principles over precedent. It's a "pharisaic" point of view, if you like. David Brooks' liberalism however impels him to ignore the actual issues at stake and to focus on the human drama and its potential for virtue signaling.
David Brooks wasn't interested in the Haley case except as a means of showing his moral superiority to Ted Cruz. Brooks is a "deeply spiritual person" because he cares about social justice. But Ted Cruz can't really be a Christian because he cares about the structure of the law.
As plenty of other commentators have pointed out, this shows that Brooks has no clue about Christianity.
The sad truth is that pundits, the secular public, and all too many Christians confuse “nice” with “Christian.” Thus, they judge one’s authentic Christianity by superficial measures such as tone, or define concepts such as justice or mercy through a non-Christian lens. In reality, however, the finest of Christians adopt a wide variety of dispositions, and even the most winsome and gentle find themselves rejected and scorned if they hold firm on questions of life and sexual morality. An authentic Christian simply cannot “nice” his way into elite applause.
But "tone" is the essence of this brand of dishwater liberal. In Brooks' worldview, good people are known as such by the things that they care about. This is their form of spirituality.
And what this really shows is why David Brooks, whatever religion he claims to profess, is a liberal. It's because he doesn't care about the complexities of an issue. He isn't interested in consequences. He only wants to appear virtuous.
And the desire to appear virtuous by supporting nice things, without looking into their consequences, is the essence of the kind of liberalism that led us to this disaster. It's what got people like Brooks to support Obama.
David Brooks accuses Ted Cruz of "pagan brutalism". But really he's accusing him of conservatism.