Very good. It's bad out there for any nuance. Watch John McCain get a pass on offering his wife for a topless beauty contest In SD to 50000 bikers. How would that be covered if it were Obama?

So much of this is mind numbing ... you put some words to it thanks

Obama seems to be taking a break from the campaign until this week. Also, it seems he is doing minimal advertising during the olympics. A very risky strategy. If you look at First Read and other such sites, the McCain advertising verbage is appearing and appearing more frequently.

Also, Obama's press handlers are appearing to be arrogant to people like Brooks and those who might have less adoration than the campaign might like. Again a risky strategy. That alienates a press that is conditioned to dismiss McCain gaffees.

Very worrisome indeed.

Remember David Brooks is the one who got away with calling Democrats "latte sipping liberals." He is a smuck, from the word go.

How that guy on his multi-million dollar salary has the audacity to say anything is beyond me. However, it will catch on in America, and John McCain is probably destined to become our next pseudo hero.

Read Glen Greenwald's latest book, "Great American Hypocrites." I think Glen nailed it. Until we wake up to what tactics these slime balls use and artfully outdo them, we are doomed.

The rich are letting the working class hang themselves. And you know Brooks and his erk are having a good laugh over brandy and Cuban cigars about this.

I read the entire column looking for something with something substantial to say, but it's just the same horse-race reporting without any real substance. Come on, Joan, what do you think you're doing?

Joan Walsh: "I've certainly criticized Obama for a few of the things McCain is trying to ding him on, particularly his supporters' rhetoric (which he occasionally seems to mirror) about his superiority and inevitability."

Okay, let's call out Joan Walsh for this total garbage. First Walsh says she "dinged" Obama. What, Walsh, are you a shopping cart in a Trader Joe's parking lot?

Then Walsh admits that the things she dinged him for weren't things that HE did, but that SOME of his UNNAMED supporters did. I dispute that anybody of any consequence has ever claimed Obama was "inevitable"...and wasn't that what people used to criticize Clinton's campaign for?

Walsh attempts to link it to Obama by saying he SEEMED to MIRROR their rhetoric.

My god, could Walsh's statement be any more tissue-paper thin?

Sorry, but this writing style and rhetorical approach is inert, plastic, empty. Come on, Walsh, get fired up and do some real writing about something that matters!

Did you hear that the FBI's anthrax case is totally suspicious?

Did you hear that the White House allegedly forged a key document linking Saddam Hussein to 9/11?

Did you even read a transcript of Obama's excellent and ambitious energy-policy speech given yesterday in Lansing, Michigan?

I saw the same NY Times op-ed piece, and had the same reaction.

I kept asking myself, is he really saying that the up-and-coming generation, which sounds like he's talking about 20-somethings but trying to refer to Obama (he's 47) at the same time, is a bunch of amoral mercenaries?

It sure sounded like it. It was a Op-Ed riff on a previous article in the [journalistic part of the] NY Times, dated July 30. (The Wall Street Journal played greek chorus to this article, with its own piece that implied cronyism or (at least) shoddy entrance criteria at the U of Chicago's law school faculty.)

Having studied at the U of C, even for a couple of courses, I will give them the benefit of a doubt. If they thought that someone was good-to-have-around, I expect they had a good reason. I'd bet it was merit, or promise.

People are having a hard time connecting to the guy seems to be code language. It feels a bit oily, as if to give a polite excuse to the people who don't want to vote for him for other -- more nefarious -- reasons.

...bored pundits, even some, like Brooks, who were friendly to Obama in earlier days.

You're being a bit naive here, Joan. David Brooks is and always will be a Republican hack. He's like one of those "independent" voters who have never voted for a Democrat in their lives. David Brooks was only "friendly" towards Obama in earlier days because, in earlier days, it looked like Hillary Clinton was going to be the nominee. That way, he'd get to support McCain in the general, yet whine the whole time that he'd have supported the Democrat this time if only. I'll bet you even thought Ann Coulter, James Dobson, et al., wouldn't end up supporting McCain, just because they said they'd never support McCain. Perhaps you'd like to buy this bridge to Brooklyn...

Honestly, did you really think that the conservative noisemakers who claimed to like Obama wouldn't end up biting the bullet and following the GOP Official Diktat when push came to shove?

To answer David Brooks's question, the reason Obama is not winning by a landslide is race. When Brooks says multiple times in today's column that O. is "in the law school but not of it," "in the Senate but not of it," etc. he is being as racist as less sophisticated people who say that O. is "too thin to be president" (wink, wink) or "his ears are too big for him to be president." How the hell does Brooks think he can get away with this? This is a new low for him. I guess when Brooks calls O. a "sojourner" (subtle echoes of Sojourner Truth??) he means that all those African slaves were guests of the American government in the same sense that my wife's uncle, on a bomber shot down over Germany and put in a POW camp for a couple of years, told me he was a guest of the German government.

...: I have a soft spot for anyone an authoritarian defender of the Current Order would call a "rootless cosmopolitan".