The Breaking Point of David Brooks

We’re still playing media catch up after our return home, so Friday’s “News Hour” is fresh for us, and boy it was refreshing.  If you’re not familiar with this PBS staple, it’s a segment that airs every Friday featuring David Brooks of the New York Times and syndicated columnist Mark Shields, gentlemen who resist the Crossfire-style shouting match and actually discuss.  Their analysis is sometimes insightful, often engaging, and always reasonable.  Shields speaks for the Left and Brooks for the Right, but this week he was voicing his anger at the Bush Administration, and it wasn’t just about the late response to Katrina.

Here’re Brooks own words from his essay “The Bursting Point:”

“Over the past few years, we have seen intelligence failures in the inability to prevent Sept. 11 and find W.M.D.'s in Iraq. We have seen incompetent postwar planning. We have seen the collapse of Enron and corruption scandals on Wall Street. We have seen scandals at our leading magazines and newspapers, steroids in baseball, the horror of Abu Ghraib….

“We're not really at a tipping point as much as a bursting point. People are mad as hell, unwilling to take it anymore.”

I know that I’ve been at the bursting point for months, wondering if and when those who supported the President would explode.  Now that the successor to William Safire has blown his top, I hope that he’s right and many more will follow.