The duplicity of David Brooks.

David Brooks is blatantly a fan of McCain, but his defence of McCain's campaign pushes credibility to the limits. First there's his description of McCain and how he wanted to campaign, and where the blame for his inability to run the kind of campaign he wanted lies:

McCain started his general-election campaign in poverty-stricken areas of the South and Midwest. He went through towns where most Republicans fear to tread and said things most wouldn’t say. It didn’t work. The poverty tour got very little coverage on the network news. McCain and his advisers realized the only way they could get TV attention was by talking about the subject that interested reporters most: Barack Obama.

So the first problem was the nasty press ignoring him because of their obsession with Obama. Despite the fact that the press tended to be much more negative towards Obama than McCain.

The next problem, as Brooks sees it, was Obama's:

McCain started with grand ideas about breaking the mold of modern politics. He and Obama would tour the country together doing joint town meetings.

This is a talking point which McCain himself has already punted, the negative campaign had happened because Obama refused to agree to McCain's idea of Town hall meetings. You see, it would all be much more agreeable if Obama simply agreed to every request which McCain makes.

He then tried making exciting promises:

He would make a dramatic promise, like vowing to serve for only one totally nonpolitical term. So far it hasn’t worked.

After his one "totally nonpolitical term" he will be 76. That's not a dramatic promise, that's a recognition of reality. Life expectancy in the US is around 77.8 years, so it's extremely unlikely that the US public would re-elect a man statistically likely to die in office.

Then he offers the final excuse for McCain's latest flip-flop:

McCain and his advisers have been compelled to adjust to the hostile environment around them. They have been compelled, at least in their telling, to abandon the campaign they had hoped to run. Now they are running a much more conventional race, the kind McCain himself used to ridicule.

There's one reality that Brooks is ignoring. Obama has led in almost every poll without going negative. And Brooks' theory that the press are in the bag for Obama is simply not what The Center for Media and Public Affairs at George Mason University found when they examined the facts.

There is no hostile environment surrounding McCain, quite the opposite. And the reason he is going negative and seeking to make this election about Obama - which is simply standard Republican fare at election time - is because the policies he is proposing are box office poison, so he can't possibly run on them. So he seeks to make it about the other guy and "his character."

Brooks attempts to make out that this is something unusual when, in reality, it's the way the Republicans have fought every election I can remember.

Their policies favour themselves and vast corporations, their policies shaft the vast majority of the electorate, so they have to make the election about something other than that.

What makes Brooks' column so distasteful is the way he pretends that he does not know this.

Click title for Brooks' appalling little article.