Stupid Pet Tricks

Shorter David Brooks, "Dogs, Cats, and Leadership", March 11 2016:

One of the things you can learn from Jeffrey Goldberg's new Atlantic essay on the Obama foreign policy is that politicians are like animals, for instance Obama is a cool, disdainful cat, and Reagan was a bouncy charge-ahead dog. This is also relevant to our current situation, as Trump and Sanders are very naughty doggies, I'm afraid.

Goldberg does not say that (I wish I could add, "needless to say", but I can't quite do that), and his piece is extremely remarkable in its fair and even eloquent exposition of how Obama thinks on foreign policy issues even as Goldberg presumably continues to disagree with him. I was writing about it myself last night before I was rudely interrupted by those Republicans, and I should get my own piece out some time before midnight, but I didn't want to let Brooks go entirely.

Although when a man is reduced to lifting his uncredited ideas from Maureen Dowd, you really don't need to give him much time.