David Brooks Pulls Up the Plank Behind Him

The Rude Pundit quotes David Brooks’s scribbling on Markos Moulitsas Zuniga from Friday: “In just a few short years he has achieved a level of self-importance it took those in the pre-blog political class decades to acquire.”

Well, I had a horrifying realization the other day when I saw that Brooks is just a couple months older than I am. According to Wikipedia, he was born in August, 1961, so — despite evidence that he’s an old fuddy-duddy –he’s just about to turn 45.

He joined the Weekly Standard in 1995 at its founding, when he would have been 34. That’s the same age Kos is now. At that point, Brooks had already been an op-ed editor at the Wall Street Journal, where he’d worked for nine years (since 1986). That means he was 25 when his “first post at the Journal was as editor of the book review section”.

So somehow David Brooks, by the time he was Kos’s age, acquired the innate knowledge of the American political landscape that gave him the perspicacity to edit the opinion pages of one of the nation’s most influential papers then one of the leading magazines of conservative political opinion. But Kos — for some undefinable reason — cannot.