New York Times columnist David Brooks hits the target spectacularly well:

The members of the [Duke] lacrosse team were male, mostly white and mostly members of the suburban bourgeois middle class (39 of 54 recent graduates went on to careers in finance). For many on the tenured left, bashing people like that is all that's left of their once-great activism.

Comments

[cactus]

I stopped reading Brooks since his "For Iraqis to Win, the US must lose" piece, but every so often in passing I hear something about Brooks, and I get the feeling that lately, perhaps since Katrina, Brooks has started to sour on GW (http://www.nytimes.com/glogin?URI=http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/04/opinion/04brooks.html&OQ=_rQ3D1&OP=9fc4f42Q2F7GQ23Q2F7IOQ5BpQ25OOiD7DQ7BQ7BU7Q7BQ2B7Q7BZ7OqQ5DoQ5DOo7Q7BZQ2FQ25OOXpHPijy.)

It used to be that Brooks felt criticizing GW's policies, especially the big ones such as the war, amounted to "playing culture war" (http://powerlineblog.com/archives/001689.php). There was a lot of mileage to be gotten out of that. But if Brooks himself is not happy with the president any more, and painting liberals as supporters of GW and the Republican congress is too much of a stretch even for guys like Brooks, then something else must be the dividing line between the forces of good and the liberals. Thus we are now told that liberals are not spending their time criticizing GW and the Republican congress (there aren't any liberals out there criticizing how the war is going, or that median and real incomes are falling, or about pollution, or about any other traditional liberal issues) but rather using the last remaining gasps "of their once-great activism" attacking the Duke Lacrosse team only because most of its members are "male, mostly white and mostly members of the suburban bourgeois middle class."

But what happens if one day Brooks decides for whatever reason that some members of the Duke Lacrosse are guilty? What will he tell us the liberals are paying attention to then?