OH, REALLY?

Writing about Georgie Boy's $40 million inauguration and his overrated speech, David Brooks noted in his Saturday column, headlined "Ideals And Reality": "What you saw in Washington that day is what you see in America so often -- this weird intermingling of high ideals with gross materialism, the lofty and the vulgar cheek to cheek." Anyone who believes in Georgie Boy's high ideals needs a brain tune-up.

Count on Brooks to get it exactly backwards. (See Greg Palast's fabulous "Oaf of Office.") As he almost always does, Brooks drew the wrong conclusion: "The people who detest America take a look at this odd conjunction and assume the materialistic America is the real America; the ideals are a sham. ... But of course they've got it exactly backward. It's the ideals that are real."

What about this? And this? And this?

"Because of that speech," Brooks wrote, "it will be harder for the U.S. government to do what we did to Latin Americans for so many decades -- support strongmen to rule over them because they happened to be our strongmen. ...

"It will be harder for future diplomats to sit on couches flattering dictators, the way we used to flatter Hafez al-Assad of Syria decade after decade. From now on, the borders established by any peace process will be less important than the character of the regimes in that process."

What about this? And this? And this? Yes, really.