Writing about Georgie Boy’s $40 million inauguration and his overrated speech, David Count on Brooks to get it exactly backwards. (See Greg Palast’s fabulous <\/P> What about this?<\/FONT><\/B><\/A> And “Because of that “It will be harder for future diplomats to sit on couches flattering dictators, the way we used What about 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.” […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-996","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-main","7":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pbvgEs-g4","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/996","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=996"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/996\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=996"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=996"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=996"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nBrooks noted in his Saturday column, headlined
\nis what you see in America so often — this weird intermingling of high ideals with gross
\nmaterialism, the lofty and the vulgar cheek to cheek.” Anyone who believes in Georgie Boy’s high
\nideals needs a brain tune-up. <\/P>
\n
\nthe wrong conclusion: “The people who detest America take a look at this odd conjunction and
\nassume the materialistic America is the real America; the ideals are a sham. … But of course
\nthey’ve got it exactly backward. It’s the ideals that are real.” <\/P>
\n
\n
\n
\nspeech<\/B><\/STRONG><\/FONT><\/A>,” Brooks wrote, “it will be harder for the U.S.
\ngovernment to do what we did to Latin Americans for so many decades — support strongmen to
\nrule over them because they happened to be our strongmen. …<\/P>
\n
\nto flatter Hafez al-Assad of Syria decade after decade. From now on, the borders established by
\nany peace process will be less important than the character of the regimes in that process.”<\/P>
\n
\nthis?<\/B><\/FONT><\/STRONG><\/A> And
\nOrlando Patterson’s op-ed piece, “The Speech Misheard Round the
\nWorld,”<\/FONT><\/B><\/A> which appeared on the same day and on the same page as Brooks’s
\nrose-tinted nonsense, for the actual meaning of Georgie Boy’s inaugural address.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"