Fun with David Brooks

What Makes Bill Frist Run?

Another coup for mainstream journalism, here.

David Brooks writes a column outlining how much he likes the "real" Bill Frist, but how he has strayed from his roots.

This part made me laugh out loud.

....These days he seems not so much the leader of the Senate conservatives, but someone who is playing the role. And because he is behaving in ways that don't seem entirely authentic, he is often trying just a bit too hard, striking the notes more forcefully than they need to be struck.

That is what happened during the Terri Schiavo affair. It's not quite fair to say that Frist diagnosed Schiavo from a TV screen, but he did put himself on the wrong side of the autopsy that came out last week. He did betray his medical training, which is the core of his being, to please a key constituency group.

Of course, he DID diagnose her from a TV screen:

"I have looked at the video footage. Based on the footage provided to me, which was part of the facts of the case, she does respond."
Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist
Senate Floor Remarks
March 17, 2005

Which we know definitively was bullshit (most of us knew it was bullshit at that time, but now we have a pathological diagnosis, the medical gold standard):

An exhaustive autopsy found that Terri Schiavo's brain had withered to half the normal size since her collapse in 1990 and that no treatment could have remotely improved her condition, medical examiners said on Wednesday . . . The autopsy also found that the brain deterioration had left her blind.
The New York Times
Schiavo Autopsy Says Brain, Withered, Was Untreatable
June 15, 2005

(via Billmon)

Then I read TBogg, and he had me laughing out loud about this:

Bill Frist: Cheating, two-timing man-slut

David Brooks finds honor in sleeping around on your fiancé:

Bill Frist was his high school's class president. He was a quarterback on the football team and a member of the honor society, and lived amid the upper crust of Nashville society. He dated the head cheerleader, and while he was in med school they were engaged to be married.

But while interning in Boston, he met another woman, spent a dinner and a night with her, and fell in love. Two days before his wedding, he flew back to Nashville and broke off his engagement. "Everyone listened carefully to what I said, all the lame explanations I had that were and were not the truth," Frist later wrote, "and they nodded and dealt with it and I went on my way."

I've always admired that anecdote. It took guts to break off the grand wedding that was in the works - to risk alienating everyone he had grown up with for the sake of the woman he had suddenly come to love. Furthermore here was a Bill Frist who knew his own heart.

.......and makes a man who cheats on his fiancé the Senate Majority Leader.

Bobo's World: Where your wedding is only a dinner and a blow job away from collapsing like a Papier Mâchè submarine.

Not only is Brooks column incredibly lame, it's also recycled from a column he wrote in 2003 for the Weekly Standard, his last MSM outpost. The 2003 piece contains the "Mom motored me around" story, the broken engagement story (if he were a white woman, would the Times have put "Runaway Bride" in the header?), and the same "everyone who knows him loves him" crap.

David Brooks, real (crappy) journalist.