The redemption of [Chris] Buckley, Gergen and Brooks

Our liberal friends who have consistently delighted in throwing media pundits generally considered “conservative” in our faces as Obama supporters, have just lost their mojo….

Peter Robinson, self-professed friends of both Buckley and Brooks, makes sure to draw attention to the johnny-come-lately awakening of the three journalists to Obama’s not-so-centrist status today in his Forbes, article, “Neither Moderate Nor Centrist”..

A humorist–and, I should disclose, an old friend–Christopher Buckley exercised his acute comic sense during the presidential campaign, judging John McCain so thoroughly risible that the nation could hardly do worse by electing Barack Obama. Now Buckley has developed a sense of the tragic. In electing Obama, he admits, we may indeed have done worse–a lot worse.

“The strange thing,” Buckley wrote last week after listening to Obama address Congress, “is that one feels almost unpatriotic, entertaining negative thoughts about Mr. Obama’s grand plan. … One thing is certain, however: Government is getting bigger and will stay bigger. Just remember … that a government that is big enough to give you everything you want is also big enough to take it all away.”

“Just remember”? Coming from someone who just remembered, the exhortation might strike a lot of people as rich. But never mind.

Read the not-my-dad Buckley response in Forbes where he “cops” to being entirely wrong about Obama, but would still vote for him again, saying:

Maybe I’m obtuse. Or maybe I just haven’t yet entirely given up on the old audacity of hope.

Meanwhile, my fellow elitist David Brooks has issued a clarion call to moderates of all persuasion to rally to prevent Obama from ruining what’s left of the U.S. economy. Let us march!

Okay… pride or obtuse… At least he’s on the “march” to prevent Obama from ruining what’s left of the economy. I think that’s all the mea culpa we’ll get from the guy.

Now a commentator for CNN, David Gergen served in a number of administrations, first working in the White House all the way back in the 1970s. To the extent that he possesses any coherent ideological outlook–a fine question to ask of someone who took jobs from both Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton–Gergen seems to share Alexander Hamilton’s view that the federal government requires, as Hamilton expressed it, “energy in the executive.”

During the campaign, Gergen praised Obama as a man of action. Now Gergen argues that Obama is displaying a little too much action.

“We are in the midst of a global crisis … that demands intense focus and daily leadership by the president …,” Gergen wrote this past week. “But … [Obama’s] … ambition for reforms in other areas do not allow him to give the economy his full attention.” The financial industry is reeling, Gergen asserted, “because there is still no clearcut set of policies about how the government will rescue banks.” And “it is stunning that [Treasury] Secretary Tim Geithner does not yet have a deputy secretary or any undersecretaries named, much less on the job.”

Energy in the executive is one matter. Zealotry in the executive is another.

Two personalities inhabit New York Times columnist David Brooks, who, like Christopher Buckley, is a friend. One personality is that of the idealist. On Inauguration Day, the idealist in Brooks claimed that Barack Obama was “a pragmatist, an empiricist” who intended “to realize the end-of-ideology politics. …” The other personality inhabiting Brooks is that of the realist. It takes a lot to rouse the realist. Trillions of dollars, in fact.

“There is evidence,” Brooks wrote last week about Obama’s $3.6 trillion budget, “of a party swept up in its own revolutionary fervor. … We end up with deficits that are $1 trillion a year and stretch as far as the eye can see. … [F]ederal spending as a share of GDP is zooming from its modern norm of 20% to an unacknowledged level somewhere far beyond

“Those of us who consider ourselves moderates–moderate-conservative, in my case–are forced to confront the reality that Barack Obama is not who we thought he was.”

As Robinson points out, all are pundit with expensive, private university educations, and easily run the wealthy and power circuits in the beltway. Unlike, say, Rush Limbaugh, any Washington soiree would leap for joy at their unexpected attendence.

Yet, as Robinson likes to point out by quoting George Orwell, “To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.” A struggle that, evidently, these three abandoned during the 2008 Presidential campaign, and under the O’spell.

Instead, it was the “troglodytes” who had Obama pegged from the beginning. Troglodyte is, BTW, code word from Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin, and we “racist, bigoted” conservatives, etal. And I daresay they have the nerve to toss Thomas Sowell in there as well… being ostracized as one of those rare, turncoat critters known as a conservative black man.

Sowell, ever adept at tongue and phrase, responded to one of Robinson’s questions during the campaign about Obama’s supposed centrist appeal by saying:

“Just what evidence do you have that he’s anything but a hard-left ideologue?”

So what’s it been since Obama moved into the Oval Office and embarked on his extremely “progressive” [humoring the “socialist” hypersensitive here] agenda… 46 days (not including Inauguration/party day…)? Not bad for shaking off that Obama-love and finally seeing the light. Although it would have preferable had they not succombed to the star-quality frenzy in the beginning, I’ll take better late than never. And at least they can no longer be fodder for the “see, I told you so” liberals who are still under the O’spell.

Now.. how long for the rest of the nation to wake up? Tapping toes, tapping toes….