Another Bill Buckley ex-columnist on Palin

David Brooks, former columnist for William Buckley's National Review, and the "house conservative" columnist at the New York Times, speaking at the big shindig in New York last week introducing the new layout of Atlantic:



You might be interested in the whole write-up over on Huffington Post, in which he also recounts an interview he had with Obama. One excerpt:

Obama has the great intellect. I was interviewing Obama a couple years ago, and I'm getting nowhere with the interview, it's late in the night, he's on the phone, walking off the Senate floor, he's cranky. Out of the blue I say, 'Ever read a guy named Reinhold Niebuhr?' And he says, 'Yeah.' So i say, 'What did Niebuhr mean to you?' For the next 20 minutes, he gave me a perfect description of Reinhold Niebuhr's thought, which is a very subtle thought process based on the idea that you have to use power while it corrupts you. And I was dazzled, I felt the tingle up my knee as Chris Matthews would say.

Please note something: the headline on that Huffington post is inflammatory, even though it's a direct quote from Brooks. I'm intentionally not posting that here, because as I've said to some of you, I think we'll all be better off if we focus on exchanging ideas, not being inflammatory. Let it start here.