I couldn't ignore the latest David Brooks argument for letting Rudy be Rudy. [The Real Rudy, NYT, November 23, 2007]His argument is that Rudy, who is in real life trying to distance  himself from his pro-criminal, sanctuary city past, (in the hope of actually being elected by American voters) should cut his own political throat by coming out in favor of not only immigration, but illegal immigration.

At its current nadir, the G.O.P. had been blessed with five heterodox presidential candidates who had the potential to modernize the party on a variety of fronts. They could be competing to do that, but instead they are competing to appeal to the narrowest slice of the old guard and flatter the most rigid orthodoxies of the Beltway interest groups.

By "narrowest slice of the old guard," I assume he means regular American voters. By "Beltway interest groups" he must mean actual conservatives. He can't be referring to immigration restrictionists as "Beltway interest groups" while ignoring the huge pro-immigration lobby, can he? Well, maybe he can. David Brooks is a conservative acceptable to the New York Times, which is to say he's not a conservative.

He's been encouraging the Republicans to pass amnesty for years, apparently because he thinks wading the Rio Grande to break into the US and steal a job is somehow heroic:

Imagine a person 10 times as determined as you are. Picture a guy who will wade across rivers, brave 120-degree boxcars and face vicious smugglers and murderous vigilantes [Emphasis added]—all to get a job picking fruit for 10 hours a day. That person is the illegal immigrant. Let's call him Sam. This whole immigration debate is about him, the choices he faces and the way he responds.[Workers In the Shadows, January 10, 2004]

That's the kind of "conservative" commentator who's supposed to be defending the interests of the American people? Well, that's why we're asking you to donate, because commentators like Brooks are common,and ones like us are few and far between.

As for David Brooks himself, Peter Brimelow wrote in 2006 that

[T]hese commentators have no understanding of nascent political movements–either because they only got into politics after the American conservative movement was in power (and, perhaps not coincidentally, able to reward supporters) or because they were actually Democrats at the time, like the neoconservatives. (Or even, in the case of the agile David Brooks, now token conservative columnist for New York Times where he is pro-immigration, natch–a socialist.)