Leonard Shelby Syndrome

A few days ago we discussed Punditosis, the intellectual halitosis that afflicts pundits who subsist on a diet of half-baked notions and undigested data. Today’s medical topic is another pundit disorder. I’ll call it Leonard Shelby Syndrome, or LSS, after the protagonist of the film Memento, who cannot remember anything that happened more than 15 minutes previously.

A particularly severe case of LSS is at work with David Brooks, the New York Times columnist who was already on the short list of candidates for Punditosis Poster Child, to be named once the National Punditosis Foundation gets rolling. Unfortunately, LSS is a much tougher call when it comes to treatment, and I’m not sure how much can be done for this patient.

You see, Punditosis can be brought under control and in some cases actually cured through a therapeutic regimen of wider reading, enhanced intellectual honesty and closer attention on the part of the inmate guards — known here as “editors.” Treatment of LSS, however, is hindered by emotional factors rising from the patient’s awareness that he either conceived or agreed with transparently insane ideas (e.g., Iraq would be a cakewalk, or the key to national prosperity is giving more tax money to Paris Hilton and Steve Forbes) and is now trying to deny such a thing ever happened. It’s not that he can’t remember; it’s that he deeply wishes not to remember.

Eminent physicians Brad DeLong and Dennis Best chart the course of Brooks’ condition through his columns on Iraq, which from fall 2003 to just about now consisted of standard right-wing guff along the standard spin-point, “everything’s going great in Iraq, it’s just that the liberal media won’t report it.” But this week, Dr. DeLong notes, LSS set in with a vengeance:

Disorder is endemic to Iraq. Today’s crisis is not three years old… the crisis is perpetual. This is a bomb of a nation . . . There is the endless Shiite-Sunni fighting. There is a massacre of the Assyrians . . . Children . . . gunned down from airplanes. Tribal wars . . . A former prime minister is found on the street by a mob, killed, and his body is reduced to pulp as cars run him over in joyous retribution . . .

The British tried to encourage responsible Iraqi self-government, to no avail. “The political ambitions of the Shia religious headquarters have always lain in the direction of theocratic domination,” a British official reported in 1923…. Today Iraq is in much worse shape. The most perceptive reports describe not so much a civil war as a complete social disintegration. This latest descent was initiated by American blunders, but is exacerbated by the same old Iraqi demons: greed, blood lust and a mind-boggling unwillingness to compromise . . . Iraq is teetering on the edge of futility . . . Iraqi national identity is looking like a suicidal self-delusion . . .

Isn’t that interesting? Brooks has just realized that not only did the Bush gang ignore the warnings of their own generals on Iraq, they ignored British warnings from decades earlier.

Three years ago, Babbling Brooks was one of the claque telling us that the Iraqis were ripe for democracy, that they were longing to be just like Americans and would gladly embrace us as soon as we removed the dictator. Now the country’s going to hell and it’s all because of “the same old Iraqi demons: greed, blood lust and a mind-boggling unwillingness to compromise.” (Maybe they’re modeling themselves after the Bush foreign policy team.) Rather than admit his mistakes, Brooks switches from praising the Iraqis to villifying them, not even skipping a beat.

Given the extreme nature of the condition, I would have to recommend amputation from the Times op-ed page. Unfortunately, the Times editors are still wedded to pre-modern medical techniques, and all they’re likely to do is throw on more leeches like John Tierney.