David Brooks, op-ed columnist for the New York Times and former contributor to the Weekly Standard, seems to be one of a growing number of conservatives coping with an identity crisis.  He is lost in the no man's land separating the unapologetic neoconservative-to-the-bitter-end Charles Krauthammer and William Kristol, and the never-drank-the-Kool-Aid old school conservatives represented by John Dean and Bruce Fein. 

Brooks' earlier calls for "A Return to National Greatness" helped pave the road to a perpetual "War on Terror" and a disastrous nearly five year occupation of Iraq.  But his academic convictions display a remarkable degree of inconstancy.  In fact, they seem to rise and fall in lock-step with our fortunes in Iraq.  When "freedom's on the rise," Brooks can be heard waxing: "There's something about our venture into Iraq that is inspiringly, painfully, embarrassingly and quintessentially American."  When the Baghdad morgues are overflowing, he wanes: "We're a shellshocked hegemon.  This has been a crushingly depressing period."  Sounds like someone should ask their doctor about Paxil.

Yesterday the man writes this:

A conservatism that recognizes stable families as the foundation of economic growth is not hard to imagine. A conservatism that loves capitalism but distrusts capitalists is not hard to imagine either. Adam Smith felt this way. A conservatism that pays attention to people making less than $50,000 a year is the only conservatism worth defending.

As Kyle Broflovski's mom from South Park says, "WHAT WHAT WHAT!!!"  How does one remain a Bush apologist yet say things like this?  Granted, David Brooks has always been more of an optimistic, bridge-building, "Can we talk?" style conservative ideologue than his more venomously right-wing compatriots, but doesn't he realize that you can't be a neocon, nor continue to make half-hearted excuses for Bush & Co., and say things like this?  It's unseemly.

Look for more of this soul-searching from your own neocon friends over the next year.  The more enlightened conservatives have already learned the err or their ways, and have put it behind them.  Some of them jumped ship and voted for Obama last week in Iowa.  The stragglers that still do not grok this will drift to and fro, without a trustworthy authoritarian compass to guide them.  There may be lucid intervals of rational thinking, when these lost souls -- abandoned by their neocon nursemaid -- start to sound like present day David Brooks.  And there will be the relapses, correlating to moments of weakness when they turn on the radio and listen to Rush Limbaugh.  I think if you look closely, you might even find one of these identity-crisis neocons in our own ranks, sounding halfway reasonable on one day, and wholly without contrition on the next.

But what would I know?  I'm just the Moron In Charge.