I certainly hope this is not photoshopped. David Brooks is one of the elite Republicans who fell under the spell of the Young Messiah and broke with the party to support him in the last election. In Brooks' case all it took was a short discussion of Reinhold Niebuhr's theology to do the job. His ludicrous assumption was that since Obama had an Ivy education, had read Niebuhr, and could be considered an intellectual he would be better equipped to take on the responsibilities of the Presidency than a military guy like McCain or [shudder] a lumpenprole breeder like Sarah Palin.
Well he, and others like him who were seduced by Obama's elegance and erudition, screwed up -- big time. Obama has so far been a disaster and there is no reason to suppose that he will change much in the future. If this is a true picture and not a manipulated image, Brooks has realized the error of his ways. And maybe, just maybe, he will begin to reconsider the class-based bigotry that led him into error.
HT: Instapundit
UPDATE: Brooks gives the reason for his disenchantment with the Young Messiah:
Read it here.But the Obama budget is more than just the sum of its parts. There is, entailed in it, a promiscuous unwillingness to set priorities and accept trade-offs. There is evidence of a party swept up in its own revolutionary fervor — caught up in the self-flattering belief that history has called upon it to solve all problems at once.
So programs are piled on top of each other and we wind up with a gargantuan $3.6 trillion budget. We end up with deficits that, when considered realistically, are $1 trillion a year and stretch as far as the eye can see. We end up with an agenda that is unexceptional in its parts but that, when taken as a whole, represents a social-engineering experiment that is entirely new.
The U.S. has never been a society riven by class resentment. Yet the Obama budget is predicated on a class divide.
David. This is what happens when you let the loony values and standards of academia out into the real world and infuse it with the resentment/revenge fantasies of urban ethnic communities. As astute an analyst of American political culture as you purport to be shoulda seen this coming miles away.
UPDATE: Looking closely at this picture it does indeed seem to have been photoshopped. There is a line on the neck where the skin tones do not quite match. I'll leave it up anyway, if only to illustrate what should happen.
