Glenn Greenwald eviscerated Bobo’s false logic and false arguments here. Scarecrow elegantly did it again here, which relieved me of the nausea associated with parsing David Brooks’ propaganda. But Brooks’ piece today is so war mongering that it deserves another critique. The first part of his descent into darkness is easily excerpted:

The stories we select help us…to interpret the world….Most people select stories that lead toward cooperation and goodness.

We all want to be kind, says Bobo, and think the best of everyone, even in the most dire situations. That claim suggests Mr. Brooks is lying or completely unaware of his surroundings in Washington, DC. Accuracy isn’t important, though, because Bobo’s pop sociology is a stage prop, in this case, one that he intends to tear up. He casts himself as an omniscient Olympian oncologist, who has detected a tumor:

But over the past few decades a malevolent narrative has emerged….That narrative has emerged on the fringes of the Muslim world. It is a narrative that sees human history as a war between Islam on the one side and Christianity and Judaism on the other….This narrative is embraced by a small minority. But it has caused incredible amounts of suffering within the Muslim world, in Israel, in the U.S. and elsewhere.

As in his descriptions of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Brooks sees evil coming from one side, and good only from the other. He ignores our own wars, and that senior American generals and sometimes presidents have called our recent ones in the Middle East "crusades".

When Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan did that in Fort Hood, Tex., last week, many Americans had an understandable and, in some ways, admirable reaction. They didn’t want the horror to become a pretext for anti-Muslim bigotry.

That last sentence is the only correct statement in his piece. Predictably, he claims it’s exactly the wrong thing to do. We would be wrong, whimpers Bobo, to be informed or empathetic about Dr. Hasan’s plight as well as being appalled at the loss of life he inflicted. Because the truth according to Bobo, who, like the rest of us, has few if any facts, is that Dr. Hasan is the tip of the Islamic iceberg about to sink the SS America.

What does Dr. Brooks tell us we should do instead? What he impliedly claims Israelis do. We should see ourselves through the victim’s outrage and only when we are the victim. When others are victims, we should consider their losses as inescapable and irrelevant collateral damage in the war to keep us safe. That is true whether we exact revenge before they do something to us or they act out violently to avenge wrongs we committed. Any other course of treatment will allow the Islamic menace to metastasize throughout the body social.

The centerpiece of Brooks’ anti-logic is that rational, inclusive thinking about what went wrong at Ft. Hood, Texas, this week would be wrong, because it would deny,

…before the evidence was in, the possibility of evil. It sought to reduce a heinous act to social maladjustment. It wasn’t the reaction of a morally or politically serious nation.

Bobo uses the language of caution and rationality, but his goal is to instill fear of a global menace – before the evidence is in that it exists. Being rational and restrained, Barack Obama’s greatest strengths, will lead us to destruction, not avoid it. Such arguments make David Brooks the least serious, the least moral, the least responsible, the most violent, if soft-spoken and often read, voice in national punditry.