David Brooks is nuts. Have you seen his NY Times column today?

[Faygo Kid]

David Brooks is a sniveling tool of Karl Rove, but this one is over the top even for him. Hey, David: Next time a Republican is savaged by the Right, and you write a column about it, it will be your first. So those who disagree with Joe's slavish support of Bush are "laced with profanity and ugliness?" Ever hear of Limbaugh, Hannity, Savage - and Coulter, David? This is yet another shot at those who dissent about the war, in an attempt to silence us. You don't have the cojones, Brooks, so give your obvious and lame attempts to intimidate the MAJORITY of the American people a rest. (I include the first few paragraphs because this is an Insider column, which I pay for but you may not be able to access).

Op-Ed Columnist
The Liberal Inquisition
By DAVID BROOKS
Published: July 9, 2006

Sometimes history comes with previews. In the 1930's, the Spanish Civil War served as a precursor to the global conflict that was World War II. And in a smaller fashion, the primary battle playing out on the smiling lawns of upscale Connecticut serves as a preview for the national conflict that will dominate American politics for the next two years.

This isn't a fight between left and right. It's a fight about how politics should be conducted. On the one hand are the true believers — the fundamentalists of both parties who believe that politics should be about party discipline, passion, purity, orthodoxy and clear choices. On the other side are the quasi-independents — the heterodox politicians who distrust ideological purity, who rebel against movement groupthink, who believe in bipartisanship both as a matter of principle and as a practical necessity.

In 2008, heterodox politicians like John McCain, Rudy Giuliani and even Hillary Clinton are going to have to face zealous assaults from within their own parties. But for the moment that war has come to Joe Lieberman.

What's happening to Lieberman can only be described as a liberal inquisition. Whether you agree with him or not, he is transparently the most kind-hearted and well-intentioned of men. But over the past few years he has been subjected to a vituperation campaign that only experts in moral manias and mob psychology are really fit to explain. I can't reproduce the typical assaults that have been directed at him over the Internet, because they are so laced with profanity and ugliness, but they are ginned up by ideological masseurs who salve their followers' psychic wounds by arousing their rage at objects of mutual hate. . .

http://select.nytimes.com/2006/07/09/opinion/09brooks.html?hp