Babbling Brooks - Still Running

I haven't commented much on David Brooks lately because his stuff is usually so banal and idiotic- so un-Krugman and so uber-Friedman - that I don't have much to say except something banal and idiotic like "Brooks dumb." But as today's column on Roe v. Wade once again demonstrates, the man has the reasoning ability of a walnut. Roe v. Wade is extraordinarily important, to be sure, but this lunacy only demonstrates how blinkered Brooks' vision can get:

Justice Harry Blackmun did more inadvertent damage to our democracy than any other 20th-century American. When he and his Supreme Court colleagues issued the Roe v. Wade decision, they set off a cycle of political viciousness and counter-viciousness that has poisoned public life ever since, and now threatens to destroy the Senate as we know it. … Harry Blackmun and his colleagues suppressed that democratic abortion debate the nation needs to have. The poisons have been building ever since. You can complain about the incivility of politics, but you can't stop the escalation of conflict in the middle. You have to kill it at the root. Unless Roe v. Wade is overturned, politics will never get better.

Except for his beholdenment to the Right, how on earth can Brooks draw this conclusion, when numerous more proximate steps - like a gentlemanly (-womanly) agreement among senators to take everything down a few notches, or excising a Congressional cancer like Tom Delay - would be much more effective at de-escalating this supposed conflict? And how on earth can he avoid addressing the context into which Roe v. Wade was inserted - that of the counterculture, the sexual revolution, and the then-resurging conservative movement - as also contributing to the firestorms around the decision itself? Oh, yeah - that beholdenment, plus his unearned status as the Op-Ed Brain of the Right.

(Thanks to Shannon for the heads-up.)