In fall 2006, the United States turned on the NeoCommentators. Furious that their smug, wrongheaded chatter had help lead the country into a catastrophic war and then, without missing a beat, turned to browbeating those who sought to end it, readers nationwide began agitating for their removal from op-ed pages, magazine columns, and television roundtables alike. And so began the Pundit Purge of '07 -- the first time in recent history that the predictive failure of an ideology led to actual occupational consequences for its peddlers.
Historians differ on what, precisely, sparked the upheaval, but no small number point to a December 10th column by David Brooks, which pretended to peer back at America's foolish withdrawal from Iraq from some point in the future, when it was well-understood that the folly of exit had triggered what Brooks termed "the Second Thirty Years' War." Experts differ on what proved so infuriating about this column: Some name Brooks' total avoidance of better solutions for a disastrous conflict he'd helped create; others point to the intellectual sleight-of-hand that identified the withdrawal from Iraq, rather than the invasion of it, as the start of the disaster. And yet others believe the column's conceit was so insufferably irritating and superficial that reprisal was inevitable.
