If more conservatives and classical liberals worked at the New York Times, would conservative columnist David Brooks temper his condescending elitism? Probably not, but at least there would be a few folks in his immediate vicinity who could take him to the woodshed when he blew smoke in the face of folks from flyover country for making him dribble his Manhattan over their raucous protests on behalf of limited government.

Instead, he’ll be handed a linen napkin and get a nice pat on the head (and a fat paycheck) from NYTimes’ leftists who congratulate him for not being “one of those kinds” of conservatives.

I don’t blame Brooks for seeing the ’60’s New Left in today’s Tea Party movement. Brooks is just another member of the establishment media. Everything seen from the 30,000-foot altitude at which it flies looks alike. We should probably count ourselves lucky that Brooks didn’t analogize Tea Party activists to stone-throwing Palestinians. Yet.

From Brooks’ posh, first-class seat in the MSM’s massive, rusting airbus, radical leftists protesting in support of communism and big government in the late ’60s look just like stay-at-home moms, blue-collar workers, and entrepreneurs who carry copies of the U.S. Constitution, labor under onerous taxation, and admire Thomas Jefferson and John Adams instead of Ho Chi Minh and Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara.

As David Keene noted, at the ACU’s Conservative Battleline Online,

Obviously, Brooks has neither bothered to attend a Tea Party nor listened very closely to anyone who has. He seems to be writing more to please the Manhattan high tea set than anyone outside his world.

The leftists radicals of the sixties sought to destroy the nation passed on to them; the tea partiers of today seek to guarantee that what they inherited will be passed on to their children and grandchildren.

David Brooks and his friends may not be able to distinguish between them, but most Americans can.