One of the more gratifying aspects of Rudy Giuliani’s Florida debacle went unmentioned – perhaps because it was thought unmentionable -- in the otherwise-triumphalist primary night reportage by Brian Lehrer on New York City’s NPR station WNYC (which Rudy once tried to close down) and in the New York Times’ front-page Rudy post-mortem-cum-victory dance by Michael Powell and Michael Cooper:

Giuliani got nothing from ageing, mostly Jewish ex-New Yorkers in Florida, whose support he’d pursued as assiduously as his campaign foreign-policy advisor Norman Podhoretz had done for years in his neo-conservative Commentary magazine. No wonder the neo-cons are scurrying over to the USS McCain now and battening onto it like barnacles below the waterline, hoping to sail it to victory in Iraq and Iran.

McCain is as wrongheadedly pro-war as Giuliani but more honest and decent about it. He’ll tolerate neo-cons if they're quiet; he'll even rely on the inevitable swift-boating of the Democratic nominee by Rupert Murdoch and whoever becomes the general-election’s Karl Rove, although he’ll piously disown what they do.

Always too clever by half, neo-cons have slithered so shamelessly from debacle to debacle that someone has to shout, “There you go again!”, especially at Times columnist David Brooks, who keeps fooling some of my well-meaning liberal friends into thinking he’s carving out a new centrist decency. This long-time, diehard Rudy lover is just angling to reel you in toward McCain.

Most neo-cons aren’t as supple as that. They're like dogged old Communist Popular Fronters, who glommed onto rugged, decent, all-American types like McCain. Weekly Standard editor Bill Kristol worked for McCain in 2000, but he quickly got over George W. Bush’s smearing of the man and helped to get Bush’s Iraq War bandwagon rolling.

So did Brooks, but he has always beguiled my innocent friends, not to mention NPR’s Robert Siegel and PBS’s Jim Lehrer, even after I exposed him as a Manchurian Columnist on the History News Networkand again in The American Prospect. (Everyone should read these two columns, even though they weren’t in the Times!)

Brooks loved Rudy passionately for years. Some of us had faith in Rudy until 9/11 transformed him and he began squeezing his operatic triumph for profit. But even in 2005, Brooks was letting Rudy’s future chief foreign-policy adviser, Charles Hill, virtually dictate a couple of his Iraq War columns, and I don’t believe that he wised up to Rudy’s devolution until long after I'd explained why Rudy really shouldn’t be president.

When Brooks finally saw the writing on the wall a few months ago, he fell silent about Rudy and began feinting furiously leftward, not because he was moving left but because he wants to retain enough credibility with Times readers and PBS viewers to reel in some of them for McCain when the time comes.

Brooks has pretended to admire Barack Obama so much, for example – almost as much as he admired Rick Santorum in 2006 – that you expect him to swim over to the Democrats. Don’t count on it. If McCain is nominated, Brooks will remind us how seriously and sympathetically he considered Democrats like Obama before concluding, ever so ruefully, as he'll say we should, too, that only McCain has what it takes, as envisioned by Max Weber or some other Thinker Brooks will cite sonorously to relieve his readers’ gnawing intellectual guilt.

Brooks' strenuous efforts to remain in good odor with his intended prey became easier on Jan. 7, when the Times hired the apparatchik Kristol to fill the op-ed page’s Chair in Conservative Propaganda. That freed the sophistical Brooks to release his inner chameleon with no howls from the right. Where that leaves NPR and PBS in continuing to showcase him as the “conservative” foil to E.J. Dionne and Mark Shields, I'll leave it to them to explain.

This week we were treated to Brooks’ soaring, organ-like rendering of Ted Kennedy’s endorsement of Obama: Something fundamental has shifted in the Democratic Party,” Brooks opened, in the portentous way he reserves for his highest hypocrisies. He noted respectfully that “a throng of Kennedys” rebuffed the Clintons’ cynical politics by joining with patriarch Ted --  “the consummate legislative craftsman,” Brooks annointed him —to assure Americans that “Obama is ready to be president on Day One.”

Democrats, Brooks intoned, are now taking “the high road versus the low road; inspiration versus calculation; future versus past; and, most of all, service versus selfishness.”

He could have been Teddy’s speechwriter for the occasion, except that when he writes about Ted Kennedy as a great American and noble statesman, he might as well also be fluttering his eyelids like the Madam of a neo-conservative bordello, denying hotly that anyone there has ever feigned love for profit or political gain.

Madam Brooks hopes we won’t notice the low road he took in 2004, when he described the “long lines of Volvos” filled with liberal advisors trying to shape John Kerry’s “brain of sculpted marshmallow.”

He hopes we won’t remember that he described Ted Kennedy as “to the left of [Syria’s] Bashr Al Assad” in October 18, 2003; as a “Chicken Little” on April 10, 2004 for doubting progress in Iraq; and as a defeatist on Feb 1, 2005 for giving a speech “blithely insisting that the terrorists are winning the war for the hearts and minds of Iraqis.”

Now Brooks writes that this very same Kennedy “has served [the Senate] with more distinction than anyone else now living. And he could do it because culture really does have rhythms….”

Rhythms like those of Brooks’ own dialectic, perhaps: Conservative, Anti-conservative, Neo-conservative. Kennedy, we now learn, has been a guardian through change and through storm of “the awareness that we are not self-made individuals… but emerge as part of networks, webs and communities.”

That awareness “is back again today. Sept. 11 really did leave a residue – an unconsummated desire for sacrifice and service. The old Clintonian style of politics clashes with that desire.” And who better to revive unconsummated desire than the one-time “Chicken Little” who sat by the left hand of Bashr Al Assad!

While buffing up Kennedy and Obama, Brooks can’t resist a catty little dig at Clinton advisor Sidney Blumenthal, long a scourge of conservatives like Brooks himself. But no matter; we are awash in national greatness with the same Ted Kennedy who Brooks told us on Feb 5, 2005 was a loser:

Many Republicans are mystified as to why the Democrats, having lost another election, are about to name Howard Dean as party chairman and have allowed Barbara Boxer and Ted Kennedy to emerge unchallenged as the loudest foreign policy voices.... Thanks to this newly dominant group, the Democrats are sure to carry Berkeley for decades to come.”

David, David.  Have you no decency? No moral or intellectual backbone? I’m not asking for ideological consistency. I’m asking if you can recognize that you owe Kennedy a straightforward apology-- and, for that matter, that you owe the same to many others.

Why this constant sliding away from what you asked your readers to believe in the past? If you can’t come clean on this -- you certainly couldn’t on the Iraq War, which you slid away from behind the covers of Cobra II – aren’t you indeed a sophist and chameleon, using Kennedy to help you puff up Obama long enough to claim later that you gave Democrats a fair chance before concluding that only McCain could keep the faith?

If you do wind up endorsing and campaigning for Obama, I’ll make a straightforward apology to you. It’s not impossible. Somewhere beneath your inner chameleon is a civic republican who thought he had to be a conservative because liberals were so hypocritcal and exasperating. Hey, I’ve been there. They still are, and the left is often worse!

The thing is, though, that Obama knows this as well as you do and has risen above it. Shouldn't you try to do that, too? Or will you prove only that you used Kennedy and Obama to soften up your audience for the same old hook?