In 1994 I wrote that the left activist and sage Jim Chapin considered New York's then-new mayor Rudy Giuliani a "progressive conservative" like Teddy Roosevelt.

David Brooks, who worshipped Giuliani, picked up the phrase, and now he's claiming that it would have fit John McCain, too, if only McCain had "escaped the straightjacket of a party that is ailing and a conservatism that is behind the times." That he didn't escape makes his campaign "unspeakably sad."

Hello? The hero of Hanoi, imprisoned by his Republican base and his chosen running mate? What's unspeakably sad is how long ago McCain's leadership and Brooks' judgment went wrong -- a surprise only to journalists who still fall for Brooks as they once did for McCain.

McCain and Brooks do have flashes of genuine decency, but these are shards of public personna that have never really cohered.

Credit McCain, adoptive father of a Bangladeshi daughter, for refusing to play the race card by tying Barack Obama to Jeremiah Wright. But read Michael Tomasky's review-essay,"Who is John McCain?" in the June 12 New York Review of Books to see what a cynic and screw-up McCain has been all along.

(The one weakness, or unanticipated irony, in the review is that Tomasky excoriates McCain for fudging his much-touted support of public campaign finance. On that, he would soon be outdone by Obama.)

In 2000, more than a few liberals cast shy, admiring glances at McCain's challenge to George W. Bush in the primaries. He charged that a global capitalist "iron triangle" of big money, bad lobbyists, and undemocratic legislation was debasing his party and his country. He electrified Americans who didn't want patriotism left to Pat Buchanan and Oliver North. But soon his insurgency was smeared and destroyed by the Bush machine in a campaign so ugly it only ennobled its victim.

Whatever credibility I accorded McCain at that time evaporated four years later, as I watched him praise Bush to the skies and then bear-hug him on a stage in Nevada, endorsing his re-election. Bush was a shill for the "iron triangle" and a war everyone knew by then had been sold fraudulently and run abominably. I went cold on McCain at that moment. I didn't have to wait to learn, a couple of months ago, that he has enlisted the very Bush operatives who smeared him in 2000 to smear Obama in 2008.

David Brooks did have to wait. Credit him for... I'll think of something, most likely his entertaining apercus about consumer society and sonorous invocations of republican virtue.

But undoubtedly my appreciation is clouded a bit by his likening George Bush to Teddy Roosevelt; his conflation of national greatness with a national-security state, as in his supple but relentless shilling for the Iraq War and its neo-conservative academic justifiers; his perverse obsessions with Ivy League undergraduates, whose weaknesses he has indulged and even flattered; his announcement that while "American pop culture may look trashy," the country's "social fabric is in the middle of an amazing moment of improvement and repair;" his wheedling defenses of Scooter Libby and Karl Rove; his cruelty toward "Chicken Little" Ted Kennedy (whom he also called "to the left of Bashr Al Assad") and toward John Kerry (with his "core of sculpted marshmallow") and toward "net roots scion" Ned Lamont (with his "vicious, Sunni-Shiite style of politics"); his arguments for indexing Social Security; his fingering of the foibles of lower-income people whose homes are being foreclosed; and, most recently, his virtual coronation of Palin after her debate with Joe Biden.

Now Brooks wants us to be "unspeakably sad" for McCain (and, perhaps, for himself), and for an honorable conservatism that might have been, and for a Republican Party of "Americanized Burkeans" which he yearned for and kept trying to herald, mainly by lampooning hapless liberals.

Look, David, I'm a civic-republican at heart, just like you (and like John McCain, I'm sure, somewhere). But I'll save my sadness for whatever the left-liberal Democrats and the neo-liberal Obama get wrong. If you really care about the country, don't save your viciousness for them. Get rid of it now.