I find only two references to New York in the Dissent piece -- one to the attacks of 9/11, the other to the Industrial Areas' Foundation's Nehemiah program, which has nothing to do with your preoccupation here.

If you are disturbed by my observing that the neo-cons are suddenly channeling Hugo Chavez after years of disdaining "community organizing," I can't help you.

Physician, heal thyself.

There, he touts the Afghan National Solidarity Project, which, according to Brooks, helps “villages elect Community Development Councils. Western aid agencies give the councils up to $60,000 to do local projects, but it’s not the projects that matter most. It’s the creation of formal community structures. These projects are up and running in 23,000 villages.”

Please do read the Dissent essay:
http://dissentmagazine.org/online.php?id=311

"The community councils, as constitutional emblems of democratic participation and efficacy, are instances of the participation and activism of the people, and of the articulation and integration of diverse communal organizations, social groups, and citizens, which permit the organized people to exercise directly the development of public politics and projects that respond to the necessities and aspirations of communities in the construction of an equal and just society."

Well, this is a little more high-flying than what Brooks claims he's seeing in Afghanistan, but one might well still conclude that Hugo Chavez was his mentor! Thanks very much for this.

Your message is basically the howl of someone who's in denial.

http://www.militarytimes.com/news/2009/11/military_unfityouths_recruiting_110309w/

Wesley Clark and John Shalikashvili held a press conference with Arne Duncan last week to say that 70% of American youth are either too overweight or too under-educated to serve in the military. Whether or not they're right, they're on to something, but they won't come clean about the causes of the problem.

If you would read the Dissent essay that occasioned this post, you would see a reference to the press conference which McChrystal's predecessor as NATO commander, Wesley Clark, and others gave last week to warn that the unfitness of 70 percent of American youth for military service has become a national-security issue. They blamed, poor education, junk food, and a lot of things that have to be put at the doorstep of extreme free-marketeers.

The first takes George Packer and The New Yorker to task for having tried to rehabilitate Brooks for polite society without truly assessing whether and how he has acknowledged his own past dissimulations and blunders.

http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/2008/06/18/the_conservatives_conundrum_an/index.php

The second assesses Brooks' incredibly irresponsible (and un-Burkean) account of the mortgage meltdown of 2008. Here I expose Brooks' intellectual usury, an equivalent of predatory lending in the realm of ideas:

http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/2008/07/22/intellectual_usury_feels_good/

But it is important to understand that one can be absolutely right even while writing in bad faith, and that is the record of Joe Lieberman and David Brooks.

I thought that I had made this clear, but now I'm putting some of this language in the post.

http://hnn.us/articles/26572.html

Brooks fretted that “far from motivating most Americans to fight harder, cruelty on [the terrorists’] scale is unnerving…. The lesson [they teach] is that if you are willing to defy all norms and codes of morality you can undermine your enemy’s willingness to fight.” Thus do terrorists “create an environment in which it is difficult to survive if you are decent.”

The first takes George Packer and The New Yorker to task for having tried to rehabilitate Brooks for polite society without truly assessing whether and how he has reckoned with his own past work.

http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/2008/06/18/the_conservatives_conundrum_an/index.php

The second -- written, if I may say, so, with a more commendably controlled anger than the cocktail-hour post here above, assesses Brooks' incredibly irresponsible (and un-Burkean) account of the great mortgage meltdown of 2008. Here I expose Brooks' intellectual usury, an equivalent of predatory lending in the realm of ideas:

http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/2008/07/22/intellectual_usury_feels_good/