Omigod! David Brooks reads another book...but doesn't really want us to know what it's actually about.

Brad DeLong catches David Brooks in another embarrassment - like not forthrightly telling his readers what the true subject of the book he's frothing over happens to be:

"David Brooks sure reads a lot of books."

Charles Murray's new book is called: Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010.

Now David Brooks:

"The Great Divorce: I’ll be shocked if there’s another book this year as important as Charles Murray’s “Coming Apart.” I’ll be shocked if there’s another book that so compellingly describes the most important trends in American society…"

How can a book that explicitly leaves out Asian-Americans, Hispanic-Americans, Amerindians, African-Americans, people of mixed race, and Arab-Americans possibly describe "the most important trends in American society"?

"Liberals play a central role in unfairness."

How can the New York Times editors publish a piece without asking David Brooks why he does not dare mention the subtitle of the book he is puffing?

Charles Murray, of course, is the right-wing "think-tanker" currently writing for the American Enterprise Institute and, notoriously,  co-author of "The Bell Curve" tome which argued that differences in intelligence were embedded in race.

About half-way into Brooks' latest adulatory column he notes that  Murray "is at his best" analyzing "behavioral differences" between the well-educated and the poorly educated and that "he’s mostly using data on white Americans, so the effects of race and other complicating factors don’t come into play." 

That Murray's entire study of "the most important social trends" is premised as a meditation on the circumstances of white Americans exclusively is rather conspicuously evaded by our deep-thinking gadfly, Mr. Brooks.

Update: A commenter at Brooks' NYTimes column site, Aaron Hamburger, offers this cogent observation:

Brooks writes "he’s mostly using data on white Americans, so the effects of race and other complicating factors don’t come into play." Why is "white" not a race? What are the other "complicating factors" that don't come into play?

And why do I get the feeling that this whole column reeks of nostalgia for a time when people who had "complicating factors" were kept at society's margins, not needing to be accounted for.