Poor David Brooks — the guy’s timing is simply awful. Here he is, offering a column — “Meet the Poor Republicans” — that tries to explain why a particular contingent of not-so-well-off voters has lately been voting for the GOP. His answer? Unlike the poor folks who vote for the Democrats, these poor people “agree with Horatio Alger”: they believe that they’ve got a reasonable shot at moving up the ladder, living the American dream, making a fortune and leaving that word “poor” behind. Poor Democrats, on the other hand, tend to be people who think that the cards are stacked against them.

Unfortunately for Brooks, his column ran on the very same day that the Times kicked off a mega-series on “Class in America” — the central premise of which is that there’s a lot less class mobility in America than people believe. (Lest you conservatives fear that this is simply a plot by that filthy liberal Times rag to fill our heads with lies, the Wall Street Journal ran a front-page story last week reporting pretty much exactly the same thing.)

This juxtaposition of material couldn’t possibly have been intended by the Times’ news editors to make Brooks look like a condescending idiot or a closet Democrat, but that’s the result. Because there’s no way to put these two articles together without concluding that those poor people out there who vote Republican because they think they have a chance to get ahead, those people whose praises Brooks are singing, are, sadly, chumps. They have been sold a bridge. They believe in something that, like creationism or Saddam Hussein’s WMD arsenal, is contra-factual. On the other hand, those poor Democrats, however unfashionably glum and not-with-the-morning-in-America program they may be, seem to have a clearer picture of the state of the union.

One could go further and begin to lay out how the policies of the Bush-era GOP, supported by Brooks’ “poor Republicans,” are only further locking in the sort of class immobility the Times (and Journal) articles note. But let’s not kick Brooks while his own paper has tripped him sprawling, face-down, on the political floor.

If a suicide bomber attacks and the media don’t cover it, are the victims still dead?

Today the New York Times’ rookie conservative columnist, John Tierney, offers a variation on the See No Evil argument about Iraq (itself a variation of the Blame the Messenger gambit). The real problem with Iraq, Tierney argues, isn’t that the nation is drifting into civil war and that two years after Saddam Hussein’s overthrow the U.S. still can’t provide any measure of personal safety for those Iraqis brave enough to volunteer to serve in the new government, or show any sign that it has begun to figure out how to reduce the level of violence in the country. The problem, says Tierney, is that the U.S. media is too darn determined to report on the Iraqi rebels’ attacks.

Tierney spins his case by donning the cape of a crusader for media quality: Sensationalist journalists are just too easily distracted by gory photo opportunities. There’s no news here, the columnist argues; seen one suicide bombing, seen ’em all. “How much shock value or mystery is there anymore to suicide bombings? How intrigued are people by murders when the motive, the weapon and the murderer’s fate are never in doubt?”

In this view, the bombings in Iraq are context-free acts of brutality set apart from any historical continuum. Tierney thinks the media should show “a little restraint” and “reconsider their own fondness for covering suicide bombings.” In his formulation, everything that’s happening in Iraq — all the complex interaction between Sunnis and Kurds and Shiites and American forces, all the ethnic and religious cross-currents, all the backdrop of oil politics and the post-9/11 war with al-Qaeda — gets reduced to the phrase “suicide bombings.” Don’t think that we’re dealing with the latest chapter in a war started by our own government; it’s just a strange rash of “suicide bombings.” Putting the bombers on TV only encourages them! But if we stop the cameras, maybe they will go away.

Tierney’s column is self-evidently ridiculous, but it’s worth noting that it also represents an odd twist in conservative rhetoric. Before the Iraq war, it was liberals who argued that there was no compelling reason to send an army into Iraq — that the equivalent of international police action was doing the job and would continue to do so. (Some liberals also argued for the “police action” approach against Al-Qaeda: Frame the 9/11 attackers as criminals, not as wartime enemies. But the president’s religio-apocalyptic “War on Terror” rhetoric became America’s marching orders instead.) Now that there really is a sad, bloody, endless war in Iraq, the conservatives’ line is shifting: They don’t want us to think of it as a war at all. It really is policing, now, even though we’ve still got a few divisions in the field and soldiers are dying every day. We should deal with it, Tierney says, the way Rudy Giuliani dealt with criminals. Cutting out the press worked in New York City; let’s try it in Baghdad!

The trouble is, while obviously the bombers in Iraq treat media coverage as a part of their strategy, every CNN camera could switch off and every American reporter could come home — you could have a complete blackout of U.S. coverage of every bombing — and the Iraqi rebels would continue to pursue their goals. The U.S. is only one part of a bigger game to them. The horrific bombing attacks in Iraq are not random acts of brutality; they are part of a calculated war plan aimed at undermining any chance of success for the Bush administration’s project in Iraq.

If you were an Iraqi contemplating whether to run for office or serve in the Iraqi police force, you might be reasonably afraid of being targeted by a fanatic with a bomb strapped to his chest. You might overcome your fear; you might choose the better part of valor. One thing I seriously doubt you’d consider was whether said fanatic’s bomb attack was going to get U.S. press coverage or not. Life might be a little easier for the Republicans in Washington if the American media paid less attention to Iraqi suicide bombers, but things wouldn’t get any better for Iraqis.

It’s true that the Bush administration has had some success in applying a See No Evil strategy to U.S. casualties in Iraq. Not allowing the American media to show pictures of American coffins returning home really has helped the administration keep the lid on domestic discontent with its policies. So we might expect White House officials to like the idea of extending the tactic more widely to the Iraq field of operations. What’s hard to fathom is why a journalist would propose anything of the sort.