"[W]hen David Brooks complains that Edward Snowden is an unmediated man, I must note that in the civil society Brooks invokes..."

"... Presidents and other leaders were also mediated; they were not merely checked by Congress, courts, etc., but they were also checked by themselves, and a sense of what was proper that went beyond 'how much can I get away with now?' Obama, too, is unmediated in that sense. That Brooks couldn’t see beyond his sharply-creased pants to notice that when it was apparent to keen observers even before the 2008 election is not to his credit. If the system of civil society has failed, it is in no small part because its guardians — notably including Brooks — have also failed."

So writes Instapundit, linking to my post yesterday, which links to David Brooks's new column "The Solitary Leaker."

The reference to Brooks falling for Obama's pants crease is such a big meme that it can be the entry for "David Brooks" in the new Dictionary of Received Ideas. I tracked down a substantial discussion of it from August 2009 in The New Republic:

In the spring of 2005, New York Times columnist David Brooks arrived at then-Senator Barack Obama’s office for a chat. Brooks... had never met Obama before. But, as they chewed over the finer points of Edmund Burke, it didn’t take long for the two men to click. “I don’t want to sound like I’m bragging,” Brooks recently told me, “but usually when I talk to senators, while they may know a policy area better than me, they generally don’t know political philosophy better than me. I got the sense he knew both better than me.”

That first encounter is still vivid in Brooks’s mind. “I remember distinctly an image of--we were sitting on his couches, and I was looking at his pant leg and his perfectly creased pant,” Brooks says, “and I’m thinking, a) he’s going to be president and b) he’ll be a very good president.” In the fall of 2006, two days after Obama’s The Audacity of Hope hit bookstores, Brooks published a glowing Times column. The headline was “Run, Barack, Run.”

Here's "Run, Barack, Run." Does Brooks deserve to be derided endlessly over the fixation on the pants crease? It is hilarious. It's like Rich Lowry getting "little starbursts" from Sarah Palin's wink. You can't not bring it up. But let's remember, Brooks's vision of perfection, seen in a pant's crease, came after they conversed, in depth, about Edmund Burke. That is, the 2 men were talking, in all likelihood, about the importance of civil society.

Does Obama deserve to be called an unmediated man?

ADDED: Speaking of Brooks and legs and feelings and the summer of 2009, remember this? ("I sat next to a Republican senator once at dinner and he had his hand on my inner thigh the whole time.")