David Brooks is an"exceptional" idiot

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David Brooks is a conservative-leaning New York Times columnist and is supposedly one of the smartest political commentators around. How then to you explain his bizarre comment Friday on NPR. Brooks observed that it was the 500th birthday of John Calvin.

According to Brooks, Calvin was responsible for democracy, capitalism, and "American exceptionalism."

American exceptionalism is, according to Wikipedia,

the theory that the United States occupies a special niche among developed nations^[1] in terms of its national credo, historical evolution, political and religious institutions and unique origins.

Now how Calvin can be responsible for this special character of America is beyond me, especially since he died 40 years before the first British colony in North America.