And today he's got salient observations on politics which hold much of his attention, and Deep Blue is shut off and has done nothing further.

Not a good argument for turning everything over to the Deep Blues. What's Deep Blue done for me lately?

Yeah, and back then people moved the goal posts too, saying Deep Blue was just "brute-forcing" chess (which isn't even true since it's not a pure minimax search).

Deep Blue was brute forcing chess in the sense that AlphaGo wasn't brute forcing Go.

Both of them contained a search algorithm that explored some moves from each considered position, usually not all moves. Both of them contained logic (learned or programmed) to evaluate moves and/or positions.

The differences between them are many, but brute force doesn't enter into it in either case.