Jagged Little Shill.

"And Bobo wept for his lost children” in his maudlin meditation on the sad, old Earth entitled “The Jagged World”.

What he does not bother to do is to take a time-out from his Crying Game long enough to note that it is his own Party and Principles that have stranded us waaaay out here on this creaking limb.

It is they who keep pounding on the splintering wood beneath us.

It is they who insist that the cradle will never fall if the Traitor Press and the Evil Liberals would just join them and refuse to notice the bough breaking.

We begin with a little snip from the corner of his crying towel in which Bobo announces that apparently the peaceful and prosperous Clinton 90’s actually sucked. Because it suckered us all into believing terrible thoughts.

Or something.

Of course, this analysis is from the same burbling hack who freaked so completely out over Connecticut voters freely exercising their franchise in an open and fair election that turned on a serious debate over the single most important issue of our times that he announced it constituted an “Inquisition”.

Bobo is a man whose Onstar Unit always shrieks “Turn Right Immediately!” so don’t look to NYTs least accurate poo-detective for a whole lot of expert pathfinding through the thickets and brambles of actual Democracy.

But, onward...

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I spent much of the 1990’s (that most deceptive decade) abroad — in Europe, the former Soviet Union and the Middle East. People everywhere seemed to want the same things: to live in normal societies, to be free, to give their children better lives.

Now it seems that was an oversimplified view of human nature. It’s true people everywhere want to satisfy their desires, but they also require moral systems that will restrain and give shape to their desires. It’s true people everywhere love their children, but they also require respect and recognition and they will sacrifice their own lives, and even their children’s lives, in wars for status. It’s true people everywhere hate oppression, but they also require identity, and human beings build identities by collectively hating groups that represent what they are not.

…

The chief driver of events right now is not only globalization — the integration of economies and peoples. It’s also the contest among cultures over the power of consecration — the power to define what is right and wrong. Rising hegemons like Iran (and the U.S.) see themselves not only as nations but also as moral movements.

Since 9/11, the U.S. has had little success in influencing distant groups. Americans blew the postwar administration of Iraq because they assumed they were liberating a nation sort of like their own. And yet I can’t seem to renounce my own group, which is America. It would feel like cultural suicide to repress the central truths of my society, that all human beings are endowed with inalienable rights and democracy is the most just and effective form of government.

The hard lesson of the last five years — that we live in a jagged world filled with starkly different and contesting groups — makes democracy promotion more difficult but more necessary. Only democratic habits will prevent the inevitable clash of the tribes from turning into a war of nuclear annihilation.

Now there is much to agree with in Bobo’s sorrowful assessment of the state of things, but when it comes time to bemoan the riven world...one cannot help but notice it’s now all about the “We”.

It was “Americans" who "blew the postwar administration of Iraq…”

Americans assumed “they were liberating a nation sort of like their own.”

No, Bobo. “Americans” did not fuck this up – Republicans did.

“Americans” did not lie us into Iraq – Republicans did.

“Americans” did not fiddle while NOLA drowned – Republicans did.

If you have read Brooks over the years, you cannot fail to notice how, when the cream is rising and ready to be lapped from the bowl, it is “We the Conservatives” who are our saviors.

Notice how, when the cotton is high, it is “We” Republicans who stride down the mountain with a Contract with America to save us all.

But when the poo hits the Cuisinart, and Bobo goes off his meds and gets all cranked up on fen-fen and self-righteousness, suddenly it is “We” Democrats who are full of shit and shame:

Such as this deranged sip from Bobo’s steaming cup of furious loco from last November…

“Harry Reid sits alone at his kitchen table at 4 a.m., writing important notes in crayon on the outside of envelopes. It's been four weeks since he launched his personal investigation into the Republican plot to manipulate intelligence to trick the American people into believing Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.”

Notice when Bobo busts out the crying towel for all that has gone wrong in the big, scary world, he is simply nowhere near man enough to face himself honestly in the mirror and own up to the overwhelming role he and his despicable ideology have played in the disaster his Party has visited on this country.

No, to find someone to eat his sins, he must instead spin a Cotton Candy Liberal Villain out of his own sticky flop-sweat, as he did in May of 2005, when yours truly wrote:

Well, it’s heartening to hear Brooks beating a false premise like the bogeyman of “militant secularists” twice in one column, while allowing as how he’s really only “a little nervous” about the politics of Evangelicals. And I must say, hearing BoBo’s public alas-and-alacking about the state of his tortured soul trapped – trapped, I tell’s ya! – in the sad and lonely little ‘taint created by an utterly and despicably false dichotomy is, by turns laughable, despicable and predictable. And it affords one yet another opportunity to see with gamma-ray clarity yet again what a wormy Accomodationist he really is.

The ”funny” part is the vision I get of Brooksie as Jabba the Hutt – BoBo the Hutt – all seventeen tons of him, crying his faux glycerin tears over the complete bogus alternatives he has carved out for himself. Do I continue to glut myself on the radical clerics in my own party that seem, perhaps, once in a while, a trifle, a jot, a soupcon extreme in their honorable pursuit of their religious ends? Or must I starve myself off and die on the thin soup of the “bland relativism of the militant secularists.”

BoBo asks, given these two equipoised and equally distasteful alternatives, whatever shall I do? And we ask how oh how did BoBo the Hutt get so Orca-fat feeding on such empty Straw Men?

But in the end – bloodied but still Bobo-ed -- crying his angry, pants-crapping tears, Brooks will not succumb!

He will not abandon the glory that is “We” Americans.

Refusing, year after year and column inch after columns inch to recognize the obvious and terrible fact that:

No, BoBo. It is YOU who don’t have the numbers to govern. You are riding shotgun in Jerry Falwell’s Clown Car, not the other way around. You are the one who has made a career of telling people not to mind the madmen in the basement of the GOP, as they ripped the walls out, burned the deeds and carefully mutated the Party of Lincoln into the party of Jefferson Davis.

Like Tom Cruise in “Vanilla Sky” -- or Heston in “The Omega Man” -- Bobo races down empty, ideological streets where once there had been triumphal Republican torchlit parades announcing the End of Government and Dawn of the Age of the Party of Personal Responsibility.

In his waking nightmare, for block after block after block of dead New Orleans Bobo desperately pounds the vacant pavement, looking for someone – anyone! -- on whom he can pin the blame for his Party’s madness, corruption and fatal incompetence.

And finding nothing but a vast, topless tomb stacked to the sky with the Dubya Dead, bound up in a million-mile winding cloth inscribed with the words “Mission Accomplished" , Bobo does what all of his breed do when faced with the unfaceable.

He just makes some shit up.

This from January 2006:

“But Republicans need to do more than bump DeLay. They need to put the entire leadership team up for a re-vote. That's because the real problem wasn't DeLay, it was DeLayism, the whole culture that merged K Street with the Hill, and held that raising money is the most important way to contribute to the team."

Driftglass Translation: 

But the real problem with the White House isn’t Bush…its Bushism

But the real problem with the Senate isn’t Bill Frist or Rick Santorum…its Fristitis and Santorosis.

But the Real Problem with the Entire Religious Right isn’t the slope-browed, knuckle-dragging likes of James Dobson or Phyllis Schlafly or Donald Wildmon or Jerry Falwell or the rest of the Christopaths who power your million-mile-long Electoral train packed to the rafters with an omnium-gatherum of morally diseased, Flag-swaddled Self Righteous Swine…it’s the DobsOnanism.

In other words, the fault, posits Dear Bobo, is not in the Party, but in some ineffable quality that just so happens to perfectly overlap every square inch of the Party.

...

These are the same people who have told us to our faces for three decades that Government Is The Problem. That everything from health to food to oil to torture to coal mines needs to be completely deregulated. That Social Security needs to be eliminated.

That government must be annihilated.

So, BoBo, why in the fuck would a party of looters be interested in oiling the hinges on the vault door?

But that isn’t what’s interesting here.

What’s interesting is, yet again, the Dog that Didn’t Bark in the Night.

What BoBo is NOT suggesting.

The farrago of moral decomposition and indefensibly wretched excess that is the woof and warp of the GOP has been allowed to metastasize to such a scope and scale and worm into the belly of the body politic to a deeper level than the likes of Jim Wright and Dan Rostenkowski ever fucking dreamed of for one reason.

Because your criminals hide behind Christ, Bobo.

It is no accident that shoulder-to-shoulder with a mob-wannabe thug like Abramoff stood pillars of the Christian Right like Tom DeLay and Ralph “Satan’s Babyfaced Fingerfood” Reed.

In the past, Democrats -- like anyone else -- can and have become corrupt, and can and have been punished for it.

Severely.

The thing that makes the Republican Party different is not the rot in their hearts – which is capacious – and their seething hatred of the Brown Poor – which they rationalize away into the mists of market theory.

No what makes them worse – lethally worse – is their Fundamentalist Ideology.

Period.

Because when you are lining your pockets with House postage stamps, you’re just a crook and we’re all sinners here. But when you believe that God Has Chosen Your Party…you can justify any excesses.

When you have grown besotted on the grotesque perversion of the teachings of Jesus that is Conservative Christian Fundamentalism – when you cast yourself as the righteous Christian Soldiers at war with the Evil Liberal Humanists – then all things are permitted.

When you wrap your dick in the Flag and the Bible, then you can fuck anyone and anything any way you like because you believe that God is on your side.

You can justify an illegal war.

You can justify torture.

You can justify murder.

You can justify shredding the Constitution.

You can justify demanding your fucktard superstition trump science.

You can justify impeaching my President for trivia and letting your President skate over treason.

You can justify blaming Columbine on condoms and teaching evolution.

You can justify bombing Family Planning Clinics.

You can justify lynching.

You can justify blaming 9/11 on gays and feminists and the ACLU.

You can justify blaming hurricanes on liberals.

You can justify assassination.

You can justify calling liberal judges a greater threat to America than Nazis and terrorists.

You can justify turning women back into the reproductive chattel of men.

And having swallowed all of those camels, you certainly won’t strain at a few gnats like graft, corruption, extortion, blackmail and all the rest…because all of these things are simply means to the ends of the Greater Glory of the Prince of Peace!

And your Party is the one that is so fucking Blessed and Highly Favored in His eyes, right?

Mr. Brooks, these people are the problem and these people run your party. And what the fuck kind of congenital cerebral malfunction do you have that you cannot see that?

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Sorry, Bobo, but you need to get this very, very clear.

The group you “can’t seem to renounce” isn’t America.

It is the Republican Party, which is about as far away from “America” –- from a respect for “inalienable rights”, “democracy” and a “just and effective form of government” -- as a hamster is from Harvard.

As Coulter is from Christ.