Dispatches From The Rancid Boutique

File Under: Bringing the Wingnut Jubilee

Welcome to Centerville.

A real nice place to raise your kids.

Population: All right-thinking people.
Elevation: Just right!
Climate: Agreeable!
Temperature: Sensible!
Location: Miraculously equidistant from every bad thing in the world.

When one reads these eternal verities handed down from the very ippy-tippy-top of the Holy High Place of American Journalism by David Fucking Brooks Himself --

Getting Obama Right
By DAVID BROOKS

Who is Barack Obama?

If you ask a conservative Republican, you are likely to hear that Obama is a skilled politician who campaigned as a centrist but is governing as a big-government liberal. He plays by ruthless, Chicago politics rules. He is arrogant toward foes, condescending toward allies and runs a partisan political machine.

If you ask a liberal Democrat, you are likely to hear that Obama is an inspiring but overly intellectual leader who has trouble making up his mind and fighting for his positions. He has not defined a clear mission. He has allowed the Republicans to dominate debate. He is too quick to compromise and too cerebral to push things through.

You’ll notice first that these two viewpoints are diametrically opposed. You’ll, observe, second, that they are entirely predictable. Political partisans always imagine the other side is ruthlessly effective and that the public would be with them if only their side had better messaging. And finally, you’ll notice that both views distort reality. They tell you more about the information cocoons that partisans live in these days than about Obama himself.
...

-- how can one not feel oneself being positively kerbooted into the arms of the occult?

From Eliphas Lévi

When one creates phantoms for oneself,
one puts vampires into the world,
and one must nourish these children of a voluntary nightmare
with one's blood, one's life, one's intelligence, and one's reason,
without ever satisfying them

Of course, the Vampire that Villagers like Mr. Brooks has put into the world is called Centrism; that imaginary Green Zone where reasonable, soft-spoken pragmatists can get far, far away from the gunshots and bong hits of the equally angry, equally ignorant, equally stinky, equally potty-mouthed rabble of the Left and the Right and get down to the business of making gummint work real good while bitching in pastel, passive-aggressive tones about how foolish and unserious everyone else is.

Jesus Haploid Christ, talk about the very definition of an "information cocoon".

And of course, this insatiable monster of Centrism must be fed every day.

So last week, DFB busied himself slandering a youth movement of the 1960s (known as "those dirty fucking hippies") by equating them with the Teabaggers (a middle-aged, expatriate-Republicans-in-colonial-drag White Identity mob masquerading as a populist uprising) who have belligerently declared their own Wingnut Jubilee during which the Right and their Mainstream Media enablers are now issuing themselves universal pardons which absolve them of decades of loathsome, bigoted, unforgivably reckless idiocy by total immersion baptism in the fizzy, vinegary, Lethe Koolaid of Fox News and Hate Radio...followed by a small ceremony where they ritually burn their "Bush/Cheney 04" bumper stickers, promise to never again mention the name "Lee Atwater", agree that Ronald Reagan was the greatest human being ever to walk the Earth, and concur that all of America's problem would now officially be blamed on Jimmy Carter and the Kenyan Usurper.

But yeah, other than that, they're just like the hippies.

And also because, according to DFB,

"...both movements go in big for conspiracy theories. The ’60s left developed elaborate theories of how world history was being manipulated by shadowy corporatist/imperialist networks — theories that live on in the works of Noam Chomsky. In its short life, the Tea Party movement has developed a dizzying array of conspiracy theories involving the Fed, the F.B.I., the big banks and corporations and black helicopters."

Which I guess means that, according to America's Most Respected Conservative
Public Intellectual, J. Edgar Hoover was a fictional character.

And Fred Hampton was assassinated by the Keebler Elves and not the Chicago police.

And there were no "Red Squads". Also COINTELPRO was merely the product of overactive, oversexed, teenage imaginations.

Nor were southern states ruled by clandestine mobs of politically-connected terrorists known as the Klan and their less-violent fellow travelers like the White Citizen's Council.

There were no Enemies Lists.

The Nixon White House never illegally conspired to use the FBI, the CIA the IRS and other arms of the federal government to brutally repress and destroy its political opposition.

And so forth.

And so on.

I could go on for days, but OK, I will concede that other than their age...and their political pedigree...and their deep complicity in causing the problems they now protest...and their correctness about the nature of the forces arrayed against them...and their body fat ratios...and their degree of basic cultural and historical literacy...and perhaps another dozen critically divergent characteristics that make David Fucking Brooks' analogy out to be another masterpiece of the Liar's Art, I guess those teabaggers really are exactly like those damned hippies after all!

Wowie zowie!

Which brings us to Friday's "News Hour", when Our Mr. Brooks went a long way out of his way to make sure we all knew that while the depraved McCarthyism of Liz Cheney (and Brook's friend Bill Kristol) might be a trifle over the top

people on the Left also said mean things about Dick Cheney So, y'know, it all evens out.

And winds ups back to where we started; Friday's addition to the seven-year-long skidmark DFB has left on the Op Ed page of the New York Times, in which, for what seems like the 10,000th time, David Fucking Brooks fed the Centrist Vampire; creating two strawmen -- one named Left and one named Right -- selectively imbuing them with dishonest-bordering-on-cartoonish attributes, setting them in equidistant and equinaughty opposition to each other, staking out a wholly imaginary Reasonable Center for himself (and his goooood buddy, the Kenyan Usurper), from which he could snipe away at paper targets with Unreasonable Liberals drawn on them.

And once again, it was a lie.

And once again, there was no one to stop him from pooping his lie into America's Newspaper of Record.

And so, for what seems like the 10,000th time, let me reiterate: No, no and no, Mr. Brooks.

If you ask a conservative Republican, you are not likely to hear that "Obama is a skilled politician who campaigned as a centrist but is governing as a big-government liberal."

You are likely to hear that the Kenyan Usurper is a dirty, stinking Commie fifth columnist who wants to destroy American and pave the road to his Stalinist Worker's Paradise with the bones of your grandma.

And if you ask a liberal Democrat, you are not likely to hear "that Obama is an inspiring but overly intellectual leader who has trouble making up his mind and fighting for his positions. He has not defined a clear mission. He has allowed the Republicans to dominate debate. He is too quick to compromise and too cerebral to push things through."

You are likely to hear that he has pissed away a year trying to placate a mob of unhinged Conservative Republicans who -- as any Liberal who has been following American politics for more than seven minutes could have told him -- were going to treat him like a dirty, stinking Commie fifth columnist who wants to destroy American and pave the road to his Stalinist Hell with the bones of your grandma from the moment he took the oath of office, until the moment they could "take their country back".

Also that he should have started with Single Payer.

Also that he could have gotten a lot more done on immigration reform and DADT and several other issues he explicitly campaigned on if he hadn't spent a year playing footsie with douchbags who will treat him like an uppity field n*gger who they believe needs to be taught his proper place no matter what he says or does.

Because, darn it, it just wouldn't be a proper David Fucking Brooks column unless America's Leading Conservative Creative Typist can find some ham-handed way to offload some of the crushing guilt of being wrong about everything for the last 30 years into the backs of imaginary hippies.