David Brooks Loses His Mind

You mean I have to kill them all?

Standing in an empty bar, surrounded by Imaginary Centrists, talking to an Imaginary Reasonable Conservative Bartender who echos back to Bobo his every fraudulent fantasy, David Brooks reveals that he has finally decided to abandon reality altogether, crawl back into Ronald Reagan’s leathery, cowboy man-uterus and seal the entrance behind him.

Snippets lifted from "The Government War" in the NYT:

"In these columns I try to give voice to a philosophy you might call progressive conservatism. "
...

"This general philosophy puts me to the left of where the Republican Party is now, and to the right of the Democratic Party. It puts me in that silly spot on the political map, the center, or a step to the right of it."
...

"One of the odd features of the Democratic Party is its inability to learn what politics is about. It’s not about winning arguments. It’s about deciding which arguments you are going to have. In the first year of the Obama administration, the Democrats, either wittingly or unwittingly, decided to put the big government-versus-small government debate at the center of American life.

"Just as America was leaving the culture war and the war war, the Democrats thrust it back into the government war, only this time nastier and with higher stakes."
...

"This produced the Tea Party Movement — a characteristically raw but authentically American revolt led by members of the yeoman enterprising class."
...

"The Democrats have become the government party and the Republicans are the small government party. The stale, old debate is back with a fury."

See, things were finally starting to get better, but those Liberal bastards had to get their Big Gummint spoo all over everything and fuck it all up.

I have no idea what political system or history he is writing about, but whatever it is, it has nothing whatsoever to do with America here-and-now.

Needless to say, Andrew Sullivan approves-with-reservations:

I find myself in agreement with David Brooks' column this morning on how - unwittingly - the Obama administration was forced into the kind of big government action required to cope with several huge crises, after years of negligence and drift. I can see how easy it was for the FNC-RNC to wheel out their exhausted tropes of anti-government rhetoric and for Paul Krugman, say, to wheel out his own pro-government radicalism.
...

And thus does all dialogue on the Right descend ever further into Farce.

One faction living on a garbage island of wholly imaginary, fact-free Conservative ideological purity. On that island, the last two generations of Conservative treason, corruption and catastrophic failure never happened. On that floating septic tank, Rush Limbaugh, Bill Kristol, Karl Rove, Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin rule over an army Pig People. And now that anyone with a conscience has long ago abandoned the GOP, it is the swinish inhabitants of this island that make up the margin of victory in virtually every Republican election in America.

They rule the Party of Lincoln, and every Republican elected official knows it.

The other faction lives on the equally imaginary, equally fact-free garbage island of Centrism. Its small number of well-heeled refugees from Pigsville live high atop the island's lone mountain: a flimsy mound made entire out of the paper mache remnants of maundering, self-congratulatory, self-referential newspaper columns by Andrew Sullivan, "Ross Douthat, David Brooks, Jim Manzi, Conor Friedersdorf, Fareed Zakaria, Bruce Bartlett, Jon Rauch, and... Ramesh Ponnuru".

The inhabitants of Centrism Island are just as certain as any die-hard Commie that their ideology never failed, but was instead betrayed by...somebody. Enemies within? A failure in the dialectic? The flux capacitor? Considering that, say, a typical Sullivan post now reads something like this:

Ross reax here to D-wayne's synthesis of the NRO's depiction of Junebug's analysis of the latest epistemic hairball coughed up by Ambers to my response to K-Lo's crybaby post on the Zak-meister's latest take-down of ...

it is difficult to unwind the smothering insiderhood and suss out anything useful other than...

A) It is one, monumental, self-indulgent, self-absolving circle-jerk and,

B) No matter how far Right the whole circus has traveled in the last 30 years, somehow, the Vile Liberals are still Big Gummint villains and are still always, miraculously responsible for more than half of any given problem.

The inhabitants of Centrism Island rule nothing.

Instead they all seem to make a really good living sitting around together in the same mossy bar, listening to ghosts and phantoms, feeding each other drinks, getting hammered on "Real Conservatism" and sneering at how coo-coo crazy everyone else has gotten:


Honest to White Sidewall Tire Jesus, what is there left to say but what I already said four years ago ("Hey? What's that poo-smell?"):

...
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?
...

Oh, and one other thing.

Crazy doesn't end well for those closest to it...



so if I were Thomas Friedman

I'd want to be sleeping with one eye open from now on.