Onan the Establishmentarian

Tonight we whine in Hell!

File under: When masturbatory fantasies attack!

If pressed to summarize David Brooks' entire career in 30 seconds or less, it would probably sound something like this exchange from "Full Metal Jacket":

Private Cowboy: Tough break for Hand Job. He was all set to get shipped out on a medical.

Private Joker: What was the matter with him?

Private Cowboy: He was jerkin' off ten times a day.

Private Eightball: No shit. At least ten times a day.

Private Cowboy: Last week he was sent down to Da Nang to see the Navy head shrinker, and the crazy fucker starts jerking off in the waiting room...

David Brooks: compulsive masturbator.

Column after column, year after year, literally unable to stop himself from choking that Buckley in front of millions of strangers over and over again.

Which, from a spiritual point of view, is a pretty sad existence to begin with (the pain of which is mitigated, no doubt, by the Publisher's Clearing House-sized checks from the New York Times that show up at his door twice a month) but which suddenly nose-dives deep into genuinely creepy-debilitating-fetish territory when you realize that, not only can he not stop compulsively debasing himself like a public transit flasher every day, but he is utterly incapable of getting it up enough to do his filthy business in the first place without first enacting exactly the same complex, obsessive ceremony each and every time.

No matter what the topic or the facts, first Bobo must!must!must! ritually tape up a picture of Karl Marx on the Left side of his New York Times editorial jerkoff grotto, and a picture of Rush Limbaugh on the Right. Only then can he permit himself to Solemnly and Reasonably Curve his Laffer onto a picture of Ronald Reagan, which he has scrupulously placed at the exact midpoint between his two Daddy Demons. If anything -- a slight breeze, a stray headline, E.J. Dionne -- alters the the positioning of his fetish menagerie by even a micrometer, he becomes panic-stricken and begins prattling wildly about fictional Applebees or the time he gobbled down a fistful purple greenspans and hallucinated for 18 straight hours about jogging through a 1971 Coke commercial:


But this Friday he trekked right on past both ideological dishonesty AND crippling politio-sexual obsession and into the realm of I don't-know-what.

Seriously.

This time, Bobo went so far down the hole that his own fantasy life actually turned on him.

First, rather than fiddling around with a lot of autopolitical foreplay, Our Mr. Brooks got his freak immediately and completely on by abandoning the smelly, arthritic world of facts and causality right off the bat and building himself the Lefty Policy Sexbot of his dreams:

"In my previous column, I tried to imagine what a moderate Democratic growth agenda would look like. You could call it the Moon Shot Approach."

Then he built an equally imaginary Wingnut Free Market Blowjob Queen of the Universe to spec by cherry-picking whichever spare parts and leftover -isms tickled his fancy from the Paul Ryan goofbag.

Ryan's own batshit ideas and words here (via digby):

For me, it doesn't take anything other than this, to tell me everything I need to know about the breadth of Ryan's intellectual capacities:

"The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand," Ryan said at a D.C. gathering four years ago honoring the author of "Atlas Shrugged" and "The Fountainhead."
[...]

"Almost every fight we are involved in here on Capitol Hill  . . .  is a fight that usually comes down to one conflict - individualism versus collectivism. If we actually accomplish this goal of personalizing Social Security, think of what we will accomplish. Every worker, every laborer in America will not only be a laborer but a capitalist. They will be an owner of society.  . . .  That's that many more people in America who are not going to listen to the likes of Dick Gephardt and Nancy Pelosi, Ted Kennedy, the collectivist, class-warfare-breathing demagogues," said Ryan
...

That sounds pretty damned dumb to me.

But some people think he's brilliant, no doubt about it:

GLENN BECK: Nice to meet you, sir. Tell me, tell me your thoughts on progressivism.

PAUL RYAN: Right. What I have been trying to do, and if you read the entire Oklahoma speech or read my speech to Hillsdale College that they put in there on Primus Magazine, you can get them on my Facebook page, what I've been trying to do is indict the entire vision of progressivism because I see progressivism as the source, the intellectual source for the big government problems that are plaguing us today and so to me it's really important to flush progressives out into the field of open debate.

GLENN: I love you.
...

And the process by which Bobo perfidiously frappes this cask-strength Crazy into some kind of Reasonableness Smoothie is reverse-engineered here by the good people at Reality Chex:

We could look back on the period between 1980 and 2006 as the long boom. -- David Brooks

Or, we could look at it for what it actually was -- beginning in about 1982 -- a long & still vibrant boom for the wealthiest Americans. The most casual observer knows that in this period, rich Americans have gotten richer & the rest of us have gotten poorer. To pretend otherwise, as Brooks does, is intellectual dishonesty that rises to the level of a crime of conscience.

As for Brooks' touting Paul Ryan's "intellectual heft," I can see why someone who thinks the 1980s began a long boom period would admire Rep. Ryan. As Paul Krugman notes, Ryan's fabulous budget plan "wouldn’t balance the budget, even after two generations. What it would do is massively redistribute income upward, raising taxes and slashing benefits for most Americans, while providing huge tax breaks for the top 0.1 percent of the population." And, "Paul Ryan’s budget plan ... calls for a huge increase in public debt over the near term, offset by hypothetical spending cuts four decades from now."

Prof. Krugman is not pulling these "opinions" out of a hat & he is scarcely alone in his observations. He draws his conclusions from solid economic calculations & plain ol' arithmetic.
...

So then, having scuttled into his own, dank, New York Times editorial jerkoff grotto with his own hand-crafted Simulated Fuck Toys in tow, he sat them each down and began -- I kid you not -- to argue with them.

To whine about the imaginary imperfections of these figments of his own imagination:

"Both the Democratic and Republican approaches have problems. The Moon Shot Approach relies on omniscient experts to pick out the engines of future growth and on public-spirited legislators to pass bills that maximize productivity instead of special-interest favors. The weakness of the Brooks and Ryan approach is that their sociology is off a bit. America is not a nation of risk — embracing pioneers. It is a nation of heroic bourgeois families who want to thrive within a secure social order."

Now I will cop to more than my fair share of NC-17 adventurism and encounters with the strange, but to-date I can safely say that I have never been spurned by imaginary lovers.

So it was with some degree of horror and pity with which I read David Brooks' latest 800-word embarrassment.

I mean, what else can you feel for someone who spent all that time and effort building himself his own Perfect Ideological Sexbots,

only to be told by them that they don't want him touching them there!

Tough break for Handjob.