"A man thinks that by mouthing hard words

he understands hard things." -- Herman Melville

Sometime just before Thursday supper here in the cold, cold city, having just watched Day Two of the Taxes Chainsaw Massacre, I chanced to Tweet this to the big, wide world:

Somewhere, David Brooks has written "those peevish, irrational Liberals" for the 100th time. 100 more and tomorrow's NYT column is done!

Six hours after I tweeted that, this is what David Brooks actually ended up pulling out of his ass:

Ted Kennedy was a network liberal, willing to stray from his preferences in negotiation with George W. Bush or John McCain. Most House Democrats, by contrast, are cluster liberals. They come from safe seats, have a poor feel for the wider electorate and work in an institution where politics is a war of all against all.

Barack Obama ran for president as a network liberal, and entranced a Facebook nation. But in office, Obama, like George W. Bush before him, narrowed his networks. To get things done quickly, he governed like a cluster liberal, relying on partisan leaders.

The results were predictable: insularity, alienation and defeat. So now we are headed toward divided government.
...

Having read far, far too many of David Fucking Brooks' dishonest little op-ed owl pellets over the years, I can tell you that this is arguably the most prodigiously dishonest thing he has written since back in the days when he was masturbating himself blind with excitement over George W. Bush's Excellent Iraqi Adventure. (Same kinds of lies he told about Iraq , too -- a world full of cartoon villains fighting Reasonable Heroes for fictional motives in imaginary versions of real places that David Brooks clearly knows nothing about.)

And this -- from the same column -- is arguably the second most dishonest:

The big story of the week is that Obama is returning to first principles, re-establishing himself as a network liberal. This isn’t a move to the center or triangulation. It’s not the Clinton model or the Truman model or any of the other stale categories people are trying to impose on him.
...

Cluster liberals in the House and the commentariat are angry. They have no strategy for how Obama could have better played his weak hand — with a coming Republican majority, an expiring tax law and several Democratic senators from red states insisting on extending all the cuts. They just sense the waning of their moment and are howling in protest.

They believe nonliberals are blackmailers or hostage-takers or the concentrated repositories of human evil, so, of course, they see coalition-building as collaboration. They are also convinced that Democrats should never start a negotiation because they will always end up losing in the end. (Perhaps psychologists can explain the interesting combination: intellectual self-confidence alongside a political inferiority complex).

In other words, as predicted, "those peevish, irrational Liberals" padded out with enough venom and pseudo-intellectual verbal droppings to meet his 800-word contractual obligation to the New York Times.

Not a whisper about the rapacious content of Republican positions.

Nary a peep about he malevolent and premeditated Republican behavior that led us to this place, for example, or the long and barbaric history of Republican lies, betrayals and failures that created this moment's context.

No sense whatsoever of an actual reality wherein (from the Constant Weader):

A super-majority of Americans want tax cuts for the middle class. A majority in the House & a majority in the Senate voted for tax cuts for the middle class but no tax cuts on income above $250K (for a married couple). That is the policy the President campaigned on.

In a rational world, President Obama Claus would be signing the middle-class tax cut extension this week in front of a White House Christmas tree with his funny elves Pelosi & Harry beaming at his side.
...

Because none of that is relevant to Bobo (and his dozens of loyal, wealthy readers.) Because from the safety of his well-appointed sniper's nest at the very pinnacle of American Journalism, David Brooks has never really had to given a shit about the real-world consequences of any of the mendacity he peddles.

Why should he?

After all, for America's most ubiquitous, pie-faced Conservative used car salesman, there has never been a single consequence or a moment's blow-back for being the leading spokesman for a depraved and grotesquely failed ideology.

Quite the contrary: whoring for evil men and vile causes has been very, very good for David Brooks.

As his hero George W. Bush pissed the United States treasury into the sands of Iraq, Bobo never missed a meal. As the Reagan Revolution that made his career possible finally destroyed the American economy, Bobo never missed a payday. And during all the years he cheered for sending other people's children off to die in his reckless, foreign adventures, Bobo never had to get his gated suburban marshmallow ass any closer to actual Persian peril than ordering extra sides of hummus at Applebee's.

And, if tomorrow it was announced that America was now formally a feudal corporate state run under martial law by Goldman Sachs...or the easternmost vassal province of the Greater Chinese Co-Prosperity Sphere, Inc. ...Bobo would be right there, Johnny-on-the-spot, rolling out the welcome mat for our new overlords, tucking himself into their collective ass-cracks and penning bland columns in the New York Times explaining to the serfs of the late, great United States why -- if they would just stop struggling, give up a little bit more and bow just a little bit lower -- their new peonage really is the best of all possible worlds.

Because for David Brooks, it is.


UPDATE: Again, a few words and a link to this piece were posted in the Mr. Brooks' comment section. Again they have disappeared into the pellucid digital ether.