Autodidactic Asphyxiation

Every now and then, wingnut protocol 'droid David Brooks forgets that his entire career hinges on his capacity to hide the lyrics of his native Republican contempt for working people beneath the somnolent monotone music of Reasonable Centrism (in case you are unsure of the difference, a "Republican" is someone who want to dismantle all protection for working people at once. A "Centrist" wants to dismantle half of all protection for working people today...half of the half that it left tomorrow...and half of the remainder the day after that.)

Today was one of those every-now-and-thens.

And when David Brooks has one of these lapses (such as when he famously slopped whitewash all over St. Ronald Reagan's use of the racist Southern Strategy with such flagrant disregard for the facts that had to be brought to book by his fellow New York Times op-ed columnists --

Bob Herbert Slams David Brooks' Revisionism of Reagan's Racist Legacy
This post, written by Amanda Marcotte, originally appeared on Pandagon

Bob Herbert joins in the spanking of David Brooks for trying to whitewash over Ronald Reagan's racist legacy, particularly his non-subtle signaling of support for the murders of 3 civil rights workers in Neshoba County, Mississippi in 1964. Reagan opened his campaign for President there in 1980 with a lot of loaded language about "states' rights", the rallying cry for the Confederacy to paper over the fact that they were separating in an attempt to escape an impending ban on slavery. "States' rights" then became the battle cry for those who didn't appreciate the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and were casting around for code language to oppose it without making directly racist statements. Sayeth Herbert:

The murders were among the most notorious in American history. They constituted Neshoba County's primary claim to fame when Reagan won the Republican Party's nomination for president in 1980. The case was still a festering sore at that time. Some of the conspirators were still being protected by the local community. And white supremacy was still the order of the day.

That was the atmosphere and that was the place that Reagan chose as the first stop in his general election campaign. The campaign debuted at the Neshoba County Fair in front of a white and, at times, raucous crowd of perhaps 10,000, chanting: "We want Reagan! We want Reagan!"

Reagan was the first presidential candidate ever to appear at the fair, and he knew exactly what he was doing when he told that crowd, "I believe in states' rights."

Emphasis mine. Brooks is playing off the fact that, from our vantage point, those murders happened a long time ago, and don't loom so large. In 1980, however, the murders had only happened 16 years before. The cases were still open. (No action was taken against the murderers until 2005, 41 years after the murders and 25 years after Reagan gave his nod of approval.) To put that into perspective, it would be like Rudy Giuliani kicking off his campaign in Jasper, TX with a speech about how he wants to "clean up" the nation like he cleaned up New York. No one would be under any illusions that barely concealed racist messages were being sent out.

-- an internal beat-down which the Gray Lady's starched-skirt rules of in-house decorum virtually never permits) the results come across like some sort of Randite thought-experiment:

What happens when you take America's Leading Conservative Intellectual, lock him in a dirty clothes hamper full of the Koch Brother's soiled underpants, remove all those pesky "facts" and "context" surrounding the Wisconsin Labor Uprising and insist that he write his column using only cliches from Dick Armey's Big Book of Anti-Labor Bumper Stickers...

...while still mortaring it all together with just enough meaningless, nonspecific drivel to meet the his contractual obligation to the New York Times to never take a position on anything clearly enough that he cannot weasel and equivocate his way out of later?

It's an art: one that for some reason pays phenomenally well.

Some choice bits from today's column, unfairly cut from their ooey-gooey Centrist marinade:

Make Everybody Hurt
By DAVID BROOKS

...
The public sector unions and their allies immediately flew into a rage, comparing Walker to Hitler, Mussolini and Mubarak.

Walker’s critics are amusingly Orwellian.

...
It’s the left that has suddenly embraced extralegal obstructionism.

Still, let’s try to put aside the hyperventilation.
...

Even if you acknowledge the importance of unions in representing middle-class interests, there are strong arguments on Walker’s side. In Wisconsin and elsewhere, state-union relations are structurally out of whack.

...
Private sector union members know that their employers could go out of business, so they have an incentive to mitigate their demands; public sector union members work for state monopolies and have no such interest.
...

Private sector unions confront managers who have an incentive to push back against their demands. Public sector unions face managers who have an incentive to give into them for the sake of their own survival.
...

As a result of these imbalanced incentive structures, states with public sector unions tend to run into fiscal crises.

...
There is little relationship between excellence and reward, which leads to resentment among taxpayers who don’t have that luxury.

...
It’s really important that we establish an unwritten austerity constitution: a set of practices that will help us cut effectively now and in the future.

The foundation of this unwritten constitution has to be this principle: make everybody hurt.
...

So I’d invite Governor Walker and the debt fighters everywhere to think of themselves as founding fathers of austerity.
...

So, stripped of its fancy ribbons, Mr Brooks' advice on the matter of labor unions is -- surprise! -- exactly the same as his advice on every other issue since the beginning of time, regardless of fact or context: play it right down the middle...but only after stop long enough to blame Cadillac-driving welfare queens...illegal immigrants... mouthy women...Liberals...gays...working people for the illegal war...foreign policy debacle...constitutional crisis...economic catastrophe your ideology has visited upon us.

And kick 'em in the balls one more time for good luck.

Over in the Better Universe, a column this bad could be a career-ender, but of course here there will be no such consequence.

Here is does not matter how often Mr. Brooks' ideology proves itself a catastrophic failure, or how many falsehoods, half-truths and lies-by-omission he Brietbarts into his columns to prop up that failed ideology (from reading this column you would hardly know, for example, that the most prominent person making Wisconsin-to-Egypt comparisons was not some anonymous shouter in the cheerful and well-mannered sea of tens of thousands of "public sector unions and their allies", but was instead Mr. Brook's own Conservative American Idol and and a militant advocate of massive social-program gutting, Republican Representative Paul Ryan.)

Tomorrow, next month, next year Ellsworth Monkton Bobo will still be there collecting princely sums for filling the world with his soft, mealy, razor-concealing road-apples of common wisdom.

And just how is that possible?

Because Bobo is a very senior member of a very special, very selective union -- Pundits Local 183.

A union whose chief innovation was boldly and irrevocably severing all "relationship between excellence and reward" years and years ago.

"Peter, you’ve heard all this. You’ve seen me practising it for ten years. You see it being practised all over the world. Why are you disgusted ? You have no right to sit there and stare at me with the virtuous superiority of being shocked. You’re in on it. You’ve taken your share and you’ve got to go along. You’re afraid to see where it’s leading. I’m not. I’ll tell you.
...

Judgement, Peter ! Not judgement, but public polls. An average drawn upon zeroes – since no individuality will be permitted. A world with its motor cut off and a single heart, pumped by hand. My hand – and the hands of a few, a very few other men like me. Those who know what makes you tick – you great, wonderful average, you who have not risen in fury when we called you the average, the little, the common, you who’ve liked and accepted these names. You’ll sit enthroned and enshrined, you, the little people, the absolute ruler to make all past rulers squirm with envy, the absolute, the unlimited, God and Prophet and King combined. Vox populi. The average, the common, the general.

A union whose members haven't missed a meal since.