Rough Winds Did Shake

the Randite Dudes of May/
And summer's lease had all too short a date...*
(pic originally from here)

While everyone was busy on the other side of town screaming at Barack Obama for being awful, I got a chance to slip down into David Brooks' so-called Centerbunker for a look around at what the last few months have done to the place.

It is not pretty.


Now that a few rays of sunlight have fitfully penetrated the Centerbunker's stupefying pall, and the booze and soma and NyQuil have worn off, and Our Mr. Brooks has gotten a good, clear look at the bloodthirsty conservative freak with whom he so eagerly hopped in the sack during this last Spring, his initial giggly smittenness with Galtian Superhero Paul Ryan (from Mother Jones) --

David Brooks on Paul Ryan's long-term budget proposal:

Today, Paul Ryan, the Republican chairman of the House Budget Committee, is scheduled to release the most comprehensive and most courageous budget reform proposal any of us have seen in our lifetimes....His proposal will set the standard of seriousness for anybody who wants to play in this discussion....This budget tackles just about every politically risky issue with brio and guts....Paul Ryan has grasped reality with both hands. He’s forcing everybody else to do the same.

-- seems to have faded even faster than Mr. Brooks' famously giggly smittenness with George W. Bush's epic conquest of the Sinister Swarthyfolk of Iraq:

...conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks excoriated the GOP for its intransigence. Writing yesterday that it “may no longer be a normal party” but rather a movement of “fanatic[s]” with a “sacred fixation” on tax cuts, Brooks slammed the GOP for rejecting a “no-brainer” compromise with Democrats, which would include closing tax loopholes for things like corporate jet ownership:

On the contrary, Republicans are merely being asked to close loopholes and eliminate tax expenditures that are themselves distortionary.

This, as I say, is the mother of all no-brainers.

But we can have no confidence that the Republicans will seize this opportunity. That’s because the Republican Party may no longer be a normal party. Over the past few years, it has been infected by a faction that is more of a psychological protest than a practical, governing alternative.

But Brooks’ plea for sanity was lost on House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI), who responded to the column on conservative radio host Laura Ingraham’s show this morning. Ryan said that if Republicans gave up the loopholes now without securing a deal to lower marginal tax rates overall, they would lose an opportunity to demand new tax cuts in the future:

RYAN: What happens if you do what he’s saying, is then you can’t lower tax rates. So it does affect marginal tax rates. In order to lower marginal tax rates, you have to take away those loopholes so you can lower those tax rates. If you want to do what we call being revenue neutral … If you take a deal like that, you’re necessarily requiring tax rates to be higher for everybody. You need lower tax rates by going after tax loopholes. If you take away the tax loopholes without lowering tax rates, then you deny Congress the ability to lower everybody’s tax rates and you keep people’s tax rates high.

Yikes!

So this morning, while Our Mr. Brooks met his New York Times contractual obligation by pasted together one of his patented, non sequitur Here-is-some-stuff-I-read-about-Indian-sugar-farmers-and-a-Trenton-soup-kitchen columns (His conclusion: People are complicated! Also, Context is Important!) about which I have no specific disagreement, his heart was clearly not in punditting anymore.

Just a feeling, mind you, but one based on observing spurned lovers and broken hearts over the years that to be piddling around with such trivia while your Party is busy trying to blow up the planet strikes me as the act of someone who is now virtually catatonic from Total Ideology Fail Overload (TIFO). A sense that Mr. Brooks (like so many of his kind and class) simply cannot accept the evidence of his senses and the evidence of his own, massive failures.

As if, having watched the team for which he has been a very vocal champion and cheerleader most of his life deliberately seek out an iceberg in the open ocean into which they could deliberately ram and sink the Ship of State...

...Mr. Brooks has decided to cope with this existential collapse by climbing up on the fantail and start selling cookies.

Hey, they're really good cookies!

Wassamatta, you don't like cookies?

Anyway, this is what Our Hearbroken Mr. Brooks threw together on deadline today for public consumption.

In private, back down in the Centerbunker, things are a little more frantic.

Quickly surveying the wreckage his nights of fevered debauchery with a certain bloodthirsty Conservative freak has left in its wake, a confused and shocked David Brooks asks the basic questions.

How did this bloodthirsty Conservative freak get in here?

Why is this bloodthirsty Conservative freak's johnson jammed halfway down my throat?

Why are there Craigslist responses to some ad for "bloodthirsty Conservative freak" pasted up all over my "Bloodthirsty Conservative Freaks of 2011" calendar with careful annotations next to each one in my handwriting?

Why is there a "Find hot bloodthirsty Conservative freaks in your area" Grindr app on my iPhone?

Why am I wearing a wedding ring inscribed with the words "Mrs. Bloodthirsty Conservative Freak 4 Evah!"?

Why do I have a giant "I Heart Bloodthirsty Conservative Freaks" tattoo on my ass?

Who oh who could have permitted all of these terrible things to happen?

And, above all, will this in any way affect my earning power as the Greatest Conservative Public Intellectual in America?

To this last I can answer, quite unequivocally, "Not in the slightest. Mr. Brooks."

Not in the slightest.


* (h/t Bill Shakespeare)