How David Brooks Learned to Stop Worrying

And love the Rom.

To understand David Brooks' column of 11/08/11, ("The Serious One") you must first understand that Mr. Brooks is essentially a parasitic organism whose highly successful career is now so dependent on his capacity to attach himself to insider power that he would fall to ashes and blow away if his Beltway feeding tube/ovipositor were ever severed. (In a post that was destined for brief neologistic/Googlewhack [remember those?] glory (along with "Peak Stoopid", "Christopath", "Rashomonotheism", "Christalopithecus", etc.), one long-forgotten wag once noted Mr. Brooks' strong resemblance to:

...a great, damp, hairless cricket, rubbing its moist hind legs together con way too mucho gusto.

(The extremely handy Online Encyclopedia Britannica explains Brooksie’s means of communication as characteristic of the insect family “Tettigoniidae (about 3,000 species), distinguished from the true cricket (family Gryllidae) by hearing organs located on the front legs, hair-like antennae.” It also mentions that this species is characterized as having “a sword-shaped ovipositor (in females) for laying eggs” which I think more than adequately explains the real purpose of the horrible, pink tie.))

Which means now that the Mayella Ewell Party

has gone screamingly insane, "...the Republic burns and the New Conservative Barbarians caper in the firelight screaming for blood and tax cuts, America’s Greatest Conservative Public Intellectual sits in an empty lot at the edge of the conflagration, desperately sifting the Sands of Derelict Nostalgia, looking for something other than the complete failure of everything he has ever believed in to write about".

In other words, Our Mr. Brooks is confronted with a terrible nutrient supply chain problem.

He has already...

...watched in jilted-loser dismay as every one of his Fantasy League candidates has run the hell away from the locked ward loony bin that the presidential primary process of Mr. Brooks' Party of God has become.

....loudly and publicly broken up with the Kenyan Usurper

Do you really want to hurt me
Do you really want to make me cry
Precious kisses, words that burn me
Lovers never ask you why

over his unwillingness to abase himself before the Party of God to Mr. Brooks' satisfaction.

...spent the better part of a year either ignoring or publicly decrying the cosmic Unseriousness of most of the rest the squalling moral imbeciles/Fox News employees now fighting over who get's to dress up in Reagan's moldering suit and cut taxes for the rich.

...loudly and publicly fired the priapistically patriotic Newton Leroy Gingrich (R - Hobson's Choice) from his imaginary job at Mr. Brooks' imaginary 7/11.

Which means to protect his future supply of yummy-yummy insider nectar it's time to suppress that gag reflex, break out the Body Butter and Barry White and jump on the Romney Inevitability Bandwagon.

Snips of Our Mr. Brooks just slathering it on with both hands and both feet:

In the Marx Brothers movie that is the Republican presidential race, Mitt Romney is Zeppo. He doesn’t spin out one-liners. He’s not the rambunctious one. He’s just the earnest, good-looking guy who wants to be appreciated.

...Romney continues to run an impressive presidential campaign.

...while the Twitterverse was entranced by Herman Cain, Romney delivered his most important speech yet.

...politically astute and substantively bold...

Romney grasped the toughest issue — how to reform entitlements to avoid a fiscal catastrophe — and he sketched out a sophisticated way to address it.

...government should be simpler, smarter and smaller.

...a measured fiscal strategy

...you are not a serious presidential candidate in 2012 unless ...

..harvest the best entitlement reform ideas from the conservative policy johnnies.

The experts were impressed.

The Romney campaign operates like a smooth-running White House

...sensible Social Security reforms
...similar to the Paul Ryan plan

...politically smart...

...substantively smart...

...prudent experiment...

...exemplifies the sort of big reformist vision that should be at the center of a serious Republican campaign...

...serious and substantive.

In 800-words, Our Mr. Brooks coronates Mittens with the crown jewel of Villager flattery -- "Serious" -- no less than four times.

Which, in the end, makes a gruesome kind of sense.

After all Romney really is the perfect Brooksian Candidate: hollow, reprogrammable and rich. Where John McCain was willing to grit his teeth and bellycrawl to kiss Jerry Falwell's ass, the humanlike simulacrum named "Mitt" gives every indication that, if required to complete his Prime Directive, he would cheerfully disinter Falwell's mortal remains, dress them up in Nancy Reagan's 1981 inaugural ball gown and dance a tarantella with it on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on the Fourth of July.

Mittens is the indefatigable defender of corporate interests in well-creased pants whose single, consistent characteristic is his open, panting eagerness to instantly switch his position 180 degrees to accommodate anyone with a microphone who promises to help make him President.

David Brooks -- for reasons that passeth all understanding -- is the owner of one of the biggest microphones in journalism whose single, consistent characteristic is his open, panting eagerness to support anyone who agrees with David Brooks.

I'm sure they will be very happy together.

Seriously.