Today In Both Sides Do It: David Brooks of the New York Times

"People will not look forward to posterity, who never look backward to their ancestors."

-- Edmund Burke*

I never really understood how fascism could have come to Europe...

-- David Brooks, writer of Sweeping Opinions,
America's Most Ubiquitous Conservative Public Intellectual,
University of Chicago history baccalaureate,
and yooooge Edmund Burke fan boy

Empires may fall, oceans may rise and the human race may skip a high-tech, four-ton stone across the face of Jupiter just to see why that big, red eye keeps staring at us, but the Both Siderism of David Brooks is forever.

Because even after spending five paragraphs explaining that, up until today, he had spent his entire professional life in a state of pure, blissful ignorance of political history and how fascism works (that is rivaled only by his state of pure, blissful ignorance about the American working-class) --

...

They begin to base their sense of self-worth on their tribe, not their behavior. They become mired in their resentments, spiraling deeper into the addiction of their own victimology. They fall for politicians who lie about the source of their problems and about how they can surmount them. Facts lose their meaning. Entertainment replaces reality.

Once facts are unmoored, everything else is unmoored, too. People who value humility and kindness in private life abandon those traits when they select leaders in the common sphere. Hardened by a corrosive cynicism, they fall for morally deranged little showmen...

-- Mr. David Brooks of the New York Times simply could not allow his column ("Are We on the Path to National Ruin?") to expire without once again diving for cover behind the Beltway's biggest and most formidably indestructible lie of all:

...

Blood was in the streets last week — victims of police violence in two cities and slain cops in another. America’s leadership crisis looked dire. The F.B.I. director’s statements reminded us that Hillary Clinton is willing to blatantly lie to preserve her career. Donald Trump, of course, lies continually and without compunction. It’s very easy to see this country on a nightmare trajectory.

How can America answer a set of generational challenges when the leadership class is dysfunctional, political conversation has entered a post-fact era and the political parties are divided on racial lines — set to blow at a moment’s notice?

See, the leadership class is the problem, not the Republican party elite.

Post-fact political conversation is the problem, not a mob of brainwashed Conservative myrmidons who live and die at Rush Limbaugh's command.

Political parties...divided on racial lines, are the problem, not the plain and irrefutable fact that David Brooks' Republican party has spent 40 years deliberately turning itself in the Party of Jefferson Davis in order to win elections.  

Oh, and Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are both equally awful.

Over in the Better Universe, this column would have been a firing offense. 

Instead, over in this universe, Mr. David Brooks, who has spent his entire professional career as Conservatism's own Vladimir Pozner --

Pozner worked as chief commentator for the North American service of the Radio Moscow network. In the early 1970s, he was a regular guest on Ray Briem's talk show on KABC in Los Angeles. During the 1980s, he was a favourite guest on Ted Koppel's Nightline.^[11] Pozner was the host of Moscow Meridian, an English-language current affairs program focusing on the Soviet Union; the show was produced by Gosteleradio, the Soviet State Committee for Television and Radio and broadcast on the Satellite Program Network.^[12] He also often appeared on The Phil Donahue Show.

In his Western media appearances Pozner was a charismatic and articulate apologist of some of the Soviet Union's most controversial foreign and domestic policy decisions. A master of tu quoque, he would frequently draw parallels and point out similarities between Soviet and Western policies as well as candidly admitting the existence of certain problems in the USSR. However, while stopping short of unequivocal endorsement and support, he nevertheless rationalized, among others, the arrest and exiling of Andrei Sakharov, the invasion of Afghanistan and shooting down of KAL 007,

-- will go right on commanding a princely salary for peddling the Beltway's most dangerously arrant lie long, long after that lie has become ridiculous.

Mr. Brooks claims to be worried that -- 

There’s a cavity beneath what we thought was the floor of national life, and there are demons there.

-- but can't quite seem to grok how things got this way.

Look in the mirror, Brooks.



Look in the fucking mirror.


*Thanks for the catch.  These quotes are mixed up all over the web,