Meanwhile Back At The Church of Lyin'tology...

...His Holiness Pope Bias the First, Bishop of the Acela Corridor, Vicar of Both Sides, Successor of the Prince of the Kristols, Supreme Pontiff of the Washington Beltway, Primate of Fake Centrism, Archbishop and Metropolitan of Humility, Sovereign of True Conservatism's City State, Servant of the servants of the Church of Lyin'tology is back on the job with a vengeance, baby!

First comes the "Both Sides..." claptrap, fast and furious:

The two main candidates, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, are remarkably distrustful...

They have set the modern standards for withholding information — his not releasing tax and health records, her not holding regular news conferences or quickly disclosing her pneumonia diagnosis...

Both have a problem with spontaneous, reciprocal communication with a hint of vulnerability...

Both ultimately hew to a distrustful, stark, combative, zero-sum view of life...

Trump’s convention speech was the perfect embodiment of the politics of distrust...

Clinton’s “Basket of Deplorables” riff comes from the same spiritual place...

Hey, remember seven long months ago when when Mr. Brooks' Both Siderist sermonettes were all about "Trump and Sanders"?

Hillary, for you the whirlwind is Bernie Sanders. For the rest of you it’s Donald Trump...

Trump has no actual policies and Sanders has little chance of getting his passed.

And yet the supporters don’t care. Sanders and Trump...

...the Trump and Sanders phenomena.

In debates Sanders is uninhibited by the constraints of reality, so his answers are always bolder. Trump speaks from the id, not from any policy paper, so his answers are always more vivid.

Many Americans feel like they are the victims of a slow-moving natural disaster. Sanders and Trump...

I’d love to see one of you counter the Trump and Sanders emotional tones with a bold shift in psychology...

Let Trump and Sanders shout, harangue and lecture...

Let them [Trump and Sanders] deliver long, repetitive and uninterrupted lectures...

Let them [Trump and Sanders] stand angry and solitary. You run as part of a team, a band of brothers...

Let them [Trump and Sanders] assert that all our problems can be solved if other people sacrifice...

Let them [Trump and Sanders] emphasize the cold relations of business (Trump) or of the state (Sanders)...

Let them [Trump and Sanders] preach pessimism...

Sanders and Trump have adopted emotional tones that are going to offend and exhaust people over time.

Golly, it's almost like Mr. Brooks isn't really a human being at all, but some kind of soulless, Conservative Both Siderist algorithm into which his operators simply punch the name of the Democrat they wish to fuck over this week,

Anyway, once the Both Siderist fun is over,  this most laughably transparent of all the frauds in American media ascends the mile-high pile of Both Siderist claptrap he just invented so as to better rain down his Brooks-brand of pseudo-rabbinical argle bargle on the masses far below:

The parishioners at the Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston, S.C., felt that even the man who murdered their close friends was redeemable, but Clinton has written off vast chunks of her fellow citizens as beyond hope and redemption.

Wow. 

So according Mr. Brooks, a fair standard against which to measure Hillary Clinton in the middle of a campaign against the combined forces of Il Douche and his Beltway enablers is truest, hardest-core, walk-their-faith believers in Jesus Christ?

Really?

Doesn't the Bible also mention something about "casting the first stone"?  

And since we are getting all fussy about issues of trust and disclosure, am I the only one who remembers that the insufferably moralizing David Brooks refused to mention that his wife had dumped him until it was dragged out of him?  Where are are the details of your divorce, David?

Am I the only one who remembers that until he was forced to disclose it, Mr. Brooks never mentioned that his son enlisted to serve under Benjamin Netanyahu, a man about whom Mr. Brooks writes glowingly?  Or that Mr. Brooks has written repeatedly about the glories of fracking, and yet has never revealed to his readers whether his personal net worth rises and falls with the fortunes of oil multinationals?

Why doesn't Mr. Brooks open up to his readers in exactly the way he insists Hillary Clinton should open up? Why do his employers continue to allow him to operate in conditions of such suspect secrecy?

Anyway, those are a few of the things I do remember.  What I do not remember is the very pious Mr. Brooks responding to the murder of 3,000 of our fellow citizens 9/11 with a call for unilateral forgiveness of the killers and a paean to hope and redemption.  Instead, as I recall, Mr. Brooks grabbed the loudest bullhorn he could lay his hands on and helped the Bush administration whip the masses into a headlong charge into the wrong war under false pretenses.

And as I also recall, the very pious Mr. Brooks swept aside the opponents of that war as a bunch of stupid, deluded Liberal dupes and weirdos who were quite obviously beyond redemption.

But now, with the blood and waste and lies and treason of the Age of Bush safely locked away where no one but dirty Liberals dare speak of them honestly anymore, Mr. Brooks is free to remember those years any damn way he pleases, using the  most passive voice you ever heard:

We set out a decade ago to democratize the Middle East, but we’ve ended up Middle Easternizing our democracy.

And then we're back to the argle bargle:

The true thing about distrust, in politics and in life generally, is that it is self-destructive. Distrustful people end up isolating themselves, alienating others and corroding their inner natures...

When you refuse to lay yourself before others, others won’t lay themselves before you...

The rise of distrust has corroded intimacy...

What did you do to corrode your inner nature, Mr. Brooks?  Did your wife distrust you for some reason, Mr. Brooks?  Is that why she divorced you, Mr. Brooks? Why won't you tell us, Mr. Brooks? Don't you want us to trust you, Mr. Brooks?

Furthermore, fear is the great enemy of intimacy. But the loss of intimacy makes society more isolated. Isolation leads to more fear. More fear leads to...

Wait, where have I heard this before?

 Oh yeah...

Jesus, Brooks you're pan-handling from Yoda now?

But wait, it gets so much better.  

Mr. Brooks winds up his Both Siderist sermonette by driving it to its logically absurd conclusion and then shoving it off the cliff by suggesting that both candidates are equally awful because neither of them measures up to the Gautama Buddha and Sweet Baby Jesus:

The great religions and the wisest political philosophies have always counseled going the other way. They’ve always advised that real strength is found in comradeship, and there’s no possibility of that if you are building walls. They have generally championed the paradoxical leap — that even in the midst of an avalanche of calumny, somebody’s got to greet distrust with vulnerability, skepticism with innocence, cynicism with faith and hostility with affection.

Our candidates aren’t doing it, but that really is the realistic path to strength.

Well, if Mr. Brooks can ransack a galaxy far, far universe for quotes, then I feel quite within my rights to head on down to the Cooper Union Hall, in New York City...

It is February, 1860 and civil war is lurking just over the horizon of our deeply divided nation. One side believes that slavery is a noble, Christian institution which should be expanded at all costs, One side believes that slavery is an abomination which should be reined in at all costs,  And yet a third side -- let's call it "The David Brooks side" -- continues to preach the gospel of compromise and accommodation.

On this occasion, the tall, gangly, improbable man from the frontier who is campaigning for the presidential nomination of the newly-minted Republican party has come to talk to the people about right and wrong, the insatiable rage and paranoia of conspiracy mongers, and the moral incompetence of equivocators. 

Comradeship, vulnerability, innocence and affection were not mentioned.

From Abraham Lincoln, February 20, 1860:

...

Will they be satisfied if the Territories be unconditionally surrendered to them? We know they will not. In all their present complaints against us, the Territories are scarcely mentioned. Invasions and insurrections are the rage now. Will it satisfy them, if, in the future, we have nothing to do with invasions and insurrections? We know it will not. We so know, because we know we never had anything to do with invasions and insurrections; and yet this total abstaining does not exempt us from the charge and the denunciation.

The question recurs, what will satisfy them? Simply this: We must not only let them alone, but we must somehow, convince them that we do let them alone. This, we know by experience, is no easy task. We have been so trying to convince them from the very beginning of our organization, but with no success. In all our platforms and speeches we have constantly protested our purpose to let them alone; but this has had no tendency to convince them. Alike unavailing to convince them, is the fact that they have never detected a man of us in any attempt to disturb them.

These natural, and apparently adequate means all failing, what will convince them? This, and this only: cease to call slavery wrong, and join them in calling it right. And this must be done thoroughly - done in acts as well as in words. Silence will not be tolerated - we must place ourselves avowedly with them. Senator Douglas' new sedition law must be enacted and enforced, suppressing all declarations that slavery is wrong, whether made in politics, in presses, in pulpits, or in private. We must arrest and return their fugitive slaves with greedy pleasure. We must pull down our Free State constitutions. The whole atmosphere must be disinfected from all taint of opposition to slavery, before they will cease to believe that all their troubles proceed from us.

I am quite aware they do not state their case precisely in this way. Most of them would probably say to us, "Let us alone, do nothing to us, and say what you please about slavery." But we do let them alone - have never disturbed them - so that, after all, it is what we say, which dissatisfies them. They will continue to accuse us of doing, until we cease saying.

I am also aware they have not, as yet, in terms, demanded the overthrow of our Free-State Constitutions. Yet those Constitutions declare the wrong of slavery, with more solemn emphasis, than do all other sayings against it; and when all these other sayings shall have been silenced, the overthrow of these Constitutions will be demanded, and nothing be left to resist the demand. It is nothing to the contrary, that they do not demand the whole of this just now. Demanding what they do, and for the reason they do, they can voluntarily stop nowhere short of this consummation. Holding, as they do, that slavery is morally right, and socially elevating, they cannot cease to demand a full national recognition of it, as a legal right, and a social blessing.

Nor can we justifiably withhold this, on any ground save our conviction that slavery is wrong. If slavery is right, all words, acts, laws, and constitutions against it, are themselves wrong, and should be silenced, and swept away. If it is right, we cannot justly object to its nationality - its universality; if it is wrong, they cannot justly insist upon its extension - its enlargement. All they ask, we could readily grant, if we thought slavery right; all we ask, they could as readily grant, if they thought it wrong. Their thinking it right, and our thinking it wrong, is the precise fact upon which depends the whole controversy. Thinking it right, as they do, they are not to blame for desiring its full recognition, as being right; but, thinking it wrong, as we do, can we yield to them? Can we cast our votes with their view, and against our own? In view of our moral, social, and political responsibilities, can we do this?

Wrong as we think slavery is, we can yet afford to let it alone where it is, because that much is due to the necessity arising from its actual presence in the nation; but can we, while our votes will prevent it, allow it to spread into the National Territories, and to overrun us here in these Free States? If our sense of duty forbids this, then let us stand by our duty, fearlessly and effectively. Let us be diverted by none of those sophistical contrivances wherewith we are so industriously plied and belabored - contrivances such as groping for some middle ground between the right and the wrong, vain as the search for a man who should be neither a living man nor a dead man - such as a policy of "don't care" on a question about which all true men do care - such as Union appeals beseeching true Union men to yield to Disunionists, reversing the divine rule, and calling, not the sinners, but the righteous to repentance - such as invocations to Washington, imploring men to unsay what Washington said, and undo what Washington did.

Neither let us be slandered from our duty by false accusations against us, nor frightened from it by menaces of destruction to the Government nor of dungeons to ourselves. LET US HAVE FAITH THAT RIGHT MAKES MIGHT, AND IN THAT FAITH, LET US, TO THE END, DARE TO DO OUR DUTY AS WE UNDERSTAND IT.