David Brooks Versus The Thresher Blades: Part 1,000

Hard to believe it's been almost 13 years since I wrote this about Mr. David Brooks on my then-brand-new "weblog".

[David Brooks] isn't simply misguided and there is little chance that he's ever going to see the light and change his mind: he reasons backward from his ideology into his limp diatribes, instead of forward from the facts to a reasonable conclusion.

Instead...I believe Brooks is a serious, committed Wingnut middleman -- sort of the Fundamentalist's pet PBS Mennonite -- which IMHO is much more dangerous than a fully outed Tom] DeLay.

Brooks' job is to sell the poison to the Center: to reassure the Moderates and “Reagan Democrats” and to coax the Undecideds into the Windowless Fundy Panel Truck by dandying their evil up in perfumed NYT-speak, and since the battle for the future of the country takes places in the middle, these wingnuts-in-sheep's-clothing are the ones that deserve extra-special beatings.

The good news is, BoBo obviously doesn't know he's an idjit. Instead, he thinks he's tricksey, which is why he keeps obligingly waddling into the thresher blades.

And in all that time -- after all the tectonic upheavals of the last 13 years -- Mr. Brooks has not really changed one iota.  He still writes myopic nostalgia-porn for feeble-minded plutocrat shut-ins about a world that never was.  Absurdist fiction about a non-existent Reasonable Republican Party whose rebirth is always just around the corner.  Big, sweeping lies about a Potemkin America, populated by cartoon characters pulled straight out of his ass.  A long-running, New York Times'-subsidized fairy tale of noble Whigs being led through treacherous hippie country by the humble David Brooks.

Usually (he said, speaking as America's leading Brooksologist) the "What Is David Brooks Lying About Today?" beat is a lonely one.  Because, frankly, it can be boring as shit.  Mr. Brooks is the Giant Easter Island Head of American political punditry.  After all this time, no one has any idea how he got there, and no amount of shoving or shouting will budge him (Yes, none of what I just wrote about the moai is strictly true. So what?  I have never believed in letting pedantic nitpickery get in the way of a metaphor.)

Mr. Brooks simply doesn't care that he is wrong almost all of the time.  His editors don't care.  His publishers don't care.  The other Respected Media Outlets which pay him to sit in front of their microphones and cameras and say ridiculously stupid things don't care.  His colleagues don't care.  His publicist doesn't care. The venues that book him to speak to large audiences in big gassy language about things he knows nothing about don't care.

And because all of these individuals and institutions are deeply invested in pretending that Mr. Brooks isn't a peddler of malignant twaddle, he is free to sail dirigibly on, presumably forever, on a permanent paid vacation from the Real world and uninterested in those of us grubby human who live there (take it away Walt Whitman):

GLIDING o’er all, through all,

Through Nature, Time, and Space,

As a ship on the waters advancing,

And since it is 100% clear to anyone who bothers to pay any attention to such things that the entire American political media cosmos is engaged in a successful, long-term campaign to make sure pundits like Mr. David Brooks are never brought to book for any of the stupid, noxious shit they say, over the long haul, covering the likes of Mr. Brooks can become really, really tedious.  Because, sadly, we are not even close to a Golden Age of Copernican and Galilean Punditry where political theories are actually tested against observable reality and discarded when it turns out to be wrong.

No, we are still deep in the shadow of Ptolemaic Flat-Earth Punditry, where suffocating myths about our politics and our media are now held in place by nothing but the brute force of our wealthiest and most powerful institutions.  Dissent from the empty ritual and superstitious drivel of  the High and Holy Church Both Siderism will never be permitted from the pulpits of that church, and so dissidents are forced to take the long view and try as best we can with our naked eye and our crude instruments to record the characteristics of our political cosmos Tycho Brahe-style against the day when the Reality-centric Political Cosmology which those observations support finally up-ends the toxic Both Siderism Cosmology which is killing this country.

Which, as I mentioned, can get to be kind of tedious.

But every now and then a comet streaks across the sky --

The Abortion Memo

David Brooks

FEB. 1, 2018

To: Democratic Party Leaders
From: Imaginary Democratic Consultant
Re: Late-Term Abortions
Dear Democratic Leaders...

-- and suddenly everybody notices that something is drastically wrong with a system that keeps a blithering idiot like Mr. David Brooks employed and respectable as he waddles into the thresher blades over and over and over again, decade after decade.

It won't last long because, without a sufficiently robust and well-funded Liberal media infrastructure to sustain them, no Liberals critiques of the status quo -- no matter how exhaustive or irrefutable -- can prevail against the inexorable, corporate pressure of the High and Holy Church Both Siderism,

But while it lasts it is a sight to see.

Here, Erin Matson takes Mr. Brooks apart point by point (click through to Twitter to read all of it):

Access to abortion is indivisible part of progressive agenda — there is no economic justice without reproductive justice. Progressives believe in science, access to healthcare, ending discrimination, gender equality, racial justice. Abortion rights part of all those things. (1)

— Erin Matson (@erintothemax) February 2, 2018

Here, Jamil Smith takes Mr. Brooks' ignorant, insulting piffle out behind the barn:

Abortion is not a bargaining chip, @nytdavidbrooks. Bodily autonomy is not available in a trade. I wasn’t even going to bother sharing this rubbish, but other men need to speak up and tell you about yourself. You obviously aren’t listening much to women. https://t.co/dqhsvRzabb

— Jamil Smith (@JamilSmith) February 2, 2018

Andy Richter:

Late term abortions occur in instances where the development of a fetus becomes so abnormal that the mother's life is endangered, or she is faced with carrying to term a baby that cannot survive outside the womb. It is a necessary, humane procedure. Fuck you, David Brooks. https://t.co/BB0giffvmr

— Andy Richter (@AndyRichter) February 2, 2018

Jesse Lehrich:

David Brooks should've taken like 10 minutes to learn why some women get abortions after 20 weeks before writing this crap.

protecting their rights is worth fighting for, even if it's not politically expedient.

here are some of their stories:https://t.co/qtz5gZR2Tw https://t.co/acA4JJM53R

— Jesse Lehrich (@JesseLehrich) February 2, 2018

Here the redoubtable Yastreblyansky grinds Mr. Brooks into a fine paste:

Mister Imaginary

Here the Rude One sets that paste on fire:

David Brooks's Latest Column on Abortion, Corrected

(Note: I took David Brooks's completely idiotic anti-choice "column" today where he says that Democrats should give up on preventing a ban on abortions after 20 weeks, as if that would quell the anti-choice forces in this country, and I reverse engineered it. Brooks pretended that he was a Democratic consultant offering advice to the party. So I went Republican. It was ridiculously easy to write this from the opposing side.)

Here, Wonkette does their Wonkette thing:

David Brooks’s Abortion Column Should Have Been Aborted

And here, just for fun, Eileen De Freest wishes that someone would do this type of refutation for every bullshit David Brooks column:

Thanks, Erin. Great thread. Too bad you can't do this type of refutation for every @nytdavidbrooks piece.

— Eileen De Freest (@eileendefreest) February 2, 2018

I'm trying Eileen.

I'm really, really trying.

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