Monday, February 05, 2018

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):

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

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:
I'm trying Eileen.

I'm really, really trying.



Behold, a Tip Jar!

6 comments:

trgahan said...

For as long as I have been old enough to pay attention what do conservatives ALWAYS do when Republicans are in free fall, polls are in the toilet, and even their own can't stomach the talking points long enough to repeat them into a camera?

Make it all about Abortion...natch!

RUKidding said...

https://www.thisamericanlife.org/637/words-you-cant-say/act-two-3

An episode from "This American Life." Has nada to do with abortion. It's about gunz - fake 'n real. Why am I bringing this up, you ask? Well, besides the fact that it's intersting, it highlights how incredibly brainwashed (no other word for it) so many on the right are. There's quotes not just from politicians and the usual NRA types, but also from some undoubtedly "economically anxious" good ole Looousianna White Supremacists waxing lyrical about their di.. uh guns.

Again you ask: why bring this up? Because the White Surpemacist crowd is barking mad blaming the "liberal media" and us horrid LIEbruls at every moment for "hating" guns, for "hating" gun owners, for wanting to "take away all of their guns," blah de blah you get the picture. Flat out NUTS. No truck with reality.

HOW do you reason with such brainwashed morons?

Shorter A: you don't; you can't; don't bother.

Ergo, DFBs is a moron. Whyever should anyone "offer up" some sort of "concession" on abortion - in this case the 20 week situation - in the "hopes" that it'll somehow get conservative to Wuvs us libtards.

That'll be a big fat old: NOPE.

How stupid does Fuckcakes Brooks think we are anyway?

I think everyone who pays the slightest bit of attention to politics now gets it that there's no "reasoning" with conservatives. They live in their Rush/Fox/Christiany media world, where, clearly, the one major message is: hate, Hate, HATE and FEAR the Libtards and REFUSE outright to ever listen to them, and don't you even THINK about negotiating with them because they are the Anti-Christ out to steal your gunz and kill alla your babies and make your wimminz stop making sammiches for you while stealing alla yer munnies to give to the blahs, the browns and the Mooslinz. And so on.

DFB can stick it where the sun don't shine.

File under: what else is new?

dinthebeast said...

I was gonna say that DFB had stepped in it again, but really, when did he ever step out of it?

-Doug in Oakland

Yastreblyansky said...

thanks for "redoubtable", I fucking love that. You can redoubt me any time you want. On the Easter Island Brooks, please prepare that photoshop as quickly as possible.

Robt said...

DFB realizes Trump watches F&F, Right.

That Trump doesn't read his grand elaborations on the superiority of the republican brotherhood.
The ideology he nor any republican has ever lived by or up to?

You think Brooks hired a 6 year old ghost writer to do his columns?

dave said...

mistuh brook's job is to say the words...'we're ok.'

that your hatey, feary, greedy selves are just fine.

people use information the way a drunkard uses a lamp post, for support and not illumination, and ignore the thing called conscience because we will rationalize it until we can't hear it... that your core values are not in conflict with our success as a union---even though with ANY introspection they sure as hell are...