David Brooks 2019: The Year of Mr. Wolf

If you were only to read the first half of Mr. David Brooks' latest crime against journalism, you might come away slightly stunned that a New Years' miracle had been passed.  That for once, Mr. Brooks was actually right about something.

2019: The Year of the Wolves

Sure it's the same thing about which every other sane person on the planet has been right about all along:

Trump doesn’t recognize, understand or respect institutional authority. He only understands personal power. He sees every conflict as a personal conflict in which he destroys or gets destroyed.

And sure, it is the same crisis which Mr. Brooks had been gassily pooh-poohing just 18 months ago -- 

Let’s Not Get Carried Away

-- when he accidentally disclosed to his reader that no only was he a terrible writer and a pathologically dishonest thinker, but that he also sucked at being an editor back when that was his job at the Wall Street Journal:

I was the op-ed editor at The Wall Street Journal at the peak of the Whitewater scandal. We ran a series of investigative pieces “raising serious questions” (as we say in the scandal business) about the nefarious things the Clintons were thought to have done back in Arkansas.

Now I confess I couldn’t follow all the actual allegations made in those essays. They were six jungles deep in the weeds. But I do remember the intense atmosphere that the scandal created. A series of bombshell revelations came out in the media, which seemed monumental at the time. A special prosecutor was appointed and indictments were expected. Speculation became the national sport.

In retrospect Whitewater seems overblown. And yet it has to be confessed that, at least so far, the Whitewater scandal was far more substantive than the Russia-collusion scandal now gripping Washington.

And sure, in the same column Mr. Brooks went on to say that even a paragon of virtue pure as the driven snow could be made to look just as skeevy as Trump if the Mueller people went after them:

But even if you took a paragon of modern presidents—a contemporary Abraham Lincoln—and you directed a democratically unsupervised, infinitely financed team of prosecutors at him and gave them power to subpoena his staff and look under any related or unrelated rock in an attempt to bring him down, there’s a pretty good chance you could spur even this modern paragon to want to fight back.

You could spur even him to do something that had the whiff of obstruction...

Nonetheless, if you squinted real hard at today's column and quickly skimmed just the first half as one might skip a stone across a pond --

When the indictments come down, Trump won’t play by the rules. He’ll seek to delegitimize those rules. He’ll seek to delegitimize our legal institutions. He’ll personalize every indictment, slander every prosecutor. He’ll seek to destroy the edifice of law in order to save himself.

-- you might be lulled into thinking, "Well damn, at last this greasy little fraud has finally been forced to catch up with the rest of humanity."

But sadly, you would be wrong.

Because Mr. Brooks is not in the finally-catching-up-with-the-rest-of-humanity business.

Mr. Brooks is in the cleanup business.

Specifically, the Republican cleanup business.

More specifically, whenever the evidence of the Republican Party's top-to-bottom sadism, racism and madness threatens to haul it up to the windy gibbet of history for one last primal scream before facing righteous extinction, there you will find Mr. David Brooks of The New York Times, cleaning up the crime scene.

Dissolving his Republican Party's responsibility for their barbarism in an acid-bath of weasel words.  Pulverizing his Republican Party's complicity for the monsters they have created and turned loose on the country in the mighty Car Crusher of Both Siderism.

Re-read Mr. Brooks' column again, this time without squinting.  This time don't give a glance at a stoplight on your way to someplace better.  This time stick your head car and take a good look at Mr. Brooks' hasty camouflage.

Notice, for example, that nowhere in an article about a unhinged, criminal lunatic Republican president and his craven Republican enablers in the congress and in the media...

...is the word "Republican" ever mentioned.  Nor "GOP".  Nor "Conservative".

Instead, Mr. Brooks' blames a conspicuously non-specific group of called  "partisans" for the damage Donald Trump and the Republican Party are inflicting on America (emphasis added):

2019: The Year of the Wolves 

Can the Constitution withstand the partisans?

...It’s an especially good story to tell as we enter 2019, because this looks to be the year of the wolves — the year when savage and previously unimaginable things might happen.

It will be a year of divided government and unprecedented partisan conflict.

Instead of singling out the Republican congress for how utterly they have disgraced themselves and their offices by selling out their country and morphing overnight from the Party of Infinite Bengaaazi and Email Hearings into Donald Trump's Personal Bidet...

....Mr. Brooks' calls upon a conspicuously non-specific group of called  "congressional leaders" to arrest the damage Donald Trump and the Republican Party are inflicting on America (emphasis added):

At that point congressional leaders will face the defining choice of their careers: Where does their ultimate loyalty lie, to the Constitution or to their party?

If their loyalty is to the Constitution, they will step back and figure out, in a bipartisan way, how to hold the sort of hearings that Congress held during the Watergate scandal — hearings that inspired trust in the system. They will step back and find men and women of integrity — the modern versions of Archibald Cox, Elliot Richardson and Judge John Sirica — who would work to restore decency amid the moral rot.

On the other hand, if they put party above nation, they will see this crisis as just another episode in our long-running political circus. They’ll fall back in partisan lines. They’ll hurl abuse. Their primary concern will be: How can this help me in 2020?

Finally, notice how careful Mr. Brooks is not to call the Republican base "the Republican base".

Instead, they are merely "the roughly 40 percent of Americans who support Trump".

If that happens, then the roughly 40 percent of Americans who support Trump will see serious evidence that he committed felonies, but they won’t care! They’ll conclude that this is not about law or integrity. It’s just a political show trial. They’ll see there is no higher authority that all Americans are accountable to. It’s just power and popularity straight through.

If that happens, we’ll have to face the fact that our Constitution and system of law were not strong enough to withstand the partisan furies that now define our politics...

Notice how awkwardly the Philosopher King of the Acela Corridor pretends that the Republican base will suddenly lose faith in Truth, Justice and the American Way if "partisans" don't stop bickering.  But of course, as we dirty Liberals all know, the Party created the base, and the base manifested Trump.

We know that building a political base of reprogrammable meatbags that do not give a shit about Truth, Justice and the American Way has been the strategic objective of Mr. Brooks' Republican party for nearly as long as Mr. Brooks has been alive.

And now that GOP's has once again found itself chin deep and drowning in a bloody catastrophe of its own making, it is once again time for Mr. Brooks to earn his keep by helping them hide the body and shift the blame.

Welcome to 2019, everyone!

Behold, a Tip Jar!