In Direct Violation of the Beltway Iron Rule of David Brooks...

...I will now nuke any chance I ever had of landing a sweet op-ed or cable news gig by daring -- yes daring! --

-- to remember some shit Mr. David Brooks of The New York Times wrote less than one month ago:

We’ve All Just Made Fools of Ourselves — Again

...
Maybe it’s time to declare a national sabbath. Maybe it’s time to step back from the scandalmongering and assess who we are right now.

Democrats might approach this moment with an attitude of humility and honest self-examination. It’s clear that many Democrats made grievous accusations against the president that are not supported by the evidence. It’s clear that people like Beto O’Rourke and John Brennan owe Donald Trump a public apology. If you call someone a traitor and it turns out you lacked the evidence for that charge, then the only decent thing to do is apologize.
...

The sad fact is that Watergate introduced a poison into the American body politic. Richard Nixon’s downfall was just and important, but it opened up the mouthwatering possibility that you don’t need to do the hard work of persuading people to join your side. Instead, you can destroy your foes all at once through scandal.

And posting it chock-a-block with what Mr. David Brooks wrote in The New York Times today:

It’s Not the Collusion, It’s the Corruption

The Mueller report is like a legal version of a thriller movie in which three malevolent forces are attacking a city all at once. Everybody’s wondering if the three attackers are working together. The report concludes that they weren't, but that doesn’t make the situation any less scary or the threat any less real.

The first force is Donald Trump, who represents a threat to the American systems of governance...

When Trump appears in the Mueller report, he is often running roughshod over these systems and violating these values. He asks his lawyer to hamper an investigation. He asks his F.B.I. director to take the heat off his allies. He tries to get the relevant investigators fired. I don’t know if his actions meet the legal standard of obstruction of justice, but they certainly meet the common-sense standard of interference with justice.
...

The Mueller report indicates that Trump was not colluding with Russia. But it also shows that working relationships were beginning to be built, through networkers like Paul Manafort, Donald Trump Jr. and Roger Stone. More important, it shows that many of the Trumpists, the Russians and the WikiLeaks crowd all understood that they were somehow adjacent actors in the same project.
...

The Justice Department has not been defended from political assault. William Barr’s news conference before the report’s release eroded any claim to impartiality and trustworthiness.

Trump doesn’t seem to have any notion of loyalty to an office. All power in his eye is personal power, and the government is there to serve his Sun God self. He’ll continue to trample the proper systems of government.

Two things.

First, it is genuinely hilarious to see Mr. Brooks -- a mediocrity who has spent the last 15 years using his influential and wholly-unearned position in the media to pump Both Siderist toxins into our political discourse -- fixating on the idea that everyone else is slowly poisoning our politics.

Second, the alert reader will immediately notice that, in telling the tale of the Three Evil Wizards who are responsible for all of our problems  -- Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin and Julian Assange -- Mr. Brooks has made the entire Republican Party, the entire Conservative movement, Fox News, Hate Radio and the last 50 years of American political history...

...completely disappear from history.  Which, as I have been documenting on this blog for decades, is all part of Mr. Brooks' Great Project:

Second, it is now painfully clear that Mr. Brooks is engaged in a long-term project to completely rewrite the history of American Conservatism: to flense it of all of the Conservative social, political  economic and foreign policy debacles that make Mr. Brooks wince and repackage the whole era as a fairy tale of noble Whigs being led through treacherous hippie country by the humble David Brooks.

And odds are he'll get away with it too.

The rest is left as an exercise for the reader.

Behold, a Tip Jar!