David Brooks: The Pope of the High and Holy Church of Both Sides Do It -- UPDATE

Where I live out here in the middle of Middle America, currently the big crime wave involves people boosting stuff from unlocked cars.  A van stops near a residential intersection at one or two in the morning.  A bunch of kids pile out.  They sweep the block, handle-testing every car parked on the street or in a driveway and if they find any unlocked (and they always do) they grab whatever isn't nailed down.  Change.  Phones and chargers.  Purses.  The occasional laptop.  The occasional handgun.  Whatever.

Petty larceny.

Since moving here from Chicago, I have found several of the local car-and-traffic-related traditions to be, uh, "quaint" would be the nearest approximation.  "Rush hour" here lasts about four minutes and is less congested than Devon Avenue at 4:00 AM on a Sunday morning, but people still complain.  Downtown parking is ample and really cheap, but for many locals who remember The Good Old Days when men wore hats and you could smoke wherever you wanted, it's still the end of civilization as they know it if they have to walk more than a block to get where they're going from where they park. 

And I still can't get used to the concept of people leaving their car unlocked anywhere but they do.  And because they do, roving bands of petty thieves pluck a few of them like pigeons every week, which leads to calls to the police, which leads to pleas from our beat cop at every community meeting to please lock your fucking cars, except the audience skews older, and community meetings are usually held in local churches, and so he carefully avoids saying the "fucking" even as he delivers the same fucking public service announcement to the same fucking  people for the hundredth fucking time.

Each week for the past 15 years, the New York Times Action Zeitgeist Van has dropped Mr. David Brooks off in the middle of literally hundreds of life-or-death national issues, all laid out and easy pickings for anyone with a national media platform who is even remotely interested in, say, establishing Justice, insuring domestic Tranquility, providing for the common defense, promoting the general Welfare, securing the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity or any of the other cool stuff in that song.

Furthermore, we are now chest-deep-and-sinking-fast in the Age of Trump, so in addition to the usual perversions and crimes against democracy that Republicans have been carrying out for decades, we are now faced with a nakedly fascistic madman in the White House who is gleefully executing the Republican party's Final Solution to the impediment of constitutional checks and balances by destroying every norm that supports our democracy.  Example: as of this writing, 375 former federal prosecutors have signed sign an open letter saying that Donald Trump has committed felony-level obstruction of justice.

And every week for the past 15 years, Mr. Brooks has amble down the block, mentally jiggling the handles on each obscenity committed by his Republican party ... and then moving on.

Because for the past 15 years, Mr. Brooks has only had one story to tell his readers.  One fairy tale he has spun over and over and over again, with grim, inhuman persistence.

The story of Both Sides Do It.

And being a lazy larcenist, Mr. Brooks will fiddle with every handle on every vital issue facing this country on the block -- from Abortion to Jay-Z -- until he can find one that he can open without effort.  An issue from which he can thieve enough odds and ends to assemble into his umpteenth shitty column on the Extremes on Both Sides.

Which he has once again done today.

The Tawdry Trump-Nadler War 

How to destroy checks and balances.

Go read it for yourself if you're of a mind to.

Or, if you happen to be teaching a class in how wildly-overpaid Beltway pundits have destroyed journalist by spending the last 30 years crushing every single Republican atrocity into the same Procrustean Bed of false equivalence, you could assign your students Mr. Brooks' column for this week's reading.

They can start here --

Donald Trump has never understood checks and balances. He’s never understood anything that stands in the way of his spoiled-boy will. The administration’s policy of blanket noncooperation with Congress is clearly a betrayal of how our system of government is supposed to work.

But Trump is far from the only villain in this showdown. If the House of Representatives wants to preserve its oversight power on the executive branch, then it has to be willing to oversee. It has to be willing to use its power in positive ways to improve the governance of this country...

-- and have a fine, old time vivisecting this cold little turd.

For extra-credit, perhaps some enterprising students could go even further. Perhaps, in the safety of an academic setting, they could dare to break the Beltway Iron Rule of David Brooks and demonstrate how virtually all of Mr. Brooks' hundreds of shitty Both Sides Do It columns are assembled in exactly the same way.

So many beats allocated to recount some ruthlessly dumbed-down version of The History Of  This Thing I'm Writing About.

Our system of checks and balances requires that political leaders hold two opposing ideas in their heads simultaneously. If you’re a political leader, the first is that your political opponents are wrong about many things and should be defeated in elections. The second is that you still need them. You need them to check your excesses, compensate for your blind spots and correct your mistakes.

This system has been decaying for decades, but it’s really disintegrated over the past year...

So many beats to lightly touch on the actual crisis:

Donald Trump has never understood checks and balances. He’s never understood anything that stands in the way of his spoiled-boy will. The administration’s policy of blanket noncooperation with Congress is clearly a betrayal of how our system of government is supposed to work.

One or two sentences to execute the trademark David Brooks Bullshit Pivot:

But Trump is far from the only villain in this showdown...

Then so many beats to introduce the false equivalence which will take up the rest of the column.

If the House of Representatives wants to preserve its oversight power on the executive branch, then it has to be willing to oversee. It has to be willing to use its power in positive ways to improve the governance of this country...

After which it's clear sledding (emphasis added) --

Republicans have crossed this line in the past, and Democrats crossed it this week, undermining the way the system of oversight is supposed to work.

Sure, William Barr distorted the report in his initial summary, but...

Democrats rushed into this. It took the Republicans about eight months between the time they issued a subpoena to Obama Attorney General Eric Holder..

This constitutional crisis is just for show. Partly the Democrats want the show because it just feels good to bash the administration...

Partly they are trying to appease the wing of the party that is calling for impeachment right away...

-- all the way to the inevitable scolding of Democrats for failing to deal with with a catastrophe which Mr. Brooks' Republican party created in a way which meets with Mr. Brooks approval:

The problem with any policy of appeasement is that it rarely appeases; it only emboldens. And that’s what’s happening. You can feel the atmosphere in the Democratic Party changing, getting more passionate, getting more caught up in the back-and-forth combat with Trump, getting more whipped up into impeachment furor.

Honestly, traditional Kabuki theater feels like an evening of drunken improve slam-poetry compared to the way Mr. Brooks has stylized and ritualized the manufacture of his Both Sides Do It columns.  Maybe some enterprising student can make something out of that.

As for me, I will shout my little shouts once more into the abyss.

I will note once again that, for all the blather he has been selling suckers for $24.99 about his tortured midlife-crisis wanderings between the Torah and the Beatitudes in search of God and Meaning, anyone who isn't one of Mr. Brooks' acolytes or fellow-travelers and has actually read what Mr. Brooks has actually written over these past 15 years with an unjaundiced eye can easily identify his true faith.

Both Sides Do It

Both Sides Do It is his most fervent catechism.

Both Sides Do It is the mistress he will always return to no matter what lies he tells himself or his wife.

Both Sides Do It is his Song of Songs.

Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth: for thy love is better than wine.

Because of the savour of thy good ointments thy name is as ointment poured forth, therefore do the virgins love thee.

Draw me, we will run after thee: the king hath brought me into his chambers: we will be glad and rejoice in thee, we will remember thy love more than wine: the upright love thee..

And whatever upscale architectural tours he may take of other houses of worship, Mr. David Brooks of The New York Times -- Pope Bias the First, Bishop of the Acela Corridor, aka, 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 and Servant of the servants of the Church of Lyin'tology -- Both Sides Do It will always be his true tabernacle.

The cathedral where he will always go to preach his sermons and collect his pay.

And I will note once again that the descent of Mr. Brooks' Republican party into fascism and madness and the concomitant rise of Republican monsters like Donald Trump would never have been possible without the relentless barrage of false equivalence punditry which has been the stock-in-trade of media quacks and parasites like Mr. David Brooks for decades.

Update:  In the face of my pitiless deconstruction of his wretched column (OK, a few others were involved) Mr. Brooks has made this late-breaking "amendment" to his column to acknowledge a basic fact which negates is entire argument.

One amendment to my column today. If Nadler believes the “constitutional crisis” is over Trump’s blanket refusal to cooperate with Congress (rather than the narrow subject of redaction) then is he correct.

— David Brooks (@nytdavidbrooks) May 10, 2019

Behold, a Tip Jar!