The Ghost of ACA Sabotage Plots Past*

Since the latest battle in the Republican Party's 15 year long campaign to gut the ACA will reach its catastrophic conclusion in just a few days...and since we may well be going from one government shutdown to the next over that issue... and since a leitmotif of this little blog of mine has been the absolutely lethal effect which the Both Sides Do It lie has had on our media and our politics... in the spirit of the season, let's tie that all together in a big, Christmas bow and take a No Fair Remembering Stuff (™) journey back to the Before Time about which most dare not speak.

The date: September 25, 2013.  

The location: The United States Senate.

The issue: Passing the damn budget.

Tea Party crank, first-term Texas senator and possible Zodiac-killer, Ted Cruz, decided that heaving a boulder onto the budget-approval tracks by staging a filibuster to kill the Affordable Care Act by stopping the vote to pass the budget would conjure him some political capital.  So he began running his mouth on September 25th and didn't stop until the next day.  His all-night stunt included him quoting the Founding Fathers and the Bible and reading “Green Eggs and Ham.”  

There are videos of this on YouTube which I will spare you because I'm a nice guy.

Cruz's irritating stunt didn't delay the Senate vote on the ACA.  It didn't change any votes in the Senate, but it did manage to piss off a number of Senate Republicans.  However it also inspired Republican Tea Party lunatics in the House to just up and shut the whole government down to try to kill the Affordable Care Act.  

The Republican House kept the government shut down for 16 long days and then gave up.  

In the end the shutdown accomplished nothing but the temporary furlough of 800,000 federal workers, punching the economy in the gut and infuriating the general public.  This doomed idiocy was led by Heritage Action and the Fake Tea Party.  Republicans lost, Democrats won, and the government reopened with an agreement to vote on a clean funding bill that didn't screw with the ACA, on October 25 

Here is a portion of a speech that then-president Barack Obama gave during the shutdown, included here because it'll come up later.

Given all of this high drama, it should come as no surprise that on Sunday, October 20, 2013, the Sunday Shows were full of Gummint Shutdown Talk.  And, since I have extensive Sunday Morning Comin' Down archives --

-- I rooted around in there for a bit and my oh my, is this all going to sound familiar.  

This is me, from The Before Time of 2013.

This week, another drunk dial from the Valley of the Dead as the Both Sides Caucus fired up their fighters and screamed into the sky to strafe any attempt at truth and reconciliation to bits.

First, on "This Week...with The Clinton Guy Who Fell From Grace with the Sea" we begin with a panel of delusional teabaggers perfectly ordinary, indignant white Americans who express their love for Murrica and their completely rational concerns about how the Kenyan Usurper has personally stomped everything they ever loved to death by dutifully regurgitating every brain-dead, wingnut bumper-sticker you have ever heard of.

What was missing?

How about...an identical panel of non-crazy Liberals?

Anywhere?

Ever?

Patiently and lovingly deconstructing paranoid Conservative piffle?

For the one millionth time?

That you will never see on network teevee.

Instead, we pivot straight to Matthew Dowd (paid Conservative Shill who still has a job in front of a teevee camera for reasons that continue to defy understanding) and Adam Kinzinger (R, IL Whitelandia) tag-teaming the Kenyan Usurper for committing the single most horrific transgression against the serenity of the life forms who exist floating from party to party within the Washington D.C. terrarium: actually naming and blaming the people who were actually to blame for the most recent Republican clusterfuck:

DOWD I think that Martha, part of the real problem in this is until this part changes I think that we're going to be in this situation. We need to redefine winning differently. We define winning today as us versus them.

I'm going to score points and if I don't score points I'm going to decide who the winner and the loser is. We define everything as a battle, everything as a civil war. The president, I think, has tried to balance this tension, but I think he constantly falls into; I think he would like to bring the country together and be accommodating and do all that. He ran on that just like Bush ran on that.

The end result of Bush's didn't turn out well. The end results of President Obama's didn't turn out well. But I think President Obama lapses back into this sort of dualistic thing that, OK I wasn't able to do it, I'm going to point fingers and I'm going to, and you watched his speech last week. And his speech last week was a perfect microcosm--

Martha Raddatz, (warming the seat for The Clinton Guy Who Fell From Grace with the Sea): Let's change the tone, but maybe not. 

DOWD: Let's change the tone but they're at fault. Whenever you say they're at fault, you can't--

To her credit, Representative Donna Edwards, (D, MD) actually attempted to haul this umpteenth iteration of the same, sick, tired, trifling, poisonous, premeditated, highly profitable and genuinely evil Both Sider bullshit to the ground:

EDWARDS: Well Matt come on it is really important here. We don't want to do a rewrite of this. And in order not to do a rewrite, you actually have to understand who was, who was at fault. And there was real fault here. We had a majority of Republicans--

And for her trouble, she was promptly and frantically side-tackled (in a brutal, face-mask-grabbing, fact-snapping move called "Blitzering" in the lingua franca of Bullshit Mountain) by Ms. Raddatz:

RADDATZ: But that again is--

EDWARDS: And Democrats who wanted to keep the government opened.

RADDATZ: Peter let me switch a little bit here. I want you all to talk about Obamacare...

Translation: Please stop pointing out that more than half the guests on this show are paranoids, nihilists, rubes and liars!

Meanwhile, over at "Meet the Press" we find exactly the same song being sung in a different key.

First, to establish that one is not flat-out insane, one must make a token gesture in the direction of acknowledging that the Tea Party (for which you expressed such fondness back in 2010) might actually be a little tetched:

DAVID BROOKS:  I think the Republicans may decide to tire of doing face plants. And so I think the moderate Republicans, such as they exist, may have had a little manhood injection, willing to stand up to the Tea Party and actually be a much more bipartisan, or at least a more moderate, party, a more realistic party...

DAVID BROOKS: ...The question now is will the Republican Party have a civil war over the nature of the party? And I think we're beginning to see rumblings of that. The problem is, to have a civil war, you actually have to have two sides. The Tea Party has a side. They have a political movement. They have a think tank. They have a donor side. 

The other side, the Republicans who want to be able to compete in California, in New York, along the east coast and in Illinois, they don't have a side. They have American Crossroads, a PAC. They have a cocktail party. And so what they need to do is actually build some institutions, some think tanks, some fundraising efforts, some grassroots organizations, to match Tea Party, or else the Tea Party will take over.

driftglass aside/

Golly, I wonder whatever happened to those institutions and think tanks and passion and money?

Oh yeah!  I remember!   

In order to win elections, you handed all of that over to these people  

 

when you made Rush Limbaugh your "Majority Maker" 20 years ago.

/ end driftglass aside

Then, once they were done with all the icky work of grudgingly granting that Liberals have been right all along (without, of course, actually acknowledging the existence of Liberals or their rightness) 'bout a mile outta Both Sider Town...

...Andrea Mitchell says, "Pig Pen, this here's Rubber Duck...

...And I'm about to put the hammer down."

ANDREA MITCHELL:  Both sides are going to have to give.

'Cause we got a little ol' convoy

Rockin' through the night.

Yeah, we got a little ol' convoy,

Ain't she a beautiful sight?

DAVID BROOKS: Yeah. The question [President Barack Obama had] never answered in all these years is, "How do I build a governing majority in this circumstance?"

Come on and join our convoy

Ain't nothin' gonna get in our way.

DAVID GREGORY [rough translation]:  Fuck yeah!

We gonna roll this truckin' convoy

'Cross the U-S-A.

DAVID BROOKS:   He's got 40 House Republicans who are never going to be with him. How does he siphon them off and get the other Republicans on his side to get a majority coalition? You have to anger the left a little to build that bipartisan coalition. He's never figured out a way to do that.

Convoy!

E. J. Dionne was on-hand to provide some tired, token push-back -- 

--compared to the Democrats, oddly particularly in Tea Party. The president, a lot of times, though, when people say the president should lead, what they want him to do is adopt Republican positions and then push for those. That's not leadership, that's capitulation. I think we should stop talking about a grand bargain and try to have normal government in the next two months. Let's just get rid of some of this sequester, which is hurting the economy, and which a lot of Republicans don't like.

-- to which absolutely no one paid any heed.  Of course, if E.J. Dionne did want anyone to pay any attention to what he was saying, all he really needed to do was turn on Mr. Brooks fast-fast-fast, put a finger right in his face and precede his remarks with "Look fucko..."  But then he would be faced with the unhappy task of explaining to his wife and all the little Dionnes why daddy didn't have no job no more, so don't waste to much time waiting at that bus stop...

End of 2013 Sunday Show tour.  Before exiting the vehicle, please check around your seat for any personal effects (or affects, hahaha) you may have dropped during the journey.

And looking back at that 2013 shitshow, the thing is, Republicans were entirely to blame. 100%.  There was no dispute about that.  What these two men were bitching about was that Obama had violated the legacy media's Both Sides Do It commandment by saying what everyone knew out loud.  That Republicans were at fault.  Period.  

And remember, this was a year and a half after respected political scientists Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein published their now-famous article in the Washington Post, "Let's just say it: The Republican Party is the problem".  And the two diametrically opposed reactions to the article tell the story of just how corrupt the legacy media had become.  Because while it got both Mann and Ornstein blackballed from the Sunday Shows, it also quickly became the most widely read, shared and forwarded opinion piece they had ever written, even briefly crashing the Post's comment section servers.

Also, remember that the Mann and Ornstein column came a full decade after the dawn of the Liberal blogosphere, which gave us the capacity to say -- in print and in public -- all the stuff we'd been saying among ourselves for decades, but the legacy media wouldn't touch with a barge pole.  Especially our assault on the Both Sides Do It Lie.

But in October of 2013 that patently ridiculous lie was still being staunchly defended across the board by America's media elite on the Sunday Shows.

And in December of 2025 it still is.

*Note:  We mentioned this incident briefly on our December 23rd episode of The Professional Left Podcast.  However, we got the timeline backwards: Cruz's filibuster preceded the shutdown, it didn't follow it.  Management regrets the error and, rest assured, although our entire research staff and all of our archivists have all fled into the hills in shame, those responsible will be hunted down and brutally reprimanded.  

Burn The Lifeboats

 

Professional Left Podcast Episode 956: 2025 In Review, Part 3 (of 3)

"All the pieces matter." --  Detective Lester Freamon, The Wire

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We Have Aways Been At War With Christmas

From me, 20 years ago, in the Haloscan days.  Also the pre-YouTube days, so I have swapped out a long-dead link to a web page with an MP3 (miracle!) for a video.

Back when we were trying to construct salient political and media critiques from bearskins and stone knives.

Mithras, you magnificent bastard! 

 

I read your book!

General George S. Santa whips up the 101st Chairborne-Again before dispatching them into the trenches to lay waste to Liberals in the name of the Prince of Peace…

(And if you're so inclined, you can click here to get the full, Sensurround Effect of this fiery rhetoric…)

Be seated.

I want you to remember that no bastard ever won the War for Christmas by dying for his dogma. He won it by making the other poor, dumb bastard die for his dogma.

Men, all this stuff you've heard about America not wanting to fight, wanting to stay out of the War for Christmas is a lot of horse dung. Fundymericans, traditionally, love to fight for Jesus. All real Fundymericans love the sting of battle.

When you were kids you all admired the champion draft deferrer, the biggest rich kid, John Birch, and the guy whose daddy could hire the toughest boxer. Fundymericans love a winner and will not tolerate a loser…except for the whole War of Northern Aggression thing.

And the Jim Crow thing.

And the “Segregation Now” thing.

And the “Loving vs. Virginia” thing.

But other than that, Fundymericans play to win all the time. I wouldn't give a hoot in hell for a man who lost and laughed. That's why Fundymericans have never lost and will never lose a war…and Vietnam does NOT count because it was only a “police action” and not a Real War like the War on Christmas. And anyway, we coulda won – were on the verge of winning – when we were betraaaayed by Cronkite and Jane Fonda and the dirty hippies.

Anyhoo, the very thought of losing is hateful to Fundymericans. As is the thought of Tolerance. And Science. And Causality. And Compromise. And every other religion in the history of the Universe.

Now, a Chairborne-Again army is a team. It lives, eats, sleeps, fights as a team. This individuality and “thinking for yourself” and “asking questions of the Dear Leader” stuff is a bunch of crap. The bilious bastards who wrote that stuff about individuality for the Washington Post don't know anything more about real battle than they do about the why fornicating and terrorism are both caused by feminists, queers, teaching Evolution in the public schools and the ACLU.

Now we have the finest food, Chick Tracts, the best hair, and the most extremely heterosexual men in the world. You know, by God I...I actually pity those poor bastards we're going up against, by God, I do. We're not just going to shoot these Liberal “Good Will Towards Men” bastards; we're going to cut out their living guts and use them to grease the treads of Santa’s Sleigh. We're going to murder those lousy “Tolerant”, “Turn the other check” bastards by the Hanukah Bushel.

Now, some of you boys, I know are wondering whether or not you'll chickenhawk out under fire. Don't worry about that.

I can assure you that you will, just like your fathers and grandfathers before you.

That is, if this were an actual “war” war. Then we’d just send poor Negros, Spics and hillbillies off to do our fighting for us.

But this is just some faked-up Holiday Hatred extruded by knee-biters like Bill O'Reilly to keep the stoopids distracted and divided, facing the wrong direction, and screaming wrong slogans so they won’t notice how routinely and ineptly Dear Leader’s Administration lies to them and fucks them over.

The Liberals are the enemy. Wade into them. Spill their blood in the name of the Redeemer. Shoot them in the belly for the sake of the Lamb of God. When you put your hand into a bunch of Nondenominational “Holiday” goo that a moment before was your best friend's Manger Scene, you'll know what to do!

Now there's another thing I want you to remember: I don't want to get any messages that we are holding our position. We're not holding anything. Let the Liberals do that. We are advancing constantly and we're not interested into holding onto anything except the enemy.

To celebrate the fake birthday of the King of Kings, we're going to hold onto him by the nose and we're going to kick him in the ass. In the name of the Son of the Living God, we're going to kick the hell out of him all the time and we're going to go through him like mouthbreathers through a WalMart on double-coupon day!

Now, there's one thing that you men will be able to say when you get back to you Mommy’s Basement, and you may thank God for it. Thirty years from now when you’re sitting around your fireside with your grandson on your knee, and he asks you what did you do in the great Operation Eternal Clusterfuck in Iraq?

You can proudly say, "Well, first I called everyone that didn't support the Dear Leader a traitor and a coward. Then I cowered under the bed like a little bitch while far better men and women than I went off to bleed and die to cover the margin call on my Dear Leader's stupid, reckless gamble. Then I re-elected him! Then I went out and spit on a dirty Jew to commemorate the fake birthday of my Lord and Savior."

Alright, now you sons-a-bitches, you know how I feel. I will be proud to lead you wonderful fucktards into a completely faked-up, Potemkin battle anytime, anywhere.

Like, say, Easter.

That's all.

Burn The Lifeboats

 

How Dare Anyone Be Surprised That David Brooks is in The Epstein Files

To all of the many hundreds (thousands?) of well-wishers who helpfully filled my email in-box ... and BlueSky notifications ... and every other form of digital communication ... with the news that Mr. David Brooks is in the Epstein Files, thank you.  I genuinely appreciate it.  

To all of you wonderful people who gently suggested that I get to goin' on a post about Mr. David Brooks being in the Epstein Files right!now!, well, I already sorta wrote one.  It was a month ago, when Mr. Brooks' close personal friend, Larry Summers, abruptly and meteorically fell from grace from the Acela Corridor crowd when his creepy correspondence with Jeffrey Epstein was released to the public.  

You might have read about it.  It was, as they used to say, in all the papers.  So, to repeat what I wrote a month ago...

If, like me, to make ends meet, you've had to severely economize by letting your subscription to "Tufthunters and Toffs Quarterly" lapse, you might have missed this press release from June, 2025:

WASHINGTON — In advance of Independence Day, a group of prominent Americans, led by former U.S. Treasury Secretary Lawrence H. Summers and New York Times columnist David Brooks, is coming together to provide advice and recommendations about how schools and colleges can best transmit American traditions and civic ideals to the next generation.

The group is seeking to address four related challenges:

• Social cohesion is eroding on both sides of the political spectrum. Right-wing white nationalists see some citizens as more American than others, while left-wing race essentialists undermine what we have in common as Americans...

This is perfection.  If you had paid me to write a press release about how the old, 1990s triangulation politics/"Third Way" plague ship was still afloat, still flush with unlimited funds, and still pressing its wingtips on the throat of American politics, I could not have done a better job.  

But if, like me, you still have an internet connection where you can get news -- or at least headlines -- for free, I'll bet you didn't miss headlines like these.

From The Washington Post:

After decades of power, Washington shuns Larry Summers over Epstein ties

From the Financial Times:

Lawrence Summers’ extraordinary fall from grace

From NBC:

Larry Summers' years of emails with Jeffrey Epstein roil Harvard

Harvard faculty members and students expressed unease with the correspondence between Summers and Epstein included in the House’s recent document release.

From Politico:

Larry Summers steps down from OpenAI

Politico again:

How Could Larry Summers Be So Stupid?

From Harvard Magazine:

Summers Takes Leave Amid Harvard Probe

From David Brooks' former employer, the Wall Street Journal.

How Larry Summers’s Power Delayed the Reckoning Over His Epstein Ties

The former Treasury secretary and Harvard president’s enormous network and clout kept him immune from past Jeffrey Epstein revelations. But this time was just too much.

From the Guardian, regarding David Brooks' current employer:

New York Times cuts ties with Larry Summers over Epstein emails

Publication said it will not renew former treasury secretary’s contract in latest fallout after release of emails 

And just yesterday, in the very same paper where David Brooks works:

Lawrence Summers Came Back From Scandals. Will Epstein Emails Prevent That?

The former Harvard president has come back from controversy before, but revelations in new Epstein emails are threatening his omnipresence in public life.

First of all, New York Times...

And second, am I now going to imply that just because Larry Summers' ties to Jeffrey Epstein were unceremoniously and humiliatingly dumped into public view in November of 2025, that this is the reason why his friend David Brooks (with whom he was very reverentially conjoined in June of 2025) has, just days later, fled any and all discussion of the Epstein Files like a scalded dog?

David Brooks, November 21, 2025:

The Epstein Story? Count Me Out.

Of course not.  I would never suggest that merely because of this one incident...

Hey.  Me again. Back here in mid-December, 2025.  And it turned out that it wasn't merely this one incident which prompted Mr. Brooks to haul out his oldest, most despicable and most toxic responsibility dispersion weapon -- his Both Sides Do It razor-in-the-apple -- and lob it into the middle of this grotesque and growing scandal:

I can kind of understand why Machiavellian Republicans would spew conspiracy theories. Those theories stoke cynicism, which serves Republican ends: The government can never be trusted; politicians are all liars. Cynicism causes people to check out of politics. Or, to be more precise, it causes them to care only about politics when they can destroy something. As The Economist noted in an editorial in 2019, “Cynical politicians denigrate institutions, then vandalize them.” It’s a straight line from Candace Owens to Russell Vought.

What I don’t understand is why some Democrats are hopping on this bandwagon. They may believe that the Epstein file release will somehow hurt Trump. But they are undermining public trust and sowing public cynicism in ways that make the entire progressive project impossible. They are contributing to a public atmosphere in which right-wing populism naturally thrives.

It wasn't merely the fact that his friend's involvement with the most infamous pedophile and child sex trafficker in modern history had Summers teetering up on the windy gibbet of professional, personal and legal catastrophe that had Mr. Brook hand-having the entire Epstein File scandal away as just QAnon madness, which has "taken over America" and no one except David Brooks was immune:

But the most important reason the Epstein story tops our national agenda is that the QAnon mentality has taken over America. The QAnon mentality is based on the assumption that the American elite is totally evil and that American institutions are totally corrupt. 

This was David Brooks protesting too much.  Way too much.  Perhaps possessed of a sick, sinking feeling that, sooner or later his own picture was going to crop up in the files of the most infamous pedophile and child sex trafficker in modern history.  Pictures taken at an event hosted by Epstein less than two years after was granted early release following his conviction and imprisonment in Florida for procuring a child for prostitution and soliciting a prostitute.  (In addition to that, Epstein’s original plea deal itself was widely seen as extraordinarily lenient, secretive, and unfair to victims, and because it gave Epstein (and his criminal associates) special treatment unavailable to ordinary defendants. )

Perhaps the humiliating public takedown of his friend Larry Summers coupled with the chilling certainty that, sooner or later, his own page in the Epstein files would come tumbling into public view picture, prompted Brooks to use the considerable influence his New York Times credentials give him to write a whole column in which he was practically screaming that the Epstein scandal was mere QAnon nuttiness and that no sensible person should be paying it any mind.

Add to all of this the fact that Mr. David Brooks is less of a journalist in any sense of thate word and more of what the kids call a "starfucker".  Which I understand to be:

A derogatory term for a person who seeks personal advantage—status, power, money, or career advancement—by ingratiating themselves with famous, powerful, or influential people, often in a transparently opportunistic way.

Yep.  That's our Mr. Brooks. (I am now just gonna repeat what I wrote back in  November, so if you already read it, feel free to exit through the Gift Shop :-)

Among the most influential members of the media elite, there has been no more loyal handmaiden to America's most pampered and privileged oligarchs and power-brokers than David Brooks.  

Perhaps you remember when billionaire despot statue aficionado Harlan Crow got publicly crosswise  over one of his minor purchases -- Supreme Court associate justice Clarence Thomas -- it was David Brooks who rose unhesitatingly to Crow's defense, telling the PBS News Hour audience:

Brooks:  Yes, first, I should say I have been friends with Harlan Crow for about 20 years. I find him a wonderful man. He's hosted me at his home in Dallas and in New York. So, reader — viewers should know that that's my connection to Harlan.

And so that's disclosure. And that's what I wish Clarence Thomas had done in this case.

I think viewers are smart enough to know. I'm probably biased in Harlan. I really like Harlan. I think he's a wonderful guy. 

Or perhaps you remember David Brooks' Sad Bastard Divorcé years, during which Mr. "Marriage Is The Bedrock of Civilization" never told anyone he was dumping/had dumped his wife, and during which he wrote barely-sublimated Sad Bastard columns about being alone in hotels ... about working so fucking hard to make you happy, Sarah, and give you everything you ever wanted ... about buying a home that led your humble scrivener to interpret it thusly: "Something tells me that Mr. David Brooks' J-Date profile -- "Most Ubiquitous Conservative Public Intellectual in America seeks 30-something exotic dancer who is into Burke, TED talks, humility and long, pointless walks right down the middle of everything" -- might not be yielding the kind of results the brochures had promised, and that he has now moved down-market to a more realistic price range."

Or perhaps you remember when lonely divorcé David Brooks went full Humbert-Humbert staring up at a dance studio full of athletic young women.  

Or perhaps you remember that during the middle of his Sad Bastard Era, perhaps to perk up their most well-known op-ed spinner of oligarch-friendly fairy tales, someone at the Times thought it would be an excellent idea to send Brooks on an all-expenses-paid $120,000 vacation so he could [checks notes] report back on what rich people do on vacation.  

The unmistakable through line of David Brooks' career is that he likes rich and powerful people.  He likes them a lot and has always aspired to be one of them.  He likes to rub elbows with them, glean exciting, insider rich-person insights from them, serve on boards with them and generally get invited past the velvet rope used to keep the hoi polloi out, and participate in rich-person stuff with them. 

And all of that and more has only been possible because David Brooks was given a column in The New York Times in which he has spent decades writing flattering fairy tales about America as his rich patrons wish it to be, rather than America as it actually is.  Which is why David Brooks has been so consistently and wildly wrong about almost everything.  And yet it clearly doesn't matter to the Sulzberger family how frequently or spectacularly Brooks shit the op-ed bed because of, well, things like this.  

Brooks:  Yes, first, I should say I have been friends with Harlan Crow for about 20 years. I find him a wonderful man. He's hosted me at his home in Dallas and in New York. So, reader — viewers should know that that's my connection to Harlan.

And so, once again, I would never suggest that merely because Lawrence Summers bellyflopped onto the hard pavement of the Epstein scandal, his friend David Brooks dismissed the whole thing as old news so let's just move along here people!

...Brooks' [November] column -- his usual buffoonish misdiagnosis of the state of American politics and his role-playing as his idea of a what a sober, sensible Democrat from an imaginary Democratic Party who lives in an imaginary America which does not exist might say and do -- can all be ignored.  The answer to why this particular asinine column exists is not to be found there: it's just pantomime for the wealthy, clueless mopes who still take David Brooks seriously.

It seems to me that the reason this "Everyone Should Shut Up About The Epstein Files Right Now!" column exists is fairly simple.  David Brooks has spent his entire adult life using every lever anyone would give him to ingratiate himself to America's wealthy and powerful elite.  Entangling himself in their causes, interests and amusements.  And, like Larry Summers, there is a very good chance that the names many of David Brooks' patrons and benefactors [or even, it turns out Brooks himself] are going to find their way into the very long string of very lurid, Epstein-related headlines over the next couple of years.

Which, for Brooks could be incredibly embarrassing.

Why Does David Brooks Still Have A Fucking Job?

 

Professional Left Podcast Episode 955: 2025 In Review, Part 2

"That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history." --  Aldous Huxley

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Professional Left Podcast Episode 954: 2025 In Review, Part 1

"“The past is never dead. It's not even past." --  William Faulkner

• 
  

In Certain Corners of The New York Times...

...it's always 2005.

A sheltering bower, protected from the real world by the Sulzberger family's firm belief that the nation is crying out for the opinions of these two bootless relics.

Burn The Lifeboats

Professional Left Podcast Episode 953: When The Music Stops

"Hatred is not the norm. Prejudice is not the norm. Suspicion, dislike, jealousy, scapegoating — none of those are the transcendent facet of the human personality. They’re diseases. They are the cancers of the soul." --  Dick Van Dyke's reading of a speech written for him by Rod Serling

•