Those Who Do Not Remember History

Will have long and profitable careers as Neoconservative war pimps.

On the eve of the release of his terrible, terrible book (PZ Myers's lovely review gives the game away, thus saving you from rushing out to your local municipal airport to buy a copy) --

...I learned to loathe Harold and Erica, the two upscale avatars of upper-middle-class values that Brooks marches through life in the story. And then I began to resent the omniscient narrator who narrates this exercise in unthinking consumption and privilege that is, supposedly, the ideal of happiness; it's like watching a creepy middle-aged man fuss over his Barbie and Ken dolls, posing them in their expensive accessories and cars and houses and occasionally wiggling them in simulated carnal relations (have no worries, though: Like Barbie and Ken, no genitals appear anywhere in the book), while periodically pausing to tell his audience how cool it all is, and what is going on inside his dolls' soft plastic heads.

-- David Brooks almost tripped over his own dick by accidentally reminding everyone that he is almost always horribly wrong about everything.

Especially things that involve sending other people's children off to die for one of his pet Neocon foreign adventures.

Fortunately for his future book sales, his genuinely jaw-dropping gaffe happened on an obscure foreign program from an exotic and distant land called "PBS" where 10 of the 11 people watching were doing so because the tepid drone of Jim Lehrer's voice puts their newborns to sleep better than the vibrations from either their washing machine or their idling car.

In my case, however, it was enough to halt me mid-stride -- flamingo-like -- bowl of pasta in one hand and say "Did David Fucking Brooks really just say what I think he said?" aloud to an empty room:

MARK SHIELDS: I think [Libya is] going to play out, Jim, absent a visible, factual evidence of a tragedy of great human dimensions there, I think there will be no entry on the part of the United States militarily.

I mean, Secretary Gates again delivered the sobering news for the administration and to the administration critics, which was a no-fly zone is an act of war. You know, you don't simply say -- it's not like a no-passing zone. We don't put up orange cones. I mean, you have to go in and take out the anti-aircraft capability of the other country.

So, I think that's -- that course, which was being trumpeted and heard rather loudly, became muted. But -- and there's no way we're going to act unilaterally. I think the experiences the United States has had in Iraq and Afghanistan in this first decade of the 21st century have given great cause -- caution and hesitation to the idea of a surgical strike anywhere.

JIM LEHRER: How do you see it?

DAVID BROOKS: Well, the experience has given us great caution.

On the other hand, you have got the following logistics sort of playing out. We have imposed sanctions on Gadhafi. We have more or less isolated him and his regime. There is really no escape hatch for them. And the protesters are marching.

And so we have put them in a situation where we -- they say there is no escape. We're not going to be forgiven. We have to fight to the end and just stick this out.

So, we have given them a strong incentive to do everything possible to crush the activists. And, so, if we...

JIM LEHRER: You mean to Gadhafi?

DAVID BROOKS: To Gadhafi.

JIM LEHRER: An incentive to Gadhafi...

DAVID BROOKS: Right.

And, so, I understand why the sanctions -- I supported the sanctions. But if you are going to give the dictator an incentive to kill a lot of people, well, maybe you shouldn't stop there.

And so are we really going to stand by? If his only choice is, I'm going to do whatever it takes, are we really going to do nothing, the whole world? That is a tough thing to do.

JIM LEHRER: But that's the question, isn't it?

DAVID BROOKS: Right. And so I'm -- I understand Mark's cautions, but I don't think we can just -- to the extent that this has happened, and to what we know about Gadhafi, I don't think we can stand there while he massacres people. We should expect the violence is going to get worse, because he has no incentive to not do that.

MARK SHIELDS: The invasion and occupation of Libya, which is what we are talking about...

DAVID BROOKS: Well...

MARK SHIELDS: No, it is.

DAVID BROOKS: ... invading and occupying.

MARK SHIELDS: You don't go in, you don't go in -- you don't send a platoon in. I mean, this is a war, what we're talking about. It's a civil war in the making. And it is real.

We have as little leverage in Libya as we have any place in the world. It's unlike Egypt, where there was an army, an institution that could provide the option of leadership and the reality of leadership. There's no other countries that have any influence over them.

I mean, absent a collective act by many, many countries, you know, I just don't see the United States acting.

JIM LEHRER: What about General Deptula's idea, or not -- it wasn't an idea; it was an option that he said, well, there's that one area in Tripoli that is fortified; that's where Gadhafi and his folks are; take them out?

MARK SHIELDS: I mean, it always sounds great. I mean, it really does.

JIM LEHRER: That's the surgical...

MARK SHIELDS: That's the surgical -- I mean, let's just go in and take him out, and then we're gone.

And we don't have -- I mean, if there is evidence of a massacre, then there will be collective action. You know that. And I am tried -- I'm sorry that people are being hurt. It strikes me that the tide is going in the direction of the anti-Gadhafi forces right now, from all the reports I have had and am privy to.

So, I hope that that happens. But I do not see the United States -- one more land war in the Middle East?

DAVID BROOKS: But, I mean, nobody is talking about sending troops on land. I mean, the activists don't even want them arming us. They don't want them doing a surgical strike. I don't particularly think that is a particularly good idea.

They're asking for a little way to shift the balance of power. And we have had no-fly zones in Iraq and elsewhere around the world. It hasn't meant we have had to take over the country. In Saddam's reign, after the first Desert Storm, we had a no-fly zone. And, so, I'm not sure it is a good idea, but I'm not sure we can walk up this far and then suddenly stand back and say, OK, sorry.

MARK SHIELDS: After we wiped out Saddam's military capacity in the Persian Gulf War.

It was -- the war was stopped after 96 hours because they had been totally decimated and devastated. There was no resistance. He did...

DAVID BROOKS: Saddam had -- was using gunships on Shiites. We don't need to -- on the south, but...

This is what stopped me cold in my living room: the stark revelation that America's Greatest Conservative Public Intellectual had obviously forgotten the entire first Gulf War.

Had just slipped the whole thing down the memory hole.

Had forgotten that Iraq had been carved up by treaty like a roast after the first Gulf War.

Had forgotten that even after his army had been destroyed and his country had been cauterized by no-fly zones, Saddam Hussein had managed to hang onto power.

Had forgotten that it was precisely this fact -- that Saddam Hussein had been contained but not overthrown by the massive and sustained application of American military power -- that provided the impetus for PNAC thugs in media, in think tanks and in the White House

to lie and lie and lie and lie and lie and lie us into the disaster that is George Bush's Iraqi Debacle.

So you'd think that unless David Fucking Brooks is planning on spending the rest of his life going from town to town individually apologizing to the Americans whose lives he ruined and futures he bankrupted by being one of the Dear Leader's eager, blood-soaked, smirking Neocon boosters for his Excellent Iraqi Adventure, simple common decency would suggest that Bobo once-and-for-all shut the fuck up about Iraq already.

But of course he can't.

He can't because it squats out there, bestriding his resume and dwarfing his many, many other journalistic failures. He can't because it is the ragged hole where a massive professional tooth used to be that he just cannot keep his tongue away from.

And what's more, he doesn't have to.

He doesn't have to because we now live in a country where there is no penalty whatsoever for Conservatives who are grotesquely and serially wrong about matters of life and death. And so well-paid buffoons like Brooks have no incentive to learn the lessons of Iraq that other, less-privileged citizens have paid for with their lives. Instead, he and his ilk are left with their lives, fortunes and positions of power in American politics and media blissfully untouched, free to whitewash their failures over and over again, unmolested by the inconvenient realities of the pain and ruin they left in their wake.

From "Foreign Policy":

Whitewashing the failure in Iraq
Posted By Stephen M. Walt
On the eve of President Obama's speech to the nation on Iraq, some of the people who dreamed up this foolish war or helped persuade the nation that it was a good idea are getting out their paintbrushes and whitewash. I refer, of course, to the twin op-eds in today's New York Times by former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and neoconservative columnist David Brooks.
Wolfowitz, you will recall, was one of the main architects of the war, having pushed the invasion during the 1990s and as soon as he became Deputy Secretary of Defense in the Bush adminstration. He was the guy who recommended invading Iraq four days after 9/11, even though Osama bin Laden was nowhere near Iraq and there was no evidence that Saddam Hussein had anything to do with it. For his part, Brooks was an enthusiastic cheerleader for the war in the months prior to the invasion, and he continued to defend it long after the original rationale had been exposed as a sham.
As for Brooks, his column is a transparent attempt to retroactively justify an unnecessary war. He marshals an array of statistics showing how much things have improved in Iraq, but all his various numbers show is that after you've flattened a country and dismantled its entire political order, you can generate some positive growth rates if you pour billions of dollars back in. He claims this "nation-building" effort cost only $53 billion (hardly a trivial sum), but that figure omits all the other costs of the war (which economist Joseph Stiglitz and budget expert Linda Bilmes estimate to be in excess of $3 trillion). And like Wolfowitz, Brooks is mostly silent about the hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis and thousands of dead and wounded Americans who paid the price for their naïve experiment in social engineering.
...

Of course, what Wolfowitz and Brooks are up to is not hard to discern. They want Americans to keep pouring resources into Iraq for as long as it takes to make their ill-fated scheme look like a success. Equally important, they want to portray Iraq in a somewhat positive light now, so that Obama and the Democrats get blamed when things go south.
...

Sadly, there is, of course, nothing new here. This is all part of a "specific, mutagenic strain of "Wingnut Doublethink"" that I referred to here as Strategic Forgettery --

...the training of an entire generation of Conservatives to mindlessly attack!attack!attack! the "Left" while holding themselves willfully and belligerently ignorant of what their Movement is really doing and who is really running it -- is, in the end, Ronald Reagan's most potent and vile political legacy: Strategic Forgettery.

-- one part of a set of radical blueprints upon which the entire Modern Conservative Movement has been constructed, and which as turned the Right into what is it today: a mob of willfully amnesiac killbots who stay angry, crazy and electorally-compliant only by completely forgetting their origins, founders, history, pedigree and basically everything else that happened before whatever Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity upchucked into their skulls yesterday.

And finally, in the most hilariously, multi-dimensional, letter-perfect, public example of "Irony" I have unearthed in many a year, consider that this succinct and damning description of exactly the sort of brutalizing mental and moral devolution upon which the entire Conservative Brain Caste depends --

"Anti-ideology consists of the attempts to shrink men's minds down to the range of the immediate moment, without regard to past or future, without context or memory -- above all, without memory. so that contradictions cannot be detected, and errors or disasters can be blamed on the victim.

"In anti-ideological practice, principles are used implicitly and used to disarm the opposition, but are never acknowledged and are switched at will when it suits the purpose of the moment. Whose purpose? The gang's. This men's moral criterion becomes not "my view of the good -- or of the right -- or of the truth", but "my gang, right or wrong."

"This is what makes today's public issues and discussions so sickeningly false and futile. Most issues rest on so many wrong premises and carry so many contradictions that instead of the question: "Who is right?" one is constantly and tacitly confronted with the question: "Which gang do you support?""

-- was penned by Ayn Rand -- the materfamilias of the whole fucking unholy Movement -- in 1967.

They have become the very monsters they used to write crappy fiction about.

And so it goes.

David Brooks: Sorry / Not Sorry

Fair warning: I'm going to bury the lede for this post.

Way down at the bottom.

So if you want the socko ending -- and it is a socko ending -- jump to the last few of paragraphs, clip them, and send them to The New York Times op-ed page editor, with a short note explaining why Mr. David Brooks should be sacked immediately ( I  would do it myself, but after 14 years of working the David Brooks beat, it's pretty clear that the Times is not interested in anything unpleasant that anyone has to say about Mr. Brooks.)

But since I have no editor peering over my shoulder, tapping her watch, reminding me that the deadline approacheth and I'm already way over my word count, I'm going to amble a bit, as is my wont.  If that doesn't suit you, well, this probably the one and only professional characteristic which Mr. Brooks and I share:  neither of us can be fired from out writing gigs.

Of course the reasons that neither of us can be fired are diametrically opposed.

My job is safe because I answer to no one and my "salary" is whatever gets dropped in my tip jar during any given week.  It's really that simple.

However reasons that the House of Sulzberger has kept Mr. Brooks on as the Faith and Humility reporter for the Acela Corridor Pantograph despite his many long years of unstinting failure and terrible writing are probably manifold and ultimately unknowable to anyone outside of The Club.

On the other hand, I do believe that one can usually suss out what any organization values in any of its marquee employees by deducing what characteristics that employee routinely brings to their work.

For example, today, in order to force every American political crisis and scandal since Watergate into the Procrustean Bed of of his delicate Beltway Both Siderist sensibilities, Mr. David Brooks set about simply amputating any reference to the validity, severity or context of each individual scandal.  Thus his readers learned that while, sure, Nixon was bad --

Richard Nixon’s downfall was just and important, but...

-- it is upon the "but" in this sentence that the real moral of today's Both Siderist sermonette hangs.

So, sure, Nixon was bad, 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 then comes the inevitable torrent of Both Siderist moralizing...

The accused’s political opponents assume maximum guilt. Imaginative pundits take a few dots of information and connect them to vast if speculative constellations of guilt. “I hear the indictments are coming down next week,” they whisper to one another.

Members of the accused’s party attack the investigators themselves. They get to enjoy their own sense of spiritual superiority when it turns out the scandal is much smaller than it appeared, which is almost always the case.

It’s all a wonderful game....

...in which all scandals...

... Iran-contra, Whitewater, Valerie Plame, Benghazi, Solyndra, swift-boating. 

...all basically same scandal.  Nothing more than political stink bombs of various olfactometric calibers lobbed by Both Sides for no reason other than to disrupt the good order of Mr. Brooks' imaginary Grand Bargain, Center-Right, Lieberman/McCain, President Rubio Washington D.C.

And, yes, you read that right.  According to Mr. Brooks, Iran/Contra was pretty much the same as Benghazi.  And the Swiftboating of John Kerry was more-or-less indistinguishable from the outing of an undercover CIA agent.

Put a pin in this one.  We'll get back to it.

And because Mr. Brooks' only job at The New York Times is the ritual recitation the same, maudlin tale of Both Siderist woe over and over and over again with minor variations --

Two political parties, both alike in indignity,
In fair Washington, where we lay our scene,
From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,
Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean...

-- he goes right to the same cast of stock villains and heroes he always uses to stage his tired little puppet show.

The part of the brutishly vengeful Montagues will, of course, once more be acted out by Democrats:

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...

And in the role of the equally reckless and bloody-minded Capulets we once more find:

Republicans and the Sean Hannity-style Trumpians might also approach this moment with an attitude of humility and honest self-examination.

But who is the real star of this drama?   Noble, star-crossed and stranded in the Sensible Center?
Well obviously it's David Fucking Brooks himself  (emphasis added) --

And what about the rest of us? What about all the hours we spent speculating about the Mueller report, fantasizing about the Trump ruin or watching and reading speculation about these things? 

-- and, presumably, the 15 new very special friends he made during his Hegira to the Heartland.

And yet, using only what he could glean from William Barr's truncated, cherry-picked, four-page re-imagining of the criminal justice system to exclude crimes committed by presidents (from Salon) --

Back in 1992, the last time Bill Barr was U.S. attorney general, iconic New York Times writer William Safire referred to him as “Coverup-General Barr” because of his role in burying evidence of then-President George H.W. Bush’s involvement in “Iraqgate” and “Iron-Contra.” 

General Barr has struck again — this time, in similar fashion, burying Mueller’s report and cherry-picking fragments of sentences from it to justify Trump’s behavior. In his letter, he notes that Robert Mueller “leaves it to the attorney general to decide whether the conduct described in the report constitutes a crime.”

As attorney general, Barr — without showing us even a single complete sentence from the Mueller report — decided there are no crimes here.Just keep moving along.

Barr’s history of doing just this sort of thing to help Republican presidents in legal crises explains why Trump brought him back in to head the Justice Department...

-- and without ever seeing a single paragraph of the Mueller Report (which is, at the moment, being embargoed by Mr. Brooks' friend and fellow Republican, Mitch McConnell) and ignoring the daily assaults Donald Trump has committed against our democracy since the day he took office, Mr. Brooks has nonetheless decided that the only way to turn that scandal frown upside-down and save the republican is for every Democrat who ever called President Stupid a treasonous shithead to make an immediate, fulsome and heart-felt public apology:

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.

But here's an odd thing.  A very odd thing.

Did you notice what was completely absent from Mr. Brooks' list of co-equal scandals that divided Murrica?

The Iraq War.

The entire Iraq War.  All the Bush Administration lies that put us there.  The Bush Administration lies that kept us there.  All of the terrible, grinding, pointless slaughter.  The looting of our treasury to enrich the Dick Cheney's cronies.  The torture.  The kneecapping of democratic institutions.  The crippling of America's international reputation. The trashing of our allies.

And, of course, the massive dose of reckless madness it injected into the already-deranged Republican Party.  The open-season on Iraq War opponents that was declared here at home.

All of it -- the entire debacle -- just fucking gone.  Like a fart in a firestorm.

And all of it  -- the entire debacle --  enthusiastically promoted by none other than Mr. David Brooks who was, at the time, the Senior Editor of The Weekly Standard and in overall charge of their fanatically pro-Bush, pro-War tone and messaging.  And boy howdy, did Mr. Brooks use his position to kick the shit out of us poor, dumb Libtards over and over again.

In fact, it would be fair to say that using his position at The Weekly Standard to establish his bona fides as a leading Conservative Iraq War pimp and scourge of the Liberal dregs is what sold The New York Times on handing him a job-for-life in the first place.

Here's a sample from that body of work:

In certain circles, it is not only important what opinion you hold, but how you hold it. It is important to be seen dancing with complexity, sliding among shades of gray. Any poor rube can come to a simple conclusion -- that President Saddam Hussein is a menace who must be disarmed--but the refined ratiocinators want to be seen luxuriating amid the difficulties, donning the jewels of nuance, even to the point of self-paralysis.

And another:

Meanwhile, among the smart set, Hamlet-like indecision has become the intellectual fashion. The liberal columnist E. J. Dionne wrote in The Washington Post that he is uncomfortable with the pro- and anti-war camps. He praised the doubters and raised his colors on behalf of 'heroic ambivalence.' The New York Times, venturing deep into the territory of self-parody, ran a full-page editorial calling for 'still more discussion' on whether or not to go to war.

And another:

Their supposed demons--Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Doug Feith, Donald Rumsfeld, and company--occupy their entire field of vision, so that there is no room for analysis of anything beyond, such as what is happening in the world. For the peace camp, all foreign affairs is local; contempt for and opposition to Wolfowitz, Perle, Rumsfeld, et al. is the driving passion. When they write about these figures it is with a burning zeal. But on the rare occasions when they write about Saddam, suddenly all passion drains away. Saddam is boring, but Wolfowitz tears at their soul. You begin to realize that they are not arguing about Iraq. They are not arguing at all. They are just repeating the hatreds they cultivated in the 1960s, and during the Reagan years, and during the Florida imbroglio after the last presidential election. They are playing culture war, and they are disguising their eruptions as position-taking on Iraq, a country about which they haven't even taken the trouble to inform themselves.

And another: 

This parochialism takes many forms, but all the branches of the opposition to the war in Iraq have one thing in common: Iraq is never the issue. Something else is always the issue. For Schama and many others, the Bush crowd is the issue. They stole the election. They serve corporate America. They have bad manners. This is the prism through which Maureen Dowd, Molly Ivins, and many others view the war. Writing in the Boston Globe, Northwestern University's Karen J. Alter psychoanalyzes the groupthink mentality that she says explains the Bush crowd's strange obsession with Iraq.

And another:

For most in the peace camp, there is only the fog. The debate is dominated by people who don't seem to know about Iraq and don't care. Their positions are not influenced by the facts of world affairs. When you get deep enough into the peace camp you find fog about the fog. You find a generation of academic and literary intellectuals who have so devoted themselves to questioning meanings, deconstructing texts, decoding signifiers, and unmasking perspectives, they can't even make an argument anymore.

And,what the hell, let's do one more:

Finally, there is the dream palace of the American Bush haters. In this dream palace, there is so much contempt for Bush that none is left over for Saddam or for tyranny. Whatever the question, the answer is that Bush and his cronies are evil. What to do about Iraq? Bush is evil. What to do about the economy? Bush is venal. What to do about North Korea? Bush is a hypocrite.

In this dream palace, Bush, Cheney, and a junta of corporate oligarchs stole the presidential election, then declared war on Iraq to seize its oil and hand out the spoils to Halliburton and Bechtel. In this dream palace, the warmongering Likudniks in the administration sit around dreaming of conquests in Syria, Iran, and beyond. In this dream palace, the boy genius Karl Rove hatches schemes to use the Confederate flag issue to win more elections, John Ashcroft wages holy war on American liberties, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and his cabal of neoconservatives long for global empire. In this dream palace, every story of Republican villainy is believed, and all the windows are shuttered with hate...

My third guess is that the Bush haters will grow more vociferous as their numbers shrink. Even progress in Iraq will not dampen their anger, because as many people have noted, hatred of Bush and his corporate cronies is all that is left of their leftism. And this hatred is tribal, not ideological. And so they will still have their rallies, their alternative weeklies, and their Gore Vidal polemics. They will still have a huge influence over the Democratic party, perhaps even determining its next presidential nominee. But they will seem increasingly unattractive to most moderate and even many normally Democratic voters who never really adopted outrage as their dominant public emotion...

And so, having leveled so many serious charges against us Bush-hating, terrorist-loving simpletons on the Left and having long since been proven completely and irrefutable wrong, not by four pages of cherry-picked sentence fragments assembled by "Coverup-General Barr” but by history itself, according to Mr. Brooks' own theology, doesn't he owe us Bush-hating, terrorist-loving simpletons on the Left one helluva fulsome and heart-felt public apology?

Well as luck would have it, I just so happened to be in attendance at Elmhurst College's storied Hammerschmidt Memorial Chapel eight and a half years ago when a nice, polite, Liberal lady in the audience put exactly this question to Mr. David Brooks.

And standing at the pulpit of a church, invoking the name of Reinhold Niebuhr, America's leading Conservative public intellectual very calmly lied to her face:

In fact, if you have followed the careers of Beltway Republican op-ed opportunists like Mr. Brooks for any length of time, you cannot fail to notice that, among their ever-shifting standards of personal and professional ethics, they always included conspicuous carve-outs and exceptions for themselves and their fellow travelers.

And that, boys and girls, is how you bury the lede like a pro.

Update:  Both No More Mister Nice Blog and Yastreblyansky do yeoman's service once again.

Behold, a Tip Jar!

Team Neocon Reconquers Iraq

Over in the Better Universe, a family has a run-in with Bill Kristol on the subway.  The Poors beat reporter David Brooks has the details:

Lisa Miller is a professor of psychology and education at Teachers College, Columbia University. One day she entered a subway car and saw that half of it was crowded but the other half was empty, except for a homeless man who had some fast food on his lap and who was screaming at anybody who came close.

At one stop, a grandmother and granddaughter, about 8, entered the car. They were elegantly dressed, wearing pastel dresses and gloves with lace trim. The homeless man spotted them and screamed, “Hey! Do you want to sit with me?” They looked at each other, nodded and replied in unison, “Thank you” and, unlike everybody else, sat directly next to him.

The man offered them some chicken from his bag. They looked at each other and nodded and said, “No, thank you.” The homeless man offered several more times, and each time they nodded to each other and gave the same polite answer. Finally, the homeless man was calmed, and they all sat contentedly in their seats.

...

Sadly, over in this Universe, Bill Kristol is not a, eccentric homeless individual shouting harmless nonsense at a few people on the train.  Over in this Universe, Kristol is a wealthy, respected, multimedia sociopath, braying malignant drivel at millions of Americans every week.

And while Sean Illings of Salon ably summarizes what longtime readers of this blog have know for years, he makes a fundamental error in juxtaposing Bill Kristol and David Brooks like so:

Bill Kristol’s latest Iraq nonsense: Dumber and more dangerous than David Brooks

The man who laid the foundation for our Iraq blunder is still unbelievably disengaged from reality

Bill Kristol, and his former employee, David Brooks, are neither ignorant nor disengaged nor are they competing in some kind of dumbassery claiming race which Kristol is currently winning by a half a length.  Instead, they are both helping the Right to successfully nail down the upper and lower thresholds of the Overton Window for any future public debate of the Iraq war (which they both so eagerly and profitably pimped) in a way that:

A) Insures that none of their neocon fellow travelers or media enablers will ever be held accountable for the catastrophic war they lied us into.  And,

B) Delivers a set of clear talking points to every GOP candidate running for President in 2016 with which they can weasel their way out of any unpleasant Iraq-based conversations.

Neocon David Brooks' side of the frame is that Operation Endless Clusterfuck was a noble cause undertaken in good faith by honorable men who mismanaged it terribly:

...

Which brings us to Iraq. From the current vantage point, the decision to go to war was a clear misjudgment, made by President George W. Bush and supported by 72 percent of the American public who were polled at the time. I supported it, too.

What can be learned?

The first obvious lesson is that we should look at intelligence products with a more skeptical eye. There’s a fable going around now that the intelligence about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction was all cooked by political pressure, that there was a big political conspiracy to lie us into war.

That doesn’t gibe with the facts...

Neocon Bill Kristol's complementary side of the same frame is that Operation Endless Clusterfuck was a noble cause undertaken in good faith by honorable men who did a great and difficult thing, which was subsequently fucked up by the Kenyan Usurper (emphasis added):

William Kristol: We were right to fight in Iraq

Obama threw away hard-earned gains.

We were right to invade Iraq in 2003 to remove Saddam Hussein, and to complete the job we should have finished in 1991.

Even with the absence of caches of weapons of mass destruction, and the mistakes we made in failing to send enough troops at first and to provide security from the beginning for the Iraqi people, we were right to persevere through several difficult years. We were able to bring the war to a reasonably successful conclusion in 2008.

When President Obama took office, Iraq was calm, al-Qaeda was weakened and ISIS did not exist. Iran, meanwhile, was under pressure from abroad (due to sanctions) and at home (due to popular discontent, manifested by the Green uprising in the summer of 2009).

The Obama administration threw it all away...

This is aggressive neocon pincer movement designed to drive any discussion of the lies and liars who marched us into catastrophe -- any discussion of accountability and atonement -- the hell off the table.

And from presidential candidate Lindsey Graham (emphasis added) -- 

WOLF BLITZER, CNN: You want to be president of the United States. You're running for the Republican presidential nomination. Was the Iraq War a mistake?

SEN. LINDSEY GRAHAM (R-SC): No. I don't think so...

...

BLITZER: But, Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with 9/11.

GRAHAM: Well, he had a lot to do in terms of destabilizing the region. He had invaded his neighbor (Kuwait), he was violating U.N. mandates about inspecting sites as part of the ending the first Gulf War, he was shooting at American aircraft patrolling the skies over Iraq as part of a no-fly zone, he was gassings the Kurds. I am glad he is gone. At the end of the day, I blame President Obama for the mess in Iraq and Syria, not President Bush.

-- to presidential candidate Scott Walker (emphasis added) --

Any president would have likely taken the same action [President George W.] Bush did with the information he had, even Hillary Clinton voted for it, but knowing what we know now, we should not have gone into Iraq. President Bush deserves enormous credit for ordering the surge, a courageous move that worked. Unfortunately, President Obama and Secretary Clinton hastily withdrew our troops, threw away the gains of the surge, and embarked on a broader policy of pivoting away from the Middle East and leading from behind that has created chaos in the region.

-- to presidential candidate John Ellis "Jeb,The Smart One" Bush (emphasis added) --

Jeb Bush's new Iraq strategy: Blame Obama

Jeb Bush is back on offense against President Barack Obama’s strategy in Iraq, following a difficult week in which the likely presidential candidate struggled to clean up his answer on whether he would have invaded Iraq knowing what he knows now.

“It got a little bumpy, but all is well now,” Bush said at a roundtable event in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, on Wednesday. “The ship is stable.”

Perhaps a better focus, Bush posited, is “Knowing what we know now, Mr. President, should you have kept 10,000 troops in Iraq?” Bush said that Obama “abandoned” Iraq and lamented the fall of Ramadi to Islamic State terrorists, saying that “ISIS didn’t exist when my brother was president” and that Al Qaeda was decimated under his brother.

-- this is exactly what is happening.

The Moving Hack Writes, Ctd.

And, having writ, moves on.

Nor all thy Piety nor Wit,

Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,

Nor all thy Tears wash out

A Word of it.

David Brooks is both a man of ritual and routine, and a very lazy and dishonest writer.

Because of these two, convergent personality traits, Mr. Brooks routinely re-writes the same, awful op-ed drivel over and over again, relying heavily on the failing memories and magical thinking of his audience not to notice how obsessively he recycles the same handful of tired, discredited ideas over and over again.

For example, in just about every other column, Mr. Brooks will make a slight tweak to his hoary "Both Sides Are To Blame" scam, reliably locating the fault for the latest Conservative clusterfuck halfway between his fellow Conservatives (who committed the atrocity) and imaginary Liberals (who somehow enabled the atrocity by being insufficiently capitulative, or saying mean things, or being Norman Lear or Noam Chomsky or Al Gore.)

And then hit the "Publish" button.

To mix things up a little, every few months, Mr. Brooks will copy-and-paste some recent social ill or moral failing (often involving a bastion of traditional hierarchy condoning something horrible and then getting caught covering it up) into his Bash The Hippies and Blame The 60s writing template.

And then hit the "Publish" button.

And then, once or twice a year, Mr. Brooks ritually shoves his big, moon head into a Hefty Ultra-Flex bag full of used Ronald Reagan's Underoos, cinches it tight with his "Burkean's Do It Prudently" novelty ascot and huffs and huff until, just before he loses consciousnesses, his asphyxiating brain announces that it just caught sight of a Republican Reasonableness Renaissance juuuust around the corner.

And then he passes out on the "Publish" button.

Here are a couple of excerpts from his latest round of oxygen-starved self-abuse:

The Republican Glasnost 

By DAVID BROOKS 

Published: December 6, 2012 

Senator Marco Rubio won the Jack Kemp Foundation’s Leadership Award earlier this week. In his speech accepting the award, he sketched out his Republican vision. 

...the speech really began to sing toward the end. Rubio made an oblique rebuttal to some of the Republican gaffes during the campaign: “Some say that our problem is that the American people have changed. That too many people want things from government. But I am convinced that the overwhelming majority of our people just want what my parents had: a chance.” 

As he was telling this story, Rubio motioned to some of the service staff at the Kemp dinner. They stopped to listen to him. “It all starts with our people,” Rubio continued. “In the kitchens of our hotels. In the landscaping crews that work in our neighborhoods. In the late-night janitorial shifts that clean our offices... 

People at the dinner say that there was a hushed silence for a second as Rubio concluded with this refrain. Then a roaring ovation swelled and filled the room. The Republican Party has a long way to go before it revives itself as a majority party. But that speech signifies a moment in that revival. And I would say the last month has marked a moment.

Over the past month, the Republican Party has changed far more than I expected. First, the people at the ideological extremes of the party have begun to self-ghettoize... 

Second, politics is being reborn. For a time, Republican candidates like Richard Mourdock of Indiana proudly declared that they didn’t believe in compromise. Political activists spent more time purging deviationists than in trying to attract new converts. But that mania has passed... 

Finally, there has even been some shifting of economic values, or at least in how the party presents those values... 

The obligations to combat poverty, Ryan said, are beyond dispute. “The real debate is how best we can meet them... 

The Republicans may still blow it. If President Obama is flexible and they don’t meet him partway, Republicans would contribute to a recession that would discredit them for a decade. But they are moving in the right direction and moving fast. These are first steps, and encouraging ones.

Extremists are on the verge of being dragged out by their tricorner hats and bounced to the curb!  Compassionate Conservatism reborn!  Everyone's gonna get laid!  All of which sounds super duper nifty except, of course, to those of us with functioning cerebral cortices who remember that not so long ago David Brooks' Great White Hope was a maverick governor from Texas. 

Went by the name of George Dubya Bush Rick Perry, as I recall:

Before that, apparently owing to the severe shortage of White Men in the GOP, Mr. Brooks was forced to do the next best thing and Reformation-pledge-pin a woman named "Whitman":

The Austerity Caucus 

By DAVID BROOKS 

Published: September 30, 2010

If I had as much money as Meg Whitman, I’d probably have a more exuberant house. Hers is perfectly nice. But at a time when other Silicon Valley moguls were installing underground squash courts, arcade-size game rooms and other gewgaws, she stuck with a New England-style colonial. The furniture is traditional. There’s a middle-age Ford in the garage. There are definite signs of WASP parsimony and understatement here, especially compared with the $120 million she’s spent on her campaign to become California’s governor.

Whitman seems to have led a sober, performance-oriented life.

...

But Whitman is representative of an emerging Republican type — what you might call the austerity caucus. Flamboyant performers like Sarah Palin get all the attention, but the governing soul of the party is to be found in statehouses where a loose confederation of über-wonks have become militant budget balancers. Just as welfare reformers of the 1990s presaged compassionate conservatism, so the austerity brigades presage the national party’s next chapter.

Mitch Daniels, the governor of Indiana who I think is most likely to win the G.O.P. presidential nomination in 2012, is the spiritual leader. Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey is the rising star. Jeb Bush is the eminence. Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana and Rob Portman, a Senate candidate in Ohio, also fit the mold.  

Before that, John Thune, stole Mr. Brooks' punch-drunk heart with his olive oil voice and Guinea charm down-home, prairie values and manly bilateral symmetry.  Like Ms. Whitman, Mr. Thune was a leading member of the invisible-to-everyone-but-David-Brooks Very Serious Shadow Party that Mr. Brooks is perpetually discovering rumbling around in the "bowels" of the GOP like bad fish tacos.

In this case. Mr. Brooks' reportage on La Thune bordered on the stalkerish.  Or, as one wag put it at the time, a  "...farrago of unattributed, saccharine "everybody knows", "people say" and Third Person Omniscient declaratives." 

Meet John Thune

By DAVID BROOKS

Published: November 12, 2009

Some days the Republican Party seems to be going crazy. Its public image is often shaped by people who appear to have gone into government because they saw it as a steppingstone to talk radio.

But deep in the bowels of the G.O.P., there are serious people having quiet conversations. The people holding these conversations created and admired Bob McDonnell’s perfectly executed Virginia gubernatorial campaign. And now as they look to the future of their party, and who might lead it in 2012, the name John Thune keeps popping up

...

Thune also possesses the favored Republican profile du jour: conservative at the roots but pragmatic at the surface. Like McDonnell, nobody can question Thune’s conservative bona fides. As a result, he doesn’t have to talk about them. Instead, he prefers to talk about what he calls the “economic cluster” of issues: job creation, balanced budgets and small-business-led growth.

...

The first thing everybody knows about him is that he is tall (6 feet 4 inches), tanned (in a prairie, sun-chapped sort of way) and handsome...

The second thing people say about him is that he is unfailingly genial, modest and nice.

He grew up in Murdo, S.D., population 612. His father was a Naval aviator in World War II and a genuine war hero.

He was called back home after the war to work in the family hardware store and went on to become an educator, as did his wife.

...

John was a high school basketball star and possesses idyllic small-town manners...

He appears to be untouched by cynicism. 

...he is straightforward, intelligent and earnest. He sometimes seems to have emerged straight into the 21st century from a more wholesome time.

After high school, he attended Biola University, a small Christian college outside of Los Angeles. 

He then got an M.B.A. from the University of South Dakota  

...

He is a gracious and ecumenical legislator...

...nobody can question Thune’s conservative bona fides. 

He says his prairie background has given him a preference for small companies and local government. 

His populism is not angry. 

... a celebration of the small and local over the big and urban.

Republican pros are attracted to Thune because he could rally the hard-core conservatives without scaring away the suburbanites. His weakness is that he’s never really worked outside of government, and he’s almost never shown a maverick side. 

...

Republicans are still going to have to do root-and-branch renovation if they hope to provide compelling answers to issues like middle-class economic anxiety. But in the meantime, people like Thune offer Republicans a way to connect fiscal discipline with traditional small-town values, a way to tap into rising populism in a manner that is optimistic, uplifting and nice.

One could go on with example after example of Mr. Brooks' Party on the Verge of a Virtuous Breakdown fraud indefinitely, but let's save your valuable time and my fragile sanity by jumping directly to the period when Mr. Brooks really got his "It's The Great Republican Pumpkin, Charlie Brown!" freak all the way on:  The Age of Bush. 

And while you read (with emphasis added), note Mr. Brooks' con man's confidence in the credulity of his audience.  Knowing that neither his dedicated readers nor his fellow pundits will ever bother to check out what Mr. Brooks has committed to print before today, notice how remarkably little effort Mr. Brooks devotes to updating his scam; how the language he uses over and over again to sucker the rubes never changes.

From August 2000, when George Bush's Republican Party was right on the verge of something something:

Pabulum with a Purpose

Beneath the much-mocked superficiality of the Philadelphia convention is a serious effort to transform the GOP
...

The Philadelphia convention, in other words, was unlike any other in party history. The Democratic view of it is that the Republicans built a Potemkin image of multicultural inclusiveness to mask what is still a white, intolerant party. And it's true that the convention program did not reflect the party as it really exists. The GOP is not intolerant; still, normal party gatherings don't look and feel like this. But the more generous interpretation is that the televised show represented the party of George W. Bush's aspirations. In other words, he's trying to transform the party to make it fit the happy multi-hued image that we saw up on stage.

And if that's true, then this convention was not just a big puddle of pabulum. It was a substantive political act disguised as pabulum. It was an effort to reengineer the party as ambitious as Bill Clinton's earlier effort to transform the Democratic party.
... 

But this transformation amounts to more than atmospherics... 

In George Bush's Republican party, building healthy communities and healthy families becomes the core national mission. Bush put the challenge in generational terms. First he invoked his father's generation, "a generation of Americans who stormed beaches, liberated concentration camps, and delivered us from evil." That was a generation that faced epic challenges. Then he turned to his own generation. He pointed out that his generation was "given the gift of the best education in American history." It is a generation rich in talent, charm, and skill. But under Clinton/Gore all that has been squandered, and he vowed to redeem it.
...

Chris Matthews once observed that the Democratic party is the mommy party and the Republican party is the daddy party. The Democrats are soft and nurturing, while the Republicans are stern and bracing. But George Bush's Republicans are a nurturing party. And who knows, in Los Angeles the Democrats may emerge as the daddy party, the party that lectures us about fiscal rectitude and the imprudence of large tax cuts. Whatever happens in L.A., George Bush has recast the Republican party. Beneath all the Up With People sap, something significant happened in Philadelphia.

From September 1999, when Great Republican Men bestrode the Earth, and Great National Greatness was within their Great Grasp:  

ONE NATION CONSERVATISM 

How George W. Bush and John McCain -- without quite realizing it -- are creating a new Republican philosophy 

SEP 13, 1999, VOL. 4, NO. 48 • BY DAVID BROOKS 

At first blush, the Republican presidential field doesn't exactly overflow with new ideas. Steve Forbes updates the free-market policies and themes of Jack Kemp's 1988 campaign. Gary Bauer's campaign echoes the social conservatism of Pat Robertson's 1988 run. Elizabeth Dole reprises the Main Street Republicanism of Bob Dole's 1988 and 1996 efforts. And Pat Buchanan recycles the working-class populism of his own 1992 and 1996 campaigns.

Nonetheless, alongside these well-established lines of Republican thought, there are two newer approaches struggling to break through. If you listen carefully, you discover George W. Bush and John McCain are running campaigns that sound unlike any others in recent GOP history. The candidates themselves don't seem fully aware of the implications of what they are saying, but together, Bush's Compassionate Conservatism and McCain's New Patriotic Challenge are steps toward a fresh vision for the Republican party. Indeed, if you meld the core messages of the two campaigns, you get a coherent governing philosophy for the post-Clinton age.
... 

...But in the 1990s, liberalism is no longer dominant; the sixties is something that happened a generation ago. This decade has been a period of ideological mush and muddle. So temperamentally, the new conservative approaches are not as confrontational as the old ones.
...

If you follow these two campaigns to their logical conclusion, you arrive at a One Nation Conservatism that marries community goodness with national greatness. It starts with a series of proposals to eliminate the chunks of the modern welfare state that smothered civic activism. It replaces that old system with something else: a burbling civic life. 

...
Then it restores faith in government with an aggressive reform agenda: banning "soft money" from election campaigns, revamping welfare-state programs such as Medicare to give citizens more control over their lives, simplifying the tax code, and cutting corporate pork in order to give citizens the sense that the government works for them, rather than for the corporate titans with the best lobbyists.

It champions a series of measures designed to remind American citizens of their common bonds. It revitalizes our transportation network, which has always bound us together. It nourishes the parks, forests, and preserves that are our common heritage. It reforms the nation's culture policy, so that museums and arts institutions that accept taxpayer dollars are more likely to explore what it means to be American than they are to nourish alienation and multicultural parochialism.

Finally, it promotes an energetic foreign policy -- because Americans will never devote themselves to democratic self-government at home if they do not see themselves ardently championing democratic self-government abroad.

...The Republican party may be...on the verge of absorbing the lessons of its recent mistakes. Out of the present quiet and seemingly nonideological presidential campaign, there may emerge a vigorous One Nation Conservatism that will connect a revived sense of citizenship with the long-standing national greatness Americans hold dear.
...

From 2001, when Bush The Healer finally mended all ideological rifts in the GOP and sent it soaring in the the bright future, while in the "land of the lefties -- among the activists and the pundits -- you find a set of prejudices that have been preserved in amber for three decades or more":

Competent Conservatives, Reactionary Liberals 

JAN 15, 2001, VOL. 6, NO. 17 • BY DAVID BROOKS

We seem to be entering a period of competent conservatism and reactionary liberalism. George W. Bush has put together a cabinet long on management experience and practical skills. But liberal commentators and activists, their imaginations aflame, seem to be caught in a time warp, back in the days when Norman Lear still had hair. They are depicting John Aschroft as if he were George Wallace, Interior nominee Gale Norton as if she were the second coming of James Watt, and Labor nominee Linda Chavez as if she were Phyllis Schlafly with slightly darker skin. We could be in for a series of confrontations in which the two parties don't just hold different views, but live in different centuries.

Bush really has been able to mold an administration in his own image. He is our first president with an MBA, and it's clear that he brings an MBA mentality to the job. There are almost no academics at the top of this administration, but there are plenty of administrators, reflecting a Bush belief that intellectuals are people you can hire; executives are people you can trust. Like Bush, this is a conservative administration, but it is not doctrinaire. It has a chief of staff who supported Hillary Clinton's health care plan, a Treasury secretary who supported higher gas taxes and spurned the supply siders, and a secretary of state who opposed rolling back Saddam's invasion of Kuwait. These are not orthodox conservative positions. 

But Bush has been able to achieve something neither his father nor even Ronald Reagan was able to achieve. He has put together a governing conservative team. He and Dick Cheney have skillfully pleased every clique in the GOP class... 

...
He has also mended an old rift. During the Reagan and Bush years, conservative ideologues battled with Republican pragmatists. The ideologues had great ideas and no clue as to how to game the Washington power structure. The pragmatists were great at playing the system, while lacking principles to guide them. But something has happened to the GOP over the past decade that has been enormously helpful to George Bush. Young people from the ideological wing of the party, like Energy czar Spence Abraham and Labor nominee Linda Chavez, gained administrative experience under Reagan and Bush I. They are much smoother operators than their philosophical predecessors. Meanwhile, the old pragmatists have been Reaganized. Ford hands like Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and maybe even Paul O'Neill -- who must have learned something at all those American Enterprise Institute retreats -- have developed conservative convictions to go with their lifelong conservative instincts. 

In short, the Republican elite has evolved over the years, and the Bush administration reflects that. Corporate America now includes many more minorities; so does the Bush cabinet. Conservatism has evolved since Newt Gingrich and is now less strident, less libertarian, and less ambitious; the Bush cabinet reflects that too.

So it's all the more amazing that over in the land of the lefties -- among the activists and the pundits -- you find a set of prejudices that have been preserved in amber for three decades or more. For Jesse Jackson, it will always be Selma. For Anthony Lewis at the New York Times, it will always be the ACLU against the forces of McCarthyism. For abortion lobbyist Kate Michelman, it will always be 1973. They really do see a world populated by the stock characters of a decades-old morality play.

As Bush announced his cabinet picks, different groups within the liberal coalition went into well-rehearsed hysterics. The tactics, the mau-mauing, the apocalyptic warnings are all drawn straight from the 1960s, as if we haven't all heard the same ear-piercing cries thousands of times already...

From 2001, when Mr. Brooks celebrated the shiny new generation of smart, competent compassionate Conservatives who were gonna leave whiny, deficit-obsessed lefty liberal fear-mongers in the dust.

The New Stupid Party 

The Gephardt Democrats' slow, Social Security-induced suicide.

SEP 10, 2001, VOL. 6, NO. 48 • BY DAVID BROOKS
Suffering from Post-Florida Stress Disorder, the leaders of the Democratic party are in no condition for that sort of dialogue. They apparently feel some need to prove that Bush is evil and that his tax cut is the worst crime perpetrated this side of Jack the Ripper. So the Democrats launched a war of bar charts, all designed to show that the Bush administration had blown the deficit in a flurry of greed.

If you closed your eyes last week and listened to the hysterical charges coming from Democratic mouths, and to the sound of the shuffling press conference props, you might have thought that Ross Perot had taken over the Democratic party. But even if he was a little wacky, Perot at least hyperventilated about deficits when the U.S. government was actually running them. Dick Gephardt et al. are hyperventilating about fiscal rectitude in a time of surpluses.

And in working themselves up into a Perotvian lather, the Democrats have emerged as rabid budget hawks. Surpluses are sacred. The higher the better. Anything that reduces the size of the surplus is an immoral money grab. The ranking Democrat on the House Budget committee, John Spratt, actually held a press conference in which he said that the purpose of the budget process is to keep the fiscal balances of the country healthy. The party that once believed that the purpose of government is to help people now believes that the purpose of the people is to help the government hoard cash. The party that once believed in Keynesian pump-priming has now signed on to an agenda that includes building up massive surpluses during a possible recession. 

...

From 2002, when the Right was gonna Rule the School For-Evah!

The Reemerging Republican Majority
Will Bush's popularity transform his party?
FEB 11, 2002, VOL. 7, NO. 21 • BY DAVID BROOKS 

...
Yet, despite all these caveats, this is clearly a remarkable political moment. At the very least, it presents a huge opportunity to solidify these gains and create a governing Republican majority. And in his State of the Union address Bush demonstrated that he understands, or at least has stumbled into, exactly how to do it.

...
But in the first and final thirds of his State of the Union speech, Bush expanded the Republican message and showed the way toward a new majority. In those sections Bush echoed precisely the aggressive foreign policy and patriotic national service themes that John McCain struck in the 2000 primary season, and which appealed so powerfully to independents.
...
President Bush has broken the libertarian grip on the GOP. (Not only did he call for a grand foreign policy mission, he called for expanding Head Start and liberalizing welfare benefits for immigrants.) But there is still some way to go if he is to win over the independent voters from Purple America (the ones who are halfway between Red and Blue). The final McCainiac initiatives that Bush has not yet co-opted have to do with reform 

...
Bush has already indicated he will sign the McCain-Feingold campaign finance reform bill if it should come to his desk. But an idea that would have a much more positive effect on the country is capital market reform. Enron has the Bush administration acting defensively, but it could spur a great conservative reform agenda that draws on both McCainiac and Bushian impulses. This would involve pushing through accounting and financial disclosure regulations that would make it possible for small stockholders and entrepreneurs to have faith that they can compete fairly in the financial markets. Such reforms, starting with the ones Arthur Levitt has proposed, would give the markets the credibility that is a prerequisite if Social Security privatization is ever to see the light of day. 

If the Bush administration ever wends its way to a reform agenda, if it champions a national service initiative that has both military and faith-based components, if, most important, it prosecutes the war against the axis of evil, then President Bush and his aides will not only have done great things for America, they will have laid the groundwork for a governing Republican majority. And George Bush will have established himself, with FDR and Reagan, as one of the great transformational presidents of the age.
...

From 2003, fresh from our unconditional victory in Iraq.  In your face, doubting losers!

Optimism Rediscovered 

From the April 4, 2003 London Times: Suddenly, things don't look so grim.
10:25 AM, APR 6, 2003 • BY DAVID BROOKS

This defeatist tone in the press simply proved unsustainable day after day as the coalition forces seemed to be bungling their way straight into Baghdad. Iraqi crowds sometimes grew exuberantly pro-American as the Baath secret police vanished. An Iraqi civilian in Najaf exulted, "Democracy! Whiskey! And Sexy!" giving the war its first great slogan. Members of the commentariat began to realize that once again they'd gone off the pessimistic deep end. 

...
In the White House, the mood is further buoyed by the thought that we may be seeing a political realignment. Independent voters are responding to war events, the polls reveal, in exactly the way Republican voters are, and are likely to side with Republicans whenever foreign and security issues come up.
The Democrats, meanwhile, are as divided as any U.S. party has been since Vietnam. Many Democrats support the war, while criticizing Bush's diplomatic tactics. This group includes most of the Clinton foreign policy team and liberals such as Richard Gephardt. But a hard core within the party never did, and never will, support the effort. And this group is getting more alienated, insular and vituperative each day. 

It should be emphasized that these mood swings are occurring at the elite level. Out in l'Amerique profonde there is amazing stability. Eight-five per cent tell pollsters the war is going very or moderately well, and this figure has barely wiggled in the past two weeks. Polls show a willingness to absorb casualties.
In this as in so many ways, President Bush reflects the country better than the beltway. He is not the sort of person who wakes up wondering what the columnists think. He has the advantage of having a mind that does not flit about much. Aides say he is dismissive of the chorus of instant evaluators, and has grown imperious towards those who bring that mentality into the White House. The media mood ebbs and flows, but persistence shapes U.S. policy. ...

I did not have to bribe anyone at the Library of Congress for access to these columns, nor did I have to get someone's secretary drunk or skulk around in a parking garage at 2:00 in the morning to get them.  The staggeringly idiotic written record of American's most powerful and ubiquitous Conservative public intellectual is right there, on the internet, for anyone to see.  To hold up to the light.  To compare with things he has said before and things he is saying now.

Honestly, it does not bother me that American's most powerful and ubiquitous Conservative public intellectual makes his living telling lies and recycling scams.

But it bothers me immensely that, year after year, no one but a rag-tag handful of bloggers ever has the balls to call him out on it.

Crom, Strong On His Mountain

I was thinking that a spin around "The Land of The Lost" might be a nice change of pace. Tease a few Sleestaks. Ride a few dinosaurs. Sort of like a trip to the Creationist Museum, as scripted by Norman Spinrad and produced by Sid and Marty Krofft.

But given that my gas gauge's wee sword is beknighting the "E" lightly on its shoulder, TLoTL will have to wait. Instead, I believe I have just enough juice for a quick trip to last decade of the 20th Century, and since so many people seem to have completely forgotten who did what and said what about whom before January, 2009, it amounts to pretty much the same thing.

So, as a small Zappadan gift to future historians trying to piece together exactly when and how we lost our minds, put the top down, crank up some cheery, mid-90s bubble gum

(Not Safe for Work) and tear off for a little tour through the days when a stone-crazy GOP base was animated by a blinding, psychotic hatred of the Democratic President: a hatred which we know beyond a doubt was being manufactured and belt-fed into the "Both Sides Do It" Villager media machine by ultra-rightwing billionaires and their paid stooges.

Through the Olden Days when anyone who alleged that the Right was running a, massive, well-organized, knives-out smear campaign were dismissed out-of-hand as a loony Lefty Clinton-lover.

A time (the Both Sides Do It" brigade always forgets to mention) when Keith Olbermann was doing sports on ESPN and MSNBC was barely out of the gate (and featured programs like The Contributors with [no kidding] Ann Coulter and Laura Ingraham)...but Rush Limbaugh was entering his second decade as the de facto leader of the GOP, and had been feted as "The Majority Maker" --

Rush Limbaugh Saluted As a `Majority Maker'

The Washington Post
December 11, 1994

House Republican newcomers made Rush Limbaugh an honorary class member tonight, a symbol of their gratitude for conservative talk-radio hosts who championed their campaigns.

Limbaugh was presented a "Majority Makers" pin, the emblem of the newcomers who have given their party majority status in the House for the first time in 40 years. Six GOP women in the class added their own special thanks, presenting Limbaugh with a plaque that said: "Rush was right." And Rep.-elect Barbara Cubin (R-Wyo.) added: "There's not a femiNazi among us."

Limbaugh, who was greeted with whoops and hollers from the newcomers, was one of the featured speakers at the closing dinner...

-- by the Party of God.

A time when America's relative peace and prosperity could not dissuade the Party of God that the Existential Peril posed by a bad Arkansas land deal and Bill Clinton's Penis was worse than nine Hitlers.

A time when David Brooks worked cheek-by-jowl with Bloody Bill Kristol at the Conservative "Weekly Standard"...

Here, then, is Our Mr. Brooks in his very own words, doing the writing that scored him a permanent seat on "The News Hour" and "Meet the Press" and a lifetime gig at the New York times...*

Mr. Brooks on that damned GOP Base (which Our Modern Mr. Brooks 2.0 now routinely dismisses as lound and annoying, but ultimately an irrelevant abberation which will be brought to heel by the Serious Leaders of the Conservative Movement) from January, 1999:

DAVID BROOKS: I'm not sure. I think in part it is the sense that every time they try to pull back the grassroots, the famous base hits them, and that's what happened over the weekend. They tried to pull back a quick and easy get out and just the massive calls came in.

...

DAVID BROOKS: Let's not overstate their rationalism - rationale of what's going on here - it's a head-heart problem. In their head they know it's a lost cause; in their heart they still don't like the guy.

...

Mr. Brooks on the nobility and historic importance of impeaching Bill Clinton (from January, 1999):

DAVID BROOKS: I think we are too close. I'm not sure you can step back and say what is the first blush look. I mean, if you look at the way public opinion has shifted, in the very beginning Bill Clinton did that famous poll with Dick Morris. Would the public have affected perjury, and the Dick Morris poll showed no. You do the polls today. Did Clinton commit perjury? Most people say yes. I think in the 70's a lot of people say yes. Should he be removed from office? No. But there has been a shift in public opinion dragged along by this process, but if I could just pick up on one thing about the dullness of the day, I think there was a kernel of romance in the day, a kernel that will be nurtured by the Republican Party. This is a party that is emotionally spent, that is very exhausted by its failure of the past several years. This is a great lost cause. They're going to be able to say to themselves we fought for honesty, we fought for justice against the polls, against everything else. You know, you look to the 2000 Republican Convention. Henry Hyde mounts the podium. You can say the place going bananas. You can see this magnifying into an event, an important event in Republican Party history.

JIM LEHRER: No matter what the result is?

DAVID BROOKS: Even more if it's negative. Even if they go down in defeat in 2000. They stood for principle against the polls. That's the way movements are built based on this kind of lost cause.

...

Mr. Brooks on the dazzling competence of George W. Bush (January, 2001):

Competent Conservatives, Reactionary Liberals

JAN 15, 2001, VOL. 6, NO. 17 • BY DAVID BROOKS

We seem to be entering a period of competent conservatism and reactionary liberalism. George W. Bush has put together a cabinet long on management experience and practical skills. But liberal commentators and activists, their imaginations aflame, seem to be caught in a time warp, back in the days when Norman Lear still had hair.

...

We could be in for a series of confrontations in which the two parties don't just hold different views, but live in different centuries.

Bush really has been able to mold an administration in his own image. He is our first president with an MBA, and it's clear that he brings an MBA mentality to the job. There are almost no academics at the top of this administration, but there are plenty of administrators, reflecting a Bush belief that intellectuals are people you can hire; executives are people you can trust. Like Bush, this is a conservative administration, but it is not doctrinaire. It has a chief of staff who supported Hillary Clinton's health care plan, a Treasury secretary who supported higher gas taxes and spurned the supply siders, and a secretary of state who opposed rolling back Saddam's invasion of Kuwait. These are not orthodox conservative positions.

...

Mr. Brooks on those Loony Liberals (February, 2001):

Bush, as Advertised

FEB 5, 2001, VOL. 6, NO. 20 • BY DAVID BROOKS

What on earth has gotten into the liberals and the media? Perhaps affected by some sort of post-Palm Beach stress disorder, reporters and activists on the left have depicted George W. Bush as the leader of some sort of arch-conservative jihad. They've portrayed his tax plan as dangerously radical, some of his nominees as Confederacy-loving loons, and his voucher plan as a menace to the future of public education. To put it bluntly, this is all deranged. You get the impression that the left has actually started believing its own direct-mail fund-raising letters

Over the past few weeks, George W. Bush has made it abundantly clear that he is who he has been telling us he is. From his first campaign speech in Iowa, through his national convention in Philadelphia, up to his inaugural address in Washington, Bush has been consistent: He has portrayed himself as an inclusive, not-particularly ideological compassionate conservative. He admires the nurturing caregiver rather than the rugged individualist or the entrepreneurial wealth creator. He prides himself on his ability to work across party lines. He has shown in a thousand and one ways that while he values responsibility and discipline, he is not a culture warrior.

Many in the media and on the left seem to regard all this as some sort of show, as a slick and palatable front designed to mask the right-wing bogeyman underneath. But now President Bush is translating his campaign into policy proposals, and it is clear that he has been straight-forward with the American people.

...

Mr. Brooks on the GOP's bright, tolerant, broad-minded future (August, 2000):

Pabulum with a Purpose

Beneath the much-mocked superficiality of the Philadelphia convention is a serious effort to transform the GOP

AUG 14, 2000, VOL. 5, NO. 45 • BY DAVID BROOKS

The Philadelphia convention, in other words, was unlike any other in party history. The Democratic view of it is that the Republicans built a Potemkin image of multicultural inclusiveness to mask what is still a white, intolerant party. And it's true that the convention program did not reflect the party as it really exists. The GOP is not intolerant; still, normal party gatherings don't look and feel like this. But the more generous interpretation is that the televised show represented the party of George W. Bush's aspirations. In other words, he's trying to transform the party to make it fit the happy multi-hued image that we saw up on stage.

And if that's true, then this convention was not just a big puddle of pabulum. It was a substantive political act disguised as pabulum. It was an effort to reengineer the party as ambitious as Bill Clinton's earlier effort to transform the Democratic party.

...

Mr. Brooks on why the Bush Tax Cuts are perfectly reasonable and easily affordable (March, 2001):

Yes, There Is a New Economy

Thanks to once-in-a lifetime productivity gains, Bush's plans are easily affordable
MAR 19, 2001, VOL. 6, NO. 26 • BY DAVID BROOKS

This year's tax and budget debate really comes down to one essential question: Is the money going to be there? The Congressional Budget Office projects surpluses of about $ 5.6 trillion over the next 10 years. The Republicans insist that those projections are conservative, so the government can afford to return $ 1.6 trillion to the taxpayers and still have money left over for Social Security, Medicare, and an $ 800 billion contingency fund. The Democrats cry that projections are notoriously inaccurate, that the tax cuts will blow a hole in the budget, and that the Bush administration's risky scheme (which sailed through the House last week) would cast us back into the days of piling debt.

The funny thing is that all of two months ago, the leading Democratic economists, in Bill Clinton's Council of Economic Advisers, were rapturous about the state of the economy and its prospects over the next several years. "Over the last eight years the American economy has transformed itself so radically that many believe we have created a New Economy," the Clinton team enthused, describing an economy filled with "virtuous circles" and positive "feedback loops."

And the Clinton economists were not just playing politics. For the truth is that over the past several months, while Wall Street and the general public have grown jittery over the state of things, leading lights in the economic profession have grown increasingly enthusiastic about the underlying strength of the U.S. economy. The key to their enthusiasm is productivity.

...

Mr. Brooks on BDSM.

No kidding (May, 2000):

The New Upper Class

How conservatives won the culture war, and lost the peace
MAY 8, 2000, VOL. 5, NO. 32 • BY DAVID BROOKS

If you'd like to be tortured with dignity and humiliated with respect, you really ought to check out the Internet newsletter of the Arizona Power Exchange, an S&M group headquartered in Phoenix. The organization offers a full array of services to what is now genteelly known as the leather community. For example, on August 3, according to last summer's newsletter, there was a discussion and humiliation session. On August 6, at 7 P.M., there was a workshop on caning. The next night, the Bondage Sadomasochism Personal Growth and Support Group met with Master Lawrence, while on August 10, Carla helped lead a discussion on high-heel and foot worship. All of these meetings were to be conducted with the maturity embodied in the organization's mission statement: "Treating the S&M, B&D and D&S experience with acceptance, caring, dignity and respect." Dignity and respect are important when you're tied up on the ground worshipping someone's boot.

The organization, which goes by the acronym APEX, has a seven-member board of directors, a long list of officers and administrators, and a web page staff to design the Internet site, which is more demure than you'd expect from your average Rotary Club. APEX sponsors charity drives. There's a special support group for submissives who are too shy to vocalize the sort of submission they like. There's a seminar on S&M and the law. There are 12-step meetings for sadists and masochists recovering from substance abuse. Finally, there are outreach efforts to build coalitions with other bondage and domination groups nationwide.
...

Mr. Brooks on wealth and class-envy among the Villagers (May, 1996):

...

The Titled Class has always resented and secretly envied the Monied Class. But for journalists, writers, and politicos, the pain now is acute. Until recently, a person who went into, say, the media understood that he or she would forever live a middle-class life. But now one need only look at Cokie Roberts or David Gergen to see that vast wealth is possible. Once it becomes plausible to imagine yourself pulling in $ 800,000 a year, the lack of that money begins to hurt.

...

Consider the situation of our composite editor. He's earning $ 110,000 a year as a top editor at, say, Time magazine. His wife, whom he met while they were studying at the Yale drama school, is a program officer at a boutique foundation that offers scholarships to Brooklyn high-school students. She makes $ 65,000. In their wildest imagining they never dreamed they'd someday pull in $ 175,000 a year.

...

When a Titleholder with a household income of $ 175,000 a year enters a room filled with Monied persons who earn $ 1.75 million a year, a few social rules will be observed. First, everyone will act as if money does not exist. Everyone, including the Titled person near bankruptcy, will pretend it is possible to jet off to Paris for a weekend and the only barrier is finding the time. Everyone will praise the Marais district, and it will not be mentioned that the Monied person has an apartment in the Marais, while the Titled person stayed in a one-star hotel somewhere in the suburbs. The Titled person will notice that the Monied Class spends a lot of time planning and talking about vacations, whereas all the Titled person wants to talk about is work.

These conversations between those who are Titled and those with Money are fraught with peril. For example, a person who has made $ 10 million in the garbage-collection business has to defer in conversation to an editor at Esquire. On the other hand, an editor at Esquire has to defer to a person who has made $ 300 million in the garbage-collection business. A TV producer who went to Yale and Oxford is higher than an apartment-building owner who went to SUNY-Binghamton but lower than the owner of a hot restaurant who went to Brooklyn Community College. You've got to be sensitive to the invisible social hierarchies.

And at the back of the Titled person's mind there is the doubt: Do they really like me, or am I just another form of servant, one who provides amusement or publicity instead of making the beds? The sad fact is, the rich tend not to think this way. The millionaires think it would be neat to be a think-tank fellow and appear on the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. Look at Mortimer Zuckerman, who owns the New York Daily News, the Atlantic, U.S. News & World Report, and a goodly chunk of Manhattan. He'll drive out to Fort Lee, New Jersey, so he can do a taping for the cable channel CNBC. It's not enough to have more money than most countries. He wants to be a pundit.

I don't know about Zuckerman, but most people in the Monied Class who fantasize about becoming a public intellectual can't actually fathom what it would be like to make less than $ 300,000 a year.

...

Mr. Brooks on that young, up-and-comer Grover Norquist and his pals (August, 1996):

UP FROM LIBERTARIANISM

12:00 AM, AUG 19, 1996 • BY DAVID BROOKS

In 1995, the Republicans were filled with libertarian fervor. Activist Grover Norquist, who was whitehot during the first months of the Congress, explained that the Republican majority had been elected by the "Leave Us Alone" coalition -- by people who simply wanted government off their backs. Norquist was quoted in a Washington Post profile saying that the sight of the executive branch buildings in Washington made him "physically ill. . . . Neo-American fascism, stuff that looks like Albert Speer designed it."

The Cato Institute was the most prominent think tank, with its experts testifying 16 times on Capitol Hill in the first month of the 104th Congress. Speaker Gingrich declared that his party would show "how to end programs, not just create them." The New Majority's Zeitgeist became so libertarian that mainstream Republicans emerged as aggressive opponents of . . . the FBI. For if Washington were incapable of running a good program, its law enforcement inevitably had to be overbearing and oppressive.

There was a positive hunger in those days for a budget train wreck; the fax machines spit out declarations from activist groups topped with slogans like " No Compromise." The Republicans were gambling that when they shut down the government, most Americans would discover they didn't mind. "Have you missed it?" Phil Gramm asked on This Week with David Brinkley during last winter's federal shutdown.

It turns out that Americans don't wake up angry because the Commerce Department exists. The shutdown gamble lost.

...

Mr. Brooks on Newt Gingrich (October, 1996):

WHAT HAPPENED TO NEWT GINGRICH?
12:00 AM, OCT 21, 1996 • BY DAVID BROOKS

The longer you watch Newt Gingrich, the less you know about him. He creates a striking first impression as the self-declared Man of Destiny, but over time the clarity of that self-made Newt dissolves, and a humbler, more modest, and more enigmatic Gingrich drifts into view. If you formed your impression of Newt Gingrich at the dawn of the 104th Congress, when the magazine covers were rife with his caricature, it is likely that everything you know about Gingrich is wrong.

The leaders of the conservative movement have now fallen out of love with the speaker, and he with them. "Movement conservatives are wonderfully critical in a way that bears almost no relationship with political reality," Gingrich says now. "It seems to make them feel good."

..."He's randomly conservative," says a senior congressional Republican. "He has no conservative instincts," says another House member. "He's conservative, but not in any conventional sense," says a longtime colleague. "I knew a lot of people were going to get their heart broken with him. He believes in what is expedient," a movement leader tells his friends. Paul Weyrich was willing to wrap up the anti-Gingrich view on the record in Rolling Stone: "Newt's a brilliant fellow who is very able to excite people and motivate them, but he believes in very little, so most of his views are negotiable. Newt creates scenarios for himself, and he becomes morally certain that they are going to play out. Then when it doesn't happen, he goes into a blue funk."

...

But if the Republicans keep the House, then Gingrich will come back, for there is no untruer truism than Fitzgerald's claim that there are no second acts in American lives. Gingrich will have natural advantages. A reelected President Clinton will want to pass some legislation, and given the fractiousness of the Democratic party, he will have to rely often on a legislative strategist of Gingrich's caliber. The public will see Gingrich's constructive side. And while some conservatives may doubt his loyalty to conservative principle, Gingrich is far more ideologically rooted than Bill Clinton. His pull on legislation will be substantial.

Then in 1998, if historical trends hold true, the Republicans will gain seats in the House, and Gingrich will see his stature enhanced. At that point it will be possible to see his speakership lasting a long time (assuming he ignores his silly pledge to termlimit himself). The odd thing for a self- described revolutionary is that Gingrich does worst when time is compressed, when a lot of things happen at once. At such moments, his passions come to the surface, his desire for conflict seems angriest, his brain is at its most hyperactive, and his skin is thinnest. Gingrich does best when time stretches out, over the long haul (as in the struggle to gain the majority). In those circumstances, Gingrich's ability to see more broadly and imagine farther serves him well. And his ability to keep his focus on a distant goal while other people are distracted by temporary phenomena comes to the fore. If Gingrich survives this election, he will be able slowly to rebuild, and he will have the opportunity to dominate the coming era.

And, finally and most exquisitely, Mr. Brooks on why Centrism is ultimately empty and absurd (Oct, 1995):

THE LAND BEYOND LEFT AND RIGHT
OCT 2, 1995, VOL. 1, NO. 03 • BY DAVID BROOKS


This is a time of such profound change that we need a dynamic center, that is not in the middle of what is left and right, but is way beyond it.

-- Bill Clinton

On September 1 in the Year of Our Lord 199_, I undertook a journey to the Land Beyond Left and Right. It was a long voyage, for I had to navigate past the Scylla of liberalism and the Charybdis of conservatism; steer" around what E. J. Dionne has called the False Choices; and traverse what Bill Bradley refers to as the To Familiar Ruts.

At each turn the Tired Old Libels [sp?] sang to me in the seductive voice of the Siren, and I could have been sucked back, as an editorial in the Democratic Leadership Council's magazine warned, into "the ideological and interest group battles of the Industrial Era." But at long last I crossed the meridian into a new, post-Cold War/Information Age/Global Economy era that requires fresh approaches and new thinking.

I docked at the Land Beyond Left and Right and was confronted with a fan of roadways, all of them marked, "To the Center." The sun was shining, and everybody was sitting around watching Ken Bode's Washington Week in Review.

...those who have taken up permanent residence in the Land Beyond are tied to no one. They sometimes call on those still clinging to the Tired Old Labels to repudiate their allies, but they themselves never have to repudiate anyone. They categorize others while remaining uncategorized.

...

The visitor can forgive himself for wondering if he hasn't discovered utopia: a place where bright, open-minded people can be seen discussing issues in civil tones. The Land Beyond has the Sparkle of freshness, as old conventions are shed, and people look for new ideas to go with a new era.

But on the second day in this land, clouds appear. Questions nag. For example, why is it always Democrats who argue that labels don't matter anymore? When Oliver North called him a liberal, Mario Cuomo protested, " don't like your labels. I don't buy shoes that way." Barbara Mikulski wrote in the "Washington Post" that the words liberal and conservative "have become cliches . . . with little meaning." A cynic might conclude that what these liberals are really trying to move beyond is the number 43 -- the percentage of Americans who vote for liberal presidential candidates.

But even among the intellectuals, Beyondists are likely to have liberal pedigrees. Sometimes they seem loosely akin to the non-aligned bloc in the Cold War, loudly nonaligned, yet somehow usually siding with one side.

...

Conservatives, by contrast, seem to be quite happy with the conservative label. They embrace it. It seems coherent and meaningful to them. Republican candidates call themselves conservatives, even if the label doesn't really apply. It may be that the effort to move beyond labels has less to do with the exhaustion of ideologies than it does with the exhaution of liberalism.

But the peace in the Land Beyond is darkened by a deeper anxiety. The Beyondists have gone past the old creeds, but it is not clear whether those beliefs have been replaced by anything else.

...

The central problem with Beyondists and centrists is that they misunderstand the way ideas are developed. The policy gabfests that Bill Clinton so loves are based on the premise that such meetings exist for people of good will to come together and solve problems There are two flaws in this sentiment. The first has to do with the phrase "come together." The second has to do with the word "problems."

"Coming together" was big in the 1960s. Songs, speakers, and pamphlets were perpetually urging people to do it. It was at the heart of the utopianism of the New Left: Conflict is not inevitable; different views are reconcilable; most conflicts can be hammered out with co-operation and better communication These premises, of course, were the basis of the New Left's approach to the Cold War.

...

Things are often irreconcilable; that is a sad reality. Liberals promote one set of virtues, a lot of them having to do with compassion. Conservatives promote another set of virtues, a lot of them having to do with achievement. And the champions of these two "ideologies" spend their time struggling to give greater weight to their own constellation of virtues. The labels "liberal" and "conservative" have survived at least a half century of charges that they are obsolete. They have done so because they represent two worldviews that are not compatible.

Not every issue in America is polarized -- most Americans occupy a middle ground on abortion and racial matters, and foreign policy disputes are for the moment unformed -- but the struggle between left and right reflects something profound. It isn't over how to solve a plumbing problem. It's a long competition between virtues.

And it is a healthy competition. Some Soviets, and some Western neoconservatives such as Jean-Francois Revel, thought that the democracies would lose the Cold War because they were always tearing themselves apart with internal disputes between right and left. But as it transpired, these internal disputes allowed the West to remain dynamic and creative. Another species may think more acutely in an atmosphere of friendship and cooperation, but for most people, a good motivation to argue well is to humiliate the sons of bitches on the other side.

Debates are not dominated by the loosely tethered individuals who declare themselves above the partisan fray. They are dominated by people who are self-conscious about their premises and firm in their conclusions, who nail their theses to a door.

...

The Beyondists have several disadvantages when they enter the battle of ideas. In the first place, they always start from square one. Their boast, echoing President Clinton, is that we are in an unprecedented age demanding new thinking. This was the song of the modernists about a hundred years ago too. But as the history of modernism shows, while "it is exhilarating to begin anew, "fresh" ideas have a way of failing. The ones that work have been tested over time.

People with definite creeds don't have to reinvent the wheel. Conservatives and liberals inherit intellectual traditions; they can learn from lines of thinkers who shared their basic precepts." Conservatives go around wearing Adam Smith neckties. They cite Burke or Jefferson or Aquinas. More recently, Milton Friedman, Lionel Trilling, James Burnham, and others did some heavy lifting; it's not necessary for today's conservatives to do it all over again. Beyondists have to start from scratch.

The labeled have an even greater advantage over the labelless. Liberals and conservatives join movements. A free marketeer can go anywhere in the world and have dinner with somebody from the local free market think tank -- in London, Jerusalem, Capetown. Domestically, conservative and liberal magazines form their own communities. Conferences and bulletin boards, parties and dinners reinforce the bonds. "

It is this web of friendships that gives a creed its dynamism. People gossip, people talk. Look at the newsletters put out by the CATO Institute or the American Enterprise Institute; there will be photos of politicians and think tankers and academics standing in happy conversational klatches, clutching cocktail glasses against their stomachs. That's a political movement in action.

...

Movements nurture the young. They offer mundane things like job opportunities, but they also impart education and give their members a sense of higher purpose. In the war of ideas, battalions do well. Each foot soldier makes an unconscious deal: He dispossesses himself of the privilege of being uncategorizable and completely autonomous, and in exchange he gets a place in the larger movement.

The Beyondists are above the compromise that membership in a movement entails, as they are beyond partisan politics. In short they are above the fray. At their worst, they seem like Kevin Phillips -- solitary complainers who inveigh against a world that will not live up to their standards. At their best they are acute observers, but observers only.

So one leaves the Land Beyond Left and Right remembering what the 19th-century journalist Walter Bagehot said of the post-ideological politicians of his own day: "They are betwixt and between, and make distinctions which no one heeds; they live in a debatable land, which each party attacks and neither defends. . . . They must endure the tedium of inaction, and bear the constant sense of irritating helplessness.

Though they are the best of rulers for the world, they are the last persons to be likely to rule."

There is, of course, much, much more, including a large body of Iraq War cheerleading and anti-Liberal slander which has already been well documented elsewhere. But this is bile-infused bit of Brooksian wisdom from 1995 is my favorite --

...why is it always Democrats who argue that labels don't matter anymore? ...A cynic might conclude that what these liberals are really trying to move beyond is the number 43 -- the percentage of Americans who vote for liberal presidential candidates.

But even among the intellectuals, Beyondists are likely to have liberal pedigrees. Sometimes they seem loosely akin to the non-aligned bloc in the Cold War, loudly nonaligned, yet somehow usually siding with one side.
...

Conservatives, by contrast, seem to be quite happy with the conservative label. They embrace it. It seems coherent and meaningful to them. Republican candidates call themselves conservatives, even if the label doesn't really apply. It may be that the effort to move beyond labels has less to do with the exhaustion of ideologies than it does with the exhaution of liberalism.

-- because one can so clearly trace the arc of Mr. Brooks' craven and highly successful campaign of booklicking and position-switching from then until now.

While the black helicopter wingnuts were feeling their oats, demagogues like Falwell and Roberstson were ascendant, Limbaugh was packing 'em in to mid-day "Rush Room" rage-fests, and the Gingrich Hate Machine was mowing down weak-kneed opposition by the use of Conservative lies and slander on a scale no one had dreamed possible...Mr. Brooks was perfectly happy to be partisan warrior.

While George W. Bush was busy bankrupting the country, shredding the Constitution and and lying us a catastrophic war...Mr. Brooks was delighting to sing his praises, carry his water and excoriate his critics.

When it all blew up in his face -- just like those awful Dirty Hippies said it would -- instead of being consigned to the outer media darkness for his really spectacular record of being wrong about everything -- Mr. Brooks suddenly discovered a hidden stash of "Both Sides Do It"-ism, turning himself almost overnight into a modest, pure-at-heart Neihburian Centrist, which a cynic might conclude is nothing but a shameless attempt to try move beyond his long and unctuous support for the Party of God and the 43rd President of the United States.

Didn't slow him down one iota.

Mr. Brooks stuck his finger in the wind, calculated where he could re-pot his career in a way that would meet three important things:

1. Let him skip right on past the inconvenient fact that Liberals were right all along.
2. Let him slip out of the nut house that his Conservatism had become with no professional blowback. And,
3. Let him remain snuggly-close to the rich and powerful.

And so virtually overnight Mr. Reasonable Conservative became Mr. Centrist -- a heavyweight champion of the Big Lie at the heart of our corrupt media -- one that that he now promotes so single-mindedly -- and gets away with so completely -- that yours truly has been moved over the years to pen several hundred posts on the subject.

Then Mr. Brooks did what Mr. Brooks always does: attached himself tapeworm-like to the Next Big Thing. Which, this time around, was Barack Obama.

Mash notes were written. Public plights of troth were made. VIP/All-Access passes were issued, and Our Mr. Brooks was dutifully escorted past the hordes of Dirty Hippies to the head of the line.

More mash notes. More public paeans. And for awhile it was like the good, giggly old days with Dubya.

But it couldn't last.

Because the bylaws of the Big Centrist Lie to which Mr. Brooks had lashed himself would not permit it to last. Because -- as the Rules of Centrism clearly state -- fault for anything and everything must always, always, always be allote in equal measure to the Left and the Right. And so when President Obama finally had to split with the Centrist Punditocracy and take public note of the fact that, no matter how post-partisan he acted, no matter how lavish his compromises, and no matter how many Republican ideas he tried to enact, the GOP had dedicated itself to fanatically opposing anything and everything that his Administration proposes...the Rules of Centrism required that Our Mr. Brooks burst into loudly, blubbery, public tears and break up with him on the grounds of insufficient capitulation to lunatics and economic terrorists.

In the end, it is clear that Mr. Brooks is completely hollow. He believes in nothing but his own professional advancement (and that the Dirty Hippies are secretly to blame for everything even if he can't prove it) and so, like Captain Renault in "Casablanca", he goes "with the wind".

And right now, the prevailing wind blows from the Center.

Over in the Better Universe, such banality, naked opportunism and hackishness would have gotten Mr. Brooks laughed out of town years ago, but we live in this Universe.

And in this Universe there is a Club.

And you are not in it.

So, rather than being shown the door, Crom remains strong on his Mountain by doing once more what he has always done before: attaching himself tapeworm-like to the Next Big Thing.

Which, this time around, appears to be a cyborg that clearly needs to be programmed to pass a Turing Test before it can be safely turned loose among actual reporters.


* (Some of which are a little truncated due to the archival procedures at "The Weekly".)