My respect for the NYT

just grow and grows.

I mean, initially I though of the Time’s Select moat around its editorial pages as another cheap stunt by an embarrassingly out-of-date paper to squeeze a few more pfennigs from its octogenarian readership. Which is weird, because as I cannot imagine the seniors (who still wade through the creaky pages of the NYT as if it were relevant and fearless) navigating the digital Checkpoint Charlie to get to their Friedman Fix, so I cannot imagine anyone who lives a digital life bothering with the NYT at all.

Which is where I made my mistake.

I have now shifted from bemused contempt to unalloyed pity for poor She Who Oversees the NYT Editorial Page: Ms. Gail Collins. I mean seriously, WTF must be up behind the Big Doors at the NYT to bequeath precious column inches to an obviously talent-free, partisan hack like David Brooks week after month after year?

Because at some point mustn’t one eventually step back from Bobo’s individual crimes against narrative and honesty and just look at the sheer tonnage of feeble, flabby, dishonest, 90-degree-slanted, culturally trivial twaddle Mr. Brooks generates from his catbird seat atop America’s flagship paper?

And having assayed Bobo’s angry scribblings and plotted them along a temporal axis, and paused, stunned, at their numbingly consistent inadequacy as commentary of any stripe, how can one avoid concluding that Bobo must have the most exquisite collection of videos detailing his employers’ vigorous participation in

A. A Tijuana donkey show.
B. The international slave trade.
C. Afghanistan poppy futures.
D. GOP Page “procurement”.

Or

E. Something so fundamentally bent as to be unimaginable by mere pikers like me.

So having been treed and trapped into not only publishing Bobo’s drivel but paying him for the privilege of daubing up his font-based hairballs with their great, gray pages, his employer has had to become more subtle in executing her first responsibility as an editor: preventing the reading public from being hit in the face by big bags of poo.

So All Hail Times’ Select: the Sneeze Guard on America’s Journal of Record. Gallantly interposing itself between the Gentle Reader and diseased, Republican snot rockets that come machine-gunning out of wingnut blowholes.

Such as Bobo’s column of October 5th – “A Tear in Our Fabric” – in which he demonstrates for the millionth time this timeless truth:

No matter how many fleets of atomic-powered back-hoes the GOP leases for a million dollars a minute from Halliburton to deepen the trenches into which they have already sunk the bar for the minimally acceptable level of degenerate Republican behavior, worms like Bobo will always insist that somehow, some way, the non-GOP majority is somehow equally awful and equally culpable.

Behold this snip from his latest masterpiece of mendacity…

This is a tale of two predators. The first is a congressman who befriended teenage pages. He sent them cajoling instant messages asking them to describe their sexual habits, so he could get his jollies.

The second is a secretary, who invited a 13-year-old girl from her neighborhood into her car and kissed her. Then she invited the girl up to her apartment, gave her some vodka, took off her underwear and gave her a satin teddy to wear.

Then she had sex with the girl, which was interrupted when the girl’s mother called. Then she made the girl masturbate in front of her and taught her some new techniques.

The first predator, of course, is Mark Foley, the Florida congressman. The second predator is a character in Eve Ensler’s play, “The Vagina Monologues.”

And having “established” somewhere in the depleted nimbus of brain cells that still scurry around in his soft head that a FICTIONAL CHARACTER from a play is somehow exactly the same as a real child predator, notice how his next paragraph begins (emphasis added)

“Foley is now universally reviled. But the Ensler play…”

And off we go on a dissertation on vile, lefty art and how “cosmopolitan culture” has just gone and ruined the social fabric.

Rooned I tell's ya!

Desperate to evade the question of why a child predator was allowed to range and hunt free at the heart of the Family Values Party, and why virtually the entire Party of Personal Responsibility is now bending every oar hysterically ducking their Personal Responsibility, Bobo begins to unload the strawmen by the job lot:

But why is one sexual predator despised and the other celebrated?

...he asks

See kids, this is what happens when you drink the Koolaid, then lick the Koolaid powder off the floor, then smoke the packet in came in: Lying becomes so automatic to you – pulling out of your ass whatever works to cover up the Scandal of the Day becomes such a reflex – that you lose the capacity to distinguish between a character in a play and a real Congressman who hunts real children.

But of course, we live in the Rove Universe, ruled by utterly amoral perverts who giddily look upon the gaping wounds they themselves inflict on society as another opportunity to spread their infection.

Who see in the slaughter and ruin they and they alone have created in Iraq only a partisan opportunity to call Democrats traitors and divide the country even further for one more election.

Who see in genuine terrorist threats a fascist’s all-you-can-eat buffet: a feast laid out for them to finally be allowed to torture whomever they wish, shred that inconvenient Constitution once and for all, and call any who oppose them un-American.

Who see in the face of a Republican child sexual predator and a Republican cover-up a chance to line up and take free shots at gays, art, Clinton, Soros, "the media" and all of the rest of the usual suspects.

The honest answer to Bobo’s absurd question is, of course, is that Art is supposed to be provocative you imbecile.

It is supposed to illuminate, not laminate.

And to get that job done, we allow Artists enormous latitude. We allow them to create scary villains. Flawed heroes. Plots that creep us out. In literature, we allow the Good Guys to lose. Badly. Or to drown. Or let the life-saving fire they finally managed to strike with their frozen fingers and last match to be smothered by a dollop of snow falling from an overhanging limb.

I know that makes cultural cripples like Bobo desperately uncomfortable.

I know the idea of “culture” being anything other than a warm-milk-flavored, self-congratulatory, Matrix-pod goo makes them all itchy between their ears, but fuck ‘em. Art has ever been thus, and will ever be so. People have decried everything from perspective drawing to “The Rites of Spring” as evil.

And Bobo, artists fail all the time (most of the time) but how dare a truckling little typist like you -- who makes a living sucking the moisture out of Ayn Rand’s discarded Kleenexes -- weigh in on Art at all.

Artists make their living making us uncomfortable. That is their function, and if they work their magic right, 150 years later we will remember and revere them. If they don't, they disappear into obscurity. I don’t have to admire Dostoevsky's life to believe that “The Idiot” is a work of surpassing genius. And I don’t feel any compulsion to rush to the defense of sociopathic killers even while I note that, 150 years after they were written, “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Cask of Amontillado” are each artistic and cultural milestones of the first order.

And we allow it. Hell, we demand it. We need Provocation like we need air: Without it, the Southron Slave Empire that the Red Staters no-sot-secretly covet would be entering its three-hundred-and-fiftieth year of continuous operation. Rape and murder of non-whites would still be a God-sanctioned perk, and Dr. King would have ended up at the end of a Conservative Christian rope the first time he opened his mouth and said, “I am a Man.”

Congressmen, on the other hand, are not hired to peel the skin off of the human soul and show us the miracles and murder that contend in our hearts.

Congressmen are hired to do a job of work much like house painting and pothole-filling.

Congressmen are not hired to molest children.

Congressmen are not hired to cover up for the molesters of children.

This is a concept which is not beyond David Brooks’ comprehension, but beyond his honor. He is not actually dumb enough not to know better, because he is not a stupid man, but a despicable man.

When he dissembles to deflect judgment away from child sex predators and their enablers in his Party, he does it by choice.

Because he is a Good Republican and not a Good American.

Because it does not matter how many times Republicans hits your grandma upside the head with a shovel, Bobo will forever waddle onto the crime scene, pick up the bloody weapon and screech, “But the Liberals…”