Sunday Morning Comin’ Down - Part 2 of 2

The triumphant return of

David Fucking Brooks...


...who showed up on the Cotton Mathers Chris Matthews’ Show yesterday to play a game of truth-keep-away with fellow Conservative columnist Kathleen Parker, leaving poor little Ricky Stengel jumping back and forth trying to agree with everybody.

Matthews: (To Stengel and kinda incoherent): ...about this paranoiac streak in American history...is it part right now, part of it is, this white attitude towards a Black President. Is it that stark?

Stengel: You know, I start from the viewpoint that lots and lots of racists voted for Barack Obama…

WTF?

Stengel: I can’t tell you what is in people’s minds and hearts.

Ok, but what about what’s on their signs?

On their buttons?

On their tee shirts?

On their bookshelves?

In their churches?

On their radios and teevees?

Or are the tens of millions of failed, mentally underclocking losers who faithfully hang on every word that comes out of Limbaugh’s and Beck’s mouths all doing it “ironically”?


Stengel: I do believe the reaction that is going on right now would happen to a White President that is trying to do some of the same things that Barack Obama is doing.

Stengel: But I do think that us dwelling on it is not good for the public discourse. Not good for America.

Again, reasonable people must ask, WTF?

Matthews: This sign – “I Want My Country Back” – would that have happened (with a White President)?

Parker: By the way, in January, 70% of voters approved of Barack Obama. That percentage did suddenly become racist.

No, 70% of Americans approved of Barack Obama, which includes some large number of those 50% of all Americans who don’t vote.

So, yes, the 55% of the electorate that voted for him approved of him…and some large number of distracted, disengaged losers looked up “Jon and Kate Plus Eight” long enough to give him a thumbs up.

But the 30% of Americans who are hardcore bible-crazies, bigots and imbeciles – that irredeemably devolved slab of the public who now control the GOP and who make up Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh’s the loyal audience – never approved of him and never will.

Seriously, why isn’t the ghost of Pigmeat Markham

beating the crap out of these clowns with his pig bladder?

Parker: When they say, “I want my country back” they’re talking about this great anxiety that is widespread about the rapid growth of gummint, and debt and deficit…

driftglass: All of which are issues -- and let’s all repeat it now for the millionth time for the people waaaaay in the back of the room in the cheap seats – about which these same “patriots” never expressed a whisper of concern as long as the President who was massively increasing the debt and the deficit and expanding the reach and intrusiveness of gummint was a White Christian Conservative Republican named “Bush”.

Or don’t you remember?


Parker: So when they say they want their country back, they’re not saying they want White America back. ... What they’re saying is they want to remain a “constitutionally sound country” and they’re in doubt about that…

driftglass: All of which are issues -- let’s all repeat it now for the million-and-first time for life forms in orbit around distant suns -- about which these same “patriots” never expressed a whisper of concern when the Constitution they love so rapturously was being shredded by a White Christian Conservative Republican President named “Bush”.

Or don’t you remember?

Matthews: Yeah, but we just sat here and watched the two douchbags who lead the GOP – Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh – call the President a racist and say that he hates White people. How can “serious” journalists like David Brooks and Kathleen Parker gas on and on about how none of this is really happening when the irrefutable evidence that it is happening is staring them right in the face?

David Fucking Brooks: Yeah, what Rush and Glenn Beck are doing is just race-baiting. 100%, that’s race-baiting.

Go on…

David Fucking Brooks: So let’s just ignore it. Because its scary to me, and because if we ever seriously examined why I -- David Fucking Brooks – continue to defend Rush’s GOP and Becks’ American Conservatism Movement at the same time I pretend to abhor everything they do and say, then people might start to figure out that I’m nothing but an opportunistic weasel, willing to take every side of any issue as long as I get to continue to play the part of everybody’s favorite Non-Ranting Conservative and keep my key to the Big Dollar Media’s Executive Washroom.

David Fucking Brooks: So instead, let’s ignore everything that is actually going on around us here and now and pretend to take “a longer view”. To that end I will now recite a long list of American populists and demagogues to try to distract you from the fact that, here and now, I am the willing tool of terrible, bigoted people because the pay is really good.

David Fucking Brooks: This is a populist uprising of mostly-rural people. And they think the moral backbone of the country comes for people who work with their hands. Who are extremely suspicious when you get government power fusing with banking power…which is a lot of what they’ve seen over the past few weeks…they would be upset if Washington merged with Wall Street… the auto industry… the energy sector…the health care industry.

driftglass: Let us all now repeat the obvious for the million-and-second time for those vast, cool intelligences running empires in distant galaxies: these same “patriots” who are mere reacting to the existential terror of “Washington” merging with "Wall Street” somehow nonetheless happily voted for the Party of Bankers and Wall Street for 30 years as it fucked them over and over again.

These humble, working folk -- for some reason that David Fucking Brooks is too cowardly to name -- somehow nonetheless gleefully voted for the Party that destroyed the standards of living of millions of humble, working folk; smashing their labor unions, driving their wages down and shipped their jobs overseas.

These Sons of the Soil who would soil themselves in America-loving outrage if Washington ever merged with “the energy sector” somehow nonetheless joyfully elected an Administration which was run entirely by former oil industry executives, and whose most aggressive fundraiser was Enron’s Ken “Kenny-boy” Lay.

These same concerned Americans who are leaping from their doublewide trailers only out of their sincere concern that “Washington” is trying to merge with “the health care industry” never had a problem with Medicare, Medicaid, and somehow nonetheless never expressed a whisper of concern as long as the President who was adding an additional, multi-trillion dollar unfunded Medicare benefit was a White Christian Conservative Republican named “Bush”.

David Fucking Brooks: And if they saw as what they saw as over-educated people were leading the country. They’d be upset whether it was Hillary, or John Kerry or Barack Obama. Whether it was anybody.

driftglass: I predict a sudden, violent downpour of “Both Sides Do It” in 3…2…1…


David Fucking Brooks: To me its rural small town versus cosmopolitan big city. And to me the essence of remaining sane in times like these is to not get on either side.

Yay!

David Fucking Brooks: Because they’re both driving each other nuts.

Double Yay!

Matthews: That’s the same thing that said John Kerry is French.


Parker: I know Joe Wilson and he’s not an “angry white man”. I was shocked. It was an “unusual: thing for him – or anyone – to do. I think it is unfair to refer to it as racist.

Parker asserts that imputing racism to Joe Wilson – or to anyone – is unfair “because we can’t read someone’s mind or know their heart”. Of course, a year ago when she suggested that Sarah Palin might not be fully qualified to be Vice President, this same Kathleen Parker had no problem reading their emails:

From Firedoglake:

Kathleen Parker Shocked To Find Her Party’s Full Of “Vicious”, “Threatening”, Delusional Wingnuts


By: Blue Texan Wednesday October 1, 2008

Parker, who last week called for Palin to step down, now finds herself the target of a Wingnut Two Minutes of Hate.

"Allow me to introduce myself. I am a traitor and an idiot. Also, my mother should have aborted me and left me in a dumpster, but since she didn't, I should "off" myself.

...
"After 20 years of column writing, I'm familiar with angry mail. But the past few days have produced responses of a different order. Not just angry, but vicious and threatening.

Bwahahah!

Then Stengel gave the whole game away…

Stengel (to Brooks): Yes, the thing that Hofstadter wrote about it the “The Paranoid Style in American Politics”. Both side, in effect, mirror each other. They have the same attributes. They see the enemy in the other because of what they’re seeing in themselves.

What Stengel is citing as an foundational authority which undergirds their whole “Both sides are always equally, oppositely and insanely wrong” Big Lie is this work by Richard Hofstadter.

But Stengel gets his analysis completely wrong.

Far from proving the Big Lie of the Mainstream Media that the political Left and Right are some kind of conjoined ethical-twins, doomed to perfectly emulate each other’s insanities and excesses, Hofstadter simply says that a toxic strain of paranoia has always been afloat in American body politic, lodging over time here and there inside of various, congenial (and almost always right-wing) political movements: the anti-Masonic movement of the 1820s and 1830s, some of the more conspiracy-minded Populists in 1865, the anti-Catholic of the late 1830s, the Ku Klux Klan, the Birchers, etc.

Stengel also, incredibly, doesn’t bother to mention is Hofstadter’s piece is from 1964.

That it was written as a response to (emphasis added):

“…angry minds at work mainly among extreme right-wingers, who have now demonstrated in the Goldwater movement how much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority.”

That far from being some Left/Right equal opportunity smackdown, the piece specifically indicts “the contemporary right-wing paranoid”, which grew out of an earlier McCarthyist phase, and which viewed every event in modern history -- no matter how tiny -- as integral components in the Vast Commie Conspiracy, and the American Gummint as infested with collaborators who had already almost completely destroyed the country and sold out its people.

From Hofstadter:

“The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms—he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization. He constantly lives at a turning point.”

And

“…the paranoid is a militant leader. He does not see social conflict as something to be mediated and compromised, in the manner of the working politician. Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, what is necessary is not compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish.”

Stengel doesn’t mention that Hofstadter’s piece was written at the dawn of the Conservative Movement’s long, careful processing of harnessing and domesticating our nation’s wild strain of Political Paranoia in a generational plan to seize and hold electoral power which would come to be known as “The Southern Strategy”.

That it was written before Fox News. Before Hate Radio. Before Focus in the Family and the Moral Majority.

Written before Lee Atwater and his ratfucking political descendents figured out how to turn cross burnings into Get Out the Vote drives, how to make a Republican ward bosses out of bible-thumping cranks, and how to carefully gather together virtually every species of native xenophobe, bigot and lunatic into a limitless electoral power supply for the Party of God.

In other words, before the lunatic Right had its own media empire, religion, and major political party.

That lastly thing that Stengel doesn’t bother to mention is that yhe 19th Century movements Hofstadter cited in his essay each only lasted for brief periods of time before their impelling fever broke, or until they mutated into something else. However it has been nearly a half-century since the publication of “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” and during virtually all of that time the crazy-needle has remained firmly buried deep inside the Conservative Movement.

Matthews: The Far Left enjoys the craziness of the Far Right. We know that; it makes their case.

driftglass: No, Chris, we don’t. After over 4,000 American soldiers killed in Iraq, and over 30,000 wounded… After trillions of dollars flushed down various Republican ideological toilets… After watching the GOP break the country’s back in a hundreds different ways… I can tell you authoritatively that we really, really don’t.

Helene Cooper of the New York Times finally squirts a little of the Lemon Juice of Truth into the eyes of the wildly contorting White Conservative Journalists (and Stengel the Milquetoast Centrist) as they danced anxiously around the glaringly obvious fact that racism plays a huge part in the animus toward Barack Obama.

Cooper (to David Fucking Brooks): You talk about these poor, rural fuckers hating the elites, but you never saw this during the Bush Administration, and Bush was the ultimate elitist.

Matthews: Leaders run the country, not the crazies. Would they, the White House, like it if the leaders of both parties were to say “cool it!”

And here it comes again…

David Fucking Brooks: The White House understands that you’ve got 10% of the country over here on the Wacky Right, and 10% of the country on the Wacky Left… And they’re not going to pay attention to it.

Triple Yay!

David Fucking Brooks: They are sticking with the independents. Like on the health care bill, which is why it’s tending towards the Center.

Quadruple Yay!

David Fucking Brooks: …The main danger of this – of the Glenn and the Rush and all that– is not that they’re going to take over the country, but that they are taking over the Republican Party. And so if the Republican Party is sane, they’ll say “no” to these people. But every single elected leader in the Republican Party is afraid to take on Limbaugh and Glenn Beck.

No, David, they have already taken over the Republican Party.

They did it long, long ago.

And because they took over the Republican Party years ago -- and because David Fucking Brooks has been a happy, willing and incredibly well-paid stooge of the Limbaugh Party for his entire adult life -- it is at times like these when you can actually see David Fucking Brooks’ economic self-interests, his ideological cowardice and his willful blindness all pile headlong into each other in real-time and create these perfect moments of complete political schizophrenia.

Because in order to avoid facing the ugly fact that he is nothing but the front man for the White Power Party...David Fucking Brooks has to somehow convince himself that Limbaugh and Glenn Beck are merely the “fringe”...while at the same time and almost in the same breath lamenting the fact that they completely control the political movement to which he has devoted his entire adult life.

So what is the mechanism these “respectable” Conservatives use -- day after day after day -- to lie to themselves? To keep pretending that Conservative leaders like Limbaugh and Beck – who routinely use the massive media resources at their command in order to spew racist poison -- somehow have nothing to do with the mobs of shrieking fear-crazed wingnuts idiots carrying racists signs who show up whenever and wherever Limbaugh and Beck tell them to?

How exactly does they do it?

Parker: The wackies – by the way – on either side are way more than 10%. More like half!

Oh yeah, that's how they do it.

Quintuple Yay!