Bobo's Wild Years

Tom Waits Friday Returns...with David Fucking Brooks caught on its bumper.

Because:

...it's memories that I'm stealing
But you're innocent when you dream
When you dream
You're innocent when you dream...*

David Fucking Brooks -- the American Political Commenteriat's hand's-down winner of the "Samuel L. Jackson Sheer Ubiquity Award" --

marked his 38th appearance on the "Charlie Rose Show" by meandered his way through an hour-long "interview" this week, during which time he revealed many things, including the fact that he has enjoyed private, off-the-record access to the most powerful man on Earth "about five times" since Obama's inauguration. Which is approximately five more one-on-one meetings than I or anyone I know have ever had with any President, ever, and should serve as a sobering reminder to those of us who dismiss the Villagers and their Mouse Circus antics as the mere yapping of poll-obsessed Faux-Centrism-mongering establishmentarians, that in the politicomedia world where access and proximity to power is the genuine coin of the realm, trifling goobers like David Brooks end up wielding very real power.

A thought which becomes even more terrifying when you realize that (speculating irresponsibly on the basis on available evidence) Mr. Brooks seems to have been a blackout drunk suffering massive and debilitating episodes of memory loss over much of the last 30 years.

I mean, how else to explain his bizarre omission of the last three decades of American history during this long, tapioca spit-swap between (as I described the other day) "...two hookers who have each mistaken the other for a wealthy John."

Rose: Welcome. The last time I saw you it was 4:00 A.M. in London.

Bobo: You told me you’d never mention that!

Rose: Relax, buuuuddy; you were drunk, and in that light there was no way you could’ve known it was a dude.

And so forth.

The program was mostly a chance for Charlie Rose to let David Fucking Brooks fill an hour of air time more-or-less reading continuously aloud from his columns, while Charlie occasionally interposed "questions" to make it appear as if there were an actual conversation in progress.

Such as...

Rose: So where are we with this President?

Bobo: He has to make a fundamental decision. We’ve had this long debate between Conservatives who want to shrink government, and Liberals who want to slip me Ecstasy and make me suck stranger’s dicks.

And...

Bobo: Obama comes in with a modest technocratic kind of government -- like Larry Summers or that computer from "The Forbin Project". He is hardened by experience – Mmmm. Hardened. – but he basically wants to use gummint to do stuff. If health care fails – and I think it will – then gummint will forever have been proven to be useless, and we can all go back to getting drunk and making money exploiting proletariats. And by “all” I mean the richest 1% of Americans, and by “proletariats” I mean everyone else on the face of the Earth. And since the failure to pass health care means -- Yay! -- the end of Liberalism forever -- Boo-ya! -- what else does Obama want to be remembered for?

Rose makes a nearly inaudible farting sound which Bobo interprets as rapt attention.

Bobo: He has always had two sides to him: the filthy, bohemian Liberal side which I always found subliminally arousing and therefore frightening, and the guy who wants to fix Washington. And if he’s not going to get to preside over a second New Deal or Great Society, then he has to go back to the other side.

Rose: So running against Washington? And by “Washington” I mean the people at whose dinner parties you and I spend 70% of our lives?

Which may not be exactly what was said, but it was exactly what I heard. However as I was settling back into an amusing evening of maliciously misperceiving David Fucking Brooks' prattle about Centrism, middle America and Edmund Burke for my own depraved amusement, I suddenly heard one of those sentences that screamed "Poor David Brooks must be a blackout drunk", jumped my bullshit detector to DEFCON One , and forced me to reluctantly open my laptop and start typing:

Bobo: We’re in a great period of distrust in Washington. That’s not anti-Washington; that’s not Conservatism. Because people want Washington to work…

Really? Oh please, do continue...

Bobo: People want Washington to work, they just don’t believe that it does work. When you ask people, “Do you trust Washington not to kill your dog, sell your mommy into slavery and generally fuck you over?” between 1932 and 1964 the answer was 80%. Now we’re at 17% or 23%.

Hmmm. I wonder how Bobo is going to explain this remarkable, precipitous, toxic drop?

To be fair, Bobo did say many thing with which I did agree. Like this:

Bobo: Obama needs to do that; to try and find out a way to fix Washington.

And this...

Bobo: He’s a giant. Liberals, Conservatives…there’s nobody quite like him.

And this...

Bobo: He’s got a seriousness of purpose and a seriousness which is still unrivaled. He makes one, very good point right now about the Republicans. He was willing to take a couple of steps towards fiscal sanity. He really was willing to raise taxes. Cut Medicare. He was willing to do real stuff. Republicans, on the other hand…are a pure opposition party.

And this...

Bobo: A friend emailed me to say I’ve ... never been so pessimistic about government otherwise in my life.

And maybe this, although it could have been the voices in my head screwing with me...

Bobo: I am so completely and fraudulently unfit to occupy my position of journalistic power and privilege that I feel naked and ashamed to have been born every minute of every day.

Because when it comes to stating the obvious or reiterating the work of others, Bobo is a perfectly adequate stenographer. And in a world where genuinely crazy, lying, wingnut-cultists are now routinely considered to be acceptable camera-fodder, I suppose the calm transcription of pop culture ass-butter and second-rate Conservative apologia can look, at a distance, like journalism.

But how fucking sad is that?

And as I mused and mourned the loss of real public intellectuals in America -- and waited patiently for Bobo to offer some his signature laser-like diagnostic analysis for the reasons behind the spectacular drop in public confidence in gummint to which he had just ominously alluded -- I watched as these two, wealthy, middle-aged white elite men gradually dance each other over to the subject of the Teabaggers...

Rose: Oh! Oh! Oh! Tell me about the tea parties, Uncle Bobo

Bobo: Well, there are unspecified polls that say they’re popular, so you know it’s true! I give talks out in the country where many people stand up and cheer when the tea parties are mentioned! (Of course by “talks out in the country” I mean my inexplicably ubiquitous guest spots on every major American network, and by “many people stand up and cheer” I mean David Gregory.)

Bobo: Tea parties are more popular than half-off day at the Fox News "Me Lie Pretty One Day" Botox kiosk!

Yes, we should all pay A Lot Of Attention to the teabaggers, because, according to Bobo:

“The country hasn’t ideologically shifted. It’s not they’ve gone from Liberal of Conservative in one year; they’re still there in the middle waiting for somebody who represents their point of view.”

To which I must ask, 'What Fucking 'Point Of View' are you talking about?" Ignorant white people being tweaked by demagogues into a state of primal rage and incoherent fear isn't a "point of view"; it's the last six minutes of "The Day of the Locust":


Then came another of those many, many moments when Bobo showed exactly why he should burn in Hell.

Bobo: You had this great period of trust – from 1932 to 1964…because of Franklin Roosevelt and WWII. But for the rest of American history you have this current or distrust. It’s magnified by a lot of things…

And here we go….

Bobo: Watergate, Vietnam...

By which he means the 1960s. By which he means those dirty fucking hippies. But of course, Bobo damn well knows that "Watergate" didn't cripple America's faith in gummint, because "Watergate" is just a building. What did nearly destroy our faith in our government were the actions and attitudes of Republican President Richard Nixon, and his Republican henchmen. (Yes, Lyndon Johnson deserves a big, fat slice of the blame for the catastrophe of Vietnam, but unlike Nixon, Johnson had no larger plan for deliberately smashing and dividing the country and harvesting its organs as a part of a larger, multi-generational political strategy.)

And how did America's most ubiquitous public political and cultural analyst conclude his piercing diagnosis of exactly how we ended up in the Year of Our Lord 2010 with millions of Americans who are so utterly ignorant and smugly unhinged that they will happily follow demagogues like Sarah Palin right over a cliff, cursing the Kenyan Usurper all the way?

Bobo: Watergate, Vietnam…and all that.

And. That. Was. It.

Understand, this was was not your typical, 2.5-minute teevee cram-it-in, high-speed talking-point back alley handjob; this was a positively leisurely, amble-up-and-down-the-waterfront kind of interview where the major theme was the question of whether or not “this country is governable any longer.

And yet, for all of the wailing and gnashing of teeth over our fractured politics, and what Obama could/will/should be able to do about it (Bobo was honest enough to admit that he had “talked to the Republicans” and that they’re not going to give Obama a fucking thing. That there simply is no longer any common ground), clearly Bobo's beieved his main job was to continue laboring frantically alongside fellow Conservative media co-conspirators like Andew Sullivan (while being abetted by interlocutorial jellyfish like Charlie Rose) to push the Big Conservative Revisionist Lie that the political and cultural roots and history of the Palinites are somehow mysterious and lost to mists of time.

That between the awful, awful 1960s and sometime between June 2004 (when Sullivan began his slow jump off the wingnut bandwagon) and Katrina (when Bobo started losing his ability to pretend that the Dubya Administration wasn't a complete and catastrophic failure) nothing much was going on over in Reaganville.

And because virtually the entire Village depends on the Big Conservative Revisionist Lie to protect their collective, complicit asses, we out here in the American Heartland end up with endless, jaw-droppingly hilarious spectacles of Soviet-level Conservative denialism, such as life-long, drooling Ronald Reagan fanboy David Fucking Brooks discussing in Serious and Frightening detail of the horrible horrors of mobs of enraged Palinite yahoos who have somehow gotten the idea that their gummint is the captive of a tiny group of elites...

...while conspicuously failing to mention that the creation of an Orc Army of Palinites was all part of the fucking plan (from me, last March)

...
See, once upon a time, the Party of Lincoln got tired of losing.

Tired, tired, tired.

And their leaders sat down with many graphs and tables and Pareto charts and figured out that if they took a hard, Right turn at the corner of Loutish Bigot Avenue and Ignorant Christopath Way, they would start winning.

And it worked! So yay them!

But as the massive infusion of xenophobes, degenerate yahoos and wannabe fascists packed on Republican electoral muscle, the immutable Law of Fucktard Fluid Dynamics also meant that demagogues like Rush Limbaugh rapidly grew in Party power and influence, while anyone with an ounce of decency and self-respect was slowly cooked off and driven out of the GOP in disgust.

And that's the thing that makes "reporting" like yours so fucking laughable, Petey: the fact that Rush’s status as Party Overboss has never been exactly what you'd call a big secret.

Hell, it was on the God damned teevee!

If you'd bothered to do any checking at all you'd have found that fourteen fucking years ago -- while a popular but relatively unknown professor named Barack Obama was too busy teaching constitutional law at the University of Chicago to plot out clever schemes to make it "appear" as though the GOP was Limbaugh's personal ass coachman and penis valet -- this was the actual state of the relationship between Rush and the Party of God (Spoiler Alert: video also proves yet again that no one knows "funny" like the Wall Street Journal's own shreddin' comic hellbeast, John Fund!):


This was a marquee Washington Post story about Rush and the GOP from December of 1994:

The 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."

...while conspicuously failing to mention what horrors the GOP unleashed when they made the conscious decision to invite a whole nest of hateful, divisive Christopath thugs like these

into the Party of Lincoln 30 years ago.

...while conspicuously failing to mention the guy who built his entire political career out of telling Americans that they could not trust their gummint -- that "Gummint Is The Problem" -- because it was controlled by a "little, intellectual elite"

in a "far distant capitol".


Because "every bit as much as any Birther flake or Death Panel stooge -- every bit as much as Sarah Palin -- " Conservative apostates like David Brooks and Andrew Sullivan are conspiring to perpetrate their own massive, self-serving, fraudulent rewrite of American history.

And the thing it, while the Beck/Palin lies will probably burst at the seams sooner or later, the Brooks/Sullivan lies shom every sign of becoming quickly and eagerly adopted as Holy Writ.

And why?

Because there are dozens of other members of the Villager Media Clubhouse who are every bit as culpable as clowns like Brooks and Sullivan in permitting the Conservative wingnut infection run wild and unchecked though the American body politic year after year after year. And the malignant mythology that is being built by Brooks and Sullivan right before our eyes fulfills those same Villagers's dearest wishes: to find the Perfect Lie; one that allows them to simultaneously smirk and mock and cluck their tongues at the car-wreck that is the Palinite Movement, while conspicuously ignoring the fact that they were the ones who helped cut the brake cables that caused the wreck in the first place.

The Villagers want more than anything else to be innocent.

And after decades of covering up for Conservative lies and treason and betraying their profession into the hands of monsters, the only way they can be innocent anymore is when they dream.