The Piddler Asks

"Who Shot HCR?"

Whenever a David Brooks column commences way back in the worm-nibbled pages of some History 201 or Philosophy 310 textbook with something that sounds a lot like the lyrics of Stonehenge --

In ancient times...
Hundreds of years before the dawn of history
Lived a ancient race of people... the Druids

-- you can absolutely bet your lunch money that what Bobo is giving himself is a good, long running start at trying to make some sad, sad point about These Gut-Stabbed Modern Times while jumping cleeeeeean over the fact that his Movement and his Party have put this country into emergency room, bleeding from thirty years of Conservative bayonet thrusts into its belly.

So it was with Health Care, about which David Brooks wrote a whole column yesterday. Sort of. But to make the parsec-wide leap he was trying to make -- asserting that by contemplating the use of Reconciliation to pass a (deeply flawed) Health Care bill that that most Americans mostly want, those Bastard Democrats have napalmed the sodality of that otherwise still salvageably harmonious body known as the Unites States Senate -- he would have had to accelerate to Star Trek transwarp, gravity-well whipcrack speeds sufficient to fling him far enough back in time that he could have prevented Edith Keeler from letting Ayn Rand give Ronald Reagan his first Objectivist reacharound.

Or something.

Needless to say he didn’t quite clear that hurdle, as fine writers throughout the blogosphere have pointed out as they each took their turn whapping like a neocon piñata the insipid weirdness that Bobo actually ended up committing to paper.

Jonathan Chait at "The New Republic" believes Brooks may have finally managed to synthesize “the platonic ideal of a David Brooks column.”

David Brooks At His David Brooksiest

...
It is in some sense the template for nearly every David Brooks column, but it captured the major elements so perfectly that it almost feels as if every previous David Brooks column has been an homage to this one.
...

In reality, Brooks' conclusion is absurd. Does he really think that passing changes to the health care bill through reconciliation will materially effect how parties act in the future? He believes that the next Republican administration with more than 50 but fewer than 60 Senators would decline to pass a tax cut through reconciliation, but will now do so because the Democrats did it? I doubt even Karl Rove could say this with a straight face.

Jim Sleeper at TPM thinks it may have been yet another of Bobo’s signature mutagenic, conscience-balming lap-dances, performed for corporatist liberals who want to confine their actual involvement in hard gut-rehab work of fixing the wrecked America the GOP left behind to looking with alarm, tsk-tsking the pity of it all, and then sliding back into the Capitalist Hot Tub for another round of entitlements, narcissism and easy munny:

What David Brooks' Editors and Producers are Missing

By Jim Sleeper - March 16, 2010, 12:28PM

...
Nor would you really expect even most editors and producers in the not-for profit but still corporate and nervously liberal world to grasp the difference between Brooks' pirouetting and Mark Sheilds' elemental, bedrock honesty. I do wonder how Shields, on The News Hours, and E.J. Dionne, on "All Things Considered," can stand being opposite Brooks. But then, it's not up to them.

Again, the problem is not that Brooks is more "conservative" than they but that he's a chameleon: He poses as a cuddly conservative although he's a sophist whose sinuous dishonesty makes him uniquely culpable in a lot of American deaths, devastation, and degradation.

If there is bedrock below this poor man's posturing, it's neo-conservative bedrock of the hoariest, most embarrassing kind, but that is a story for another time...

It might be any of those things.

It might be all of them.

But to me, with its studied obsession with the secondary details of the Health Care crime scene (the angle of the paintings, the direction of the wind, the proximity of those dirty Democrats) and its equally obsessive avoidance of the obvious and critical facts of the case (the body on the floor, the Republican Party standing over said body, spattered with blood and with the obstructionist knife still in its hand) what it most strongly resembled was a murder mystery…written by the murder…after he had gotten good and drunk on deconstructionism.

What it most strongly resembled was "The Final Problem".

As it would have been written by

Professor James Moriarty.

And speaking for all the wee little bloggers who stand on top of our wee little pie wagons and inveigh in the great, long shadows of the Empire against the injustices of that Empire, believe me when I say that we comprehend the full weight of Moriarty's warning to Holmes --

You stand in the way not merely of an individual but of a mighty organization, the full extent of which, even you, with all your cleverness, have been unable to realize. You must stand clear, Mr. Holmes, or be trodden under foot.

-- perfectly well.