Sunday Morning Comin’ Down -- Part Two

This Week In Bobo.

Slant Drilling History: Episode 187 -- The Willke Years.

This week, David Brooks stitched together another couple of columns out of Ronald Reagan's old urinal cakes and the rotting limbs of older columns, and then animated them into a brief simulation of life with the last, few volts of credibility the New York Times still has stuttering around in its attic.

Oh goody!

There is, as usual, far, far too much impacted verbal fecal matter jammed into Mr. Brooks’ 800-word-embarrassments to do them proper, filleting justice without a fully-equipped, federally-funded drivel-spelunking team armed with the latest in digression drilling and tangent torching technologies.

So instead, a few notes, banged out on horseback.

Column The First, from March 23rd begins thus:

"Parties come to embody causes. For the past 90 years or so, the Republican Party has, at its best, come to embody the cause of personal freedom and economic dynamism. For a similar period, the Democratic Party has, at its best, come to embody the cause of fairness and family security. Over the past century, they have built a welfare system, brick by brick, to guard against the injuries of fate.
..."

Gracious me, what fucking nonsense.

First, except as a historical curiosity and cautionary tale on the subject of what happens when you let Republicans run in the corridors of power with scissors, the GOP as it existed 90 years ago -- in the days when the likes of Charles Evans Hughes, Calvin Coolidge, Herbert Hoover and Wendell Wilkie walked the Earth -- is so bewilderingly irrelevant to anything happening here and now, that understanding why David Brooks would even mention it is almost impossible.

In fact, it only seems to be a hilariously irrelevant waste of precious column inches until you understand the Great Work in which David F. Brooks and others are engaged.

In the face of the mile-high tsunami of evidence that the Conservative Movement and the Republican Party have been going like 60 down a wide and well-marked road to fascism and demagoguery for 30 years, Mr. Brooks must continually conjure up New and Self-Absolving reasons for his complicity in said degeneracy for most of this adult life.

(Other than the obvious answer – “They paid me real good!” – which, while pretty blatantly true, doesn’t go down so smooth with white Grenache-swilling Centrists who want to believe that Bobo keeps his various jobs by virtue of his ability to swaddle them in thick layers of smug, comforting, self-righteous Republican Reasonableness which he conjures out of thin air twice a week.)

And as this realization dawns, one comes to understand that that every single David Brooks is about the same damned thing: Trying -– week after week, year after year –- to exonerate the occupants of his Panic Room inside the rapidly disintegrating Republican Party of any special responsibility for the wingnut mobs that are burning the place down.

And once you have come to recognize the spoor of such a column, you will begin to notice that whenever Bobo takes that big of a running start at his topic, its virtually always because he is desperately trying to change the subject.

So what could it possibly be that Bobo is frantically trying to direct our attention away from this time?

Could it be that, 50 years ago, the ascendant face of Republican Party was Dwight David Eisenhower. And what was Republican President Ike enduringly famous for? Massive federal works programs. Massive federal investments in technology and education. High taxes. A unionized workforce. Foreign aid. Using federal troops to desegregate a public institution. And dire fucking warnings against letting the corporations run the government.

Does this sound like any Republican you know? Any Republican that has existed outside of a laboratory at any point during David Fucking Brooks’ decades as an apologist for the GOP?

50 years later, does David Fucking Brooks have any doubt whatsoever that such a man would be run out of his GOP as an Islamofascist commie fag by the Party he helped humanize?

40 years ago, the man casting his long shadow over the Republican Party was Richard Nixon. And when you listen to the Nixon Rehabbers out there, notice that once you get past the treason and the war crimes and Southern Strategy and the rest of poisons that Tricky Dick spent his life peeing into the public well, all of the “Yeah but”’s they cite Filthy Liberal Stuff like this:

Noam Chomsky remarked that, in many respects, Nixon was "the last liberal president."[92] Indeed, Nixon believed in using government wisely to benefit all and supported the idea of practical liberalism.[93]

Nixon initiated the Environmental Decade by signing the National Environmental Policy Act, the Clean Air Act of 1970 and the Federal Water Pollution Control Act amendments of 1972, as well as establishing many government agencies. These included the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA)[80], and the Council on Environmental Quality.[94] The Clean Air Act was noted as one of the most significant pieces of environmental legislation ever signed.[95]

And let us not forget that Nixon also was a serial committer of that Very Worst of all Liberal Sins: meeting with Foreign Tyrants!

Also too, the Democratic Party of 90 years ago was a Party ruled by the Jim Crow south and big city political machines. The machines are mostly long dead, and the White Citizens Councils of Dixieland have long since picked up stakes and taken over the Party of Lincoln.

So what about the last 30 years or so? You know, the period that covers virtually all of David Brooks’ adult life and professional career as a Conservative Water Boy. The period that saw the wholesale abandonment of anything that looks remotely like Eisenhower Conservatism?

The period that exposed Reaganism as the hollow fraud we on the Left always knew it was?

The period that saw the Rise of Limbaugh, Gingrich, Falwell, Rove, Atwater, Cheney, Robertson, the NRA, Focus on the Family, the Militia Movement, and hundreds and hundreds of other wingnut causes and celebrities?

The period that culminated in a happy goose-stepping parade into the New Dark Age of the Bush Era?

Where were you then, Bobo? Where were you when it could have mattered?

Well, suffice it to say, Brooks would rather not talk about the boring old “facts” and “history” and “trends” of those last three Inconvenient Decades, and instead fills up column inches by stares frantically into the poster of Hubert Humphrey that he allegedly had hanging on the wall of his nursery as if it were a Romper Room Magic Mirror, and through which he can make clearly see the size and shape of Barack Obama’s soul.


Another delusional fairy tale about the Good Old Conservative Days conveniently located in a far-away, half-remembered, accountability-free zone in the days before the WalkMan was invented or man’s first round of golf on the Moon, and trotted out – week after fucking week -- for exactly the same reason the killdeer will feign a broken wing:

To decoy you away from that which it desperately does not want you to find.

Column The Second was also a drunken gavotte through gauzy fiction designed to dance you away-away-away from from simple truths through the artful deployment of Big Words and Names and begins thus:

"Some brilliant scholar has to write a comprehensive history of modern economics because the evolution of this field is clearly one of the most consequential things happening in the world today.

"Act I in this history would be set in the era of economic scientism: the period when economists based their work on a crude vision of human nature (the perfectly rational, utility-maximizing autonomous individual) and then built elaborate models based on that creature.

"Act II would occur over the past few decades, as a few brave economists tried to move beyond this stick-figure view of humanity..."

And so forth.

I find this sort of thing hilarious; like a junkie caught by the narcs with the needle hanging out of his arm arguing -- and he sidles toward the exit -- that problem isn’t the needle hanging out of his arm but the larger sociohistorical impact of currency devaluation vis-à-vis education reform.

And what with the situation in Uzbekistan.

And the rain forests.

And...look over there!

And stuff.

Look, the depth charge that blew a hole in the economy and created the Republican Great Recession isn’t all that hard to understand: a bunch of criminals got themselves into a position to rip us all off blind. Then they did so. Then they sent their front men out to tell us to fuck off.

Also that they needed Moar Munnie!


Or as New York Times commenter Darrell Hampton of Dayton Ohio eloquently put it:

March 26th, 2010
12:10 am
Mr. Brooks if I go to my grave with any regrets it will be that I never took the time to get a formal education. I’m a self-educated man, some would argue that I didn’t do too good of a job. One of the reasons I shied away from formal education is because all of the so-called scholars and teachers think like you do. As a younger man I could never reconcile how people so educated could be so naïve and lacking commonsense.

You spend an entire column ruminating about the cause of the recent financial collapse and you conclude that nobody really knows what happened.

I do!

Another self-educated man named Willie Sutton could tell you what happened. When the infamous bank robber was arrested, some dumb scholarly reporter asked him “Willie, why do you rob banks”? Mr. Sutton’s reply was simple “Ain’t that where the money is?” Why is it so difficult for the Masters of The Universe to simply admit that these people simply stole all the money?

That Ronald Reagan began a mind numbing school of thought that government and regulations were holding progress back and provided the road to thievery that we all witnessed the past two years? What is so wrong with admitting “We made a mistake”? It is hard to expect anyone to give you any respect or credence for your thoughts if you can’t even recognize a simple bank robbery when you see one. They stole the money from Wall Street and the pension plans and the mortgages because regulations had been removed and “That’s where the money was”!

And they need to be prosecuted. That’s simple too!

To which nothing more needs to be added.

Except perhaps this, which should be require by law to be shown in every business or econ course from now until the end of time: