There Once Was A Man From Meretricious...

Who found Centrist cock quite delicious...

David Brooks wrote a column today.

You know, if he'd just write a fucking travel column, or something about his famous tapioca-basted hot wings (which aren't hot...or wings...but still), then I'd be perfectly happy to never bother Bobo again.

But apparently toxic banality has no "Off" switch, so here we are again, this time with "The Story of an Angry Voter".

Oooh, excellent. Tell us a story, Unca Wingnut Boiler Plate!

Let’s imagine a character named Ben.

You mean like the rat?

No. Not like the rat. Now shut up and pay attention!

Bobo continues:

A couple of decades ago, Ben went to high school.

It wasn’t easy. His parents were splitting up. His friends would cut class to smoke weed. His sister got pregnant. But Ben worked hard and graduated with decent grades and then studied at East Stroudsburg University and the University of Phoenix.

That wasn’t easy either. Ben would like to have majored in history, but he needed a skill so he studied hotel management.
...

Wait a minute...that's your fucking story? Recycled Steve Wynn commercials from the 1970s?

And how is getting drunk with Sinatra and banging cocktail waitresses two at a time (h/t Moe Green) supposed to be a bad thing?

Well, it doesn't really matter, because by now we know that every godawful Bobo Cautionary Fable ends the same way, right?

First, the Imaginary Everyman must always somehow find that the Left is inadequate, extreme and much toooo cold.

Brrr! Of course, we are never offered any proof at all that the Left -- in part or as a whole -- is really in any way inadequate or extreme; instead -- like a lazy writing slapping a Black Hat on a cardboard character to indicate "Villain" -- Bobo incants a few Magic Pundit Words like "MoveOnDotOrg" over his trite, plodding missive and we move right along indeed.

And the Right?

Ouchy, ouchy, toooo hot.

"So when Ben looked around for leaders who might understand his outrage, he only found them among the ideological hard-liners."

Thankfully, the Center is always snuggly, and womblike and juuuuust right.

Once there was a group in the political center that would have understood Ben’s outrage. Moderates like Abraham Lincoln believed in the free labor ideology. Their entire governing system was built around encouraging labor and rewarding labor.

But! wait!

In this Terrifying!New!Bobo!Reimagining! of the long-running Villager soap opera -- "General Centrism" -- apparently all is not well in the Sacred Middle.

"But these days, the political center is a feckless shell. It has no governing philosophy. Its paragons seem from the outside opportunistic, like Arlen Specter, or caught in some wishy-washy middle, like Blanche Lincoln."

Heavens!

Well, I guess this leaves Poor Ol' Ben only one choice...


Tragic indeed.

If only we had treated Ben better.
And yuppies weren't so mean.
And unions thugs weren't so uppity.
And those damned illegal Messicans didn't call our asses fat in Espanol behind our backs.

So let's tell a happier story!

Let’s imagine a character named David.

David lies for a living. Lies a lot, and in a lot of different ways.

He asserts a lot of crap that just isn't true. Mixes up snippets of interesting studies and odd sociological observations with a generous helpings of Conservative rat poison. He pulls demonstrably false equivalencies between, say, his own, catastrophically failed Conservative ideology and the vibrant, enduring adaptive Liberal ideology out of his ass with the prodigious proficiency of a magician doing the Silk Fountain.


David also apparently doesn't know any actual "Americans", so he makes fictional scenarios and cardboard characters up out of what appears to be the blooper reels from "Father Knows Best" and "The Courtship of Eddie's Father" that he picked up on eBay.

Then puts words and attitudes in their mouths.

David is basically a mediocrity who writes frustrated emails to his imaginary friends about how great it would be if everybody would just stop behaving like human beings and start behaving like David Brooks.

Sometimes the fictional characters he invents come to see the wisdom of living their lives in a David-Brooks-approved way, but usually they try to do something not-David-Brooks-like and they come to a bad end.

In that way, Davis is kind of like...well...not an angry God exactly, but more like a God who is stuck in traffic with a minor headache and hemorrhoids and is very, very disappointed in you.

Terribly sad.

Strangely enough, this spectacularly mediocre person is also the chief mouthpiece for one of America's major political movements, and full-time columnist in arguably the most powerful and influential newspaper on Earth.

I know, weird, right? But it gets even stranger.

You see, the political movement which David fronts for has pretty much failed at everything it has every tried to do. And failed really, really big.

No, really, spec-tac-ularly big.

You name it -- faith, freedom or fiscal policy -- everything they touch turns to shit, and everything they're scream hysterically In Favor Of on Monday...always ends up being negated by some hugely evil or stupid shit they'll end up doing on Tuesday...after which their position has to awkwardly reverse itself 180 degrees by Wednesday..and then -- faster than you can say "Inverso-Double-Backwards-Stupid-Hypocrites" -- the economy melts down thanks to one of their idiotic theories, or they lose a war, or 80 of them suddenly turn out to be cheating on their wives with hookers or other men or gay hookers.

After which, to relieve the pressure of being such monumental imbeciles on their tiny, tiny brains, they'll take to the streets for a brisk round of screaming that the Kenyan Usurper is a Dirty Commie, which not only makes 'em happier that a baby with a fresh diaper, but also lets them forget for a little while all that embarrassing stuff about about about being completely wrong about everything for the last 30 year.

Quite the little Everlasting Gobstopper of a Clusterfuck these Conservatives are, which is why it really is less of a "movement" and more of a collection of bumper stickers, psychotic conspiracy theories and crackpot economics wrapped in enough flags and scripture to keep several million bigots constantly paranoid and furious, and several thousand rich douchebags happy and in control.

And to give a like cipher David a fabulous career consisting almost entirely of writing two columns a week fawning over various, powerful Republicans and advocating a bold strategy of timidity, impotence, false equivalence and, finally, passive acceptance in the face of the avalanche of Conservative catastrophes roaring down the mountain at us.

Which is a fairy tale ending if ever I've heard one.