"Then A Miracle Occurs..."

This centerpiece of all magical thinking is both the punch line to one of my favorite, faded tee-shirts (man, I miss that shirt) and the missing line from today's 800-word embarrassment by David Brooks.

We are, according to Bobo, headed for disaster "Sometime between now and [2020]..."

It is a "catastrophe" which will fall upon us "with amazing swiftness."

Wow, that sounds pretty bad.

It also sounds an awful lot like what every Liberal in America has been saying.

Very loudly.

For the last 30 years or so.

So welcome to the Dirty Commie, surrender-monkey, cut-and-run brigade bandwagon, Mr. Brooks!

I assume your next sentence will be a towering excoriation of Reaganomics, radical corporate and banking deregulation, NAFTA, GATT, the grotesquely bloated Pentagon budget, the obscenity of Wall Street culture, George W. Bush's two failed wars and the Bush tax cuts that, collectively, have created the lion's share of the coming economic implosion that now haunt your dreams.

Then I assume you will be apologizing to your audience for being completely wrong about so much for so long, after which -- as a matter of honor -- you will be resigning from your column as a show of good faith and act of atonement for your wicked deeds.

"The Republicans talk about cutting deficits, but a party that campaigns to restore the $400 million in Medicare cuts included in the health care law is not serious about averting a fiscal meltdown.

"Some Democrats, meanwhile, don’t even bother to pretend. Look at the way many Democrats completely rejected the draft proposal unveiled by the chairmen of the fiscal commission. Nancy Pelosi, the public sector unions and many liberal commentators are not only unwilling to compromise to prevent a catastrophe, they’re unwilling to even consider a compromise. They seem to regard anybody who would negotiate as fundamentally immoral and unserious."

Or not.

Well, when you're a dishonest Conservative hack clinging desperately to the sweetest, easiest, most-overpaid gig in history of American journalism at a time when whole newspapers are being snuffed out of existence and thousands of real reporters are being shoveled into the maw of the Great Recession...while dragging the hideously embarrassing albatross of your own track record along with you everywhere you so with naught but a WalMart-sized drum of extra-strength "Both Siderism" to cover its stink...I guess a weak slap on a nonspecific Republican wrist (for wanting helping nice old people), followed by a very specific slam to "Nancy Pelosi, the public sector unions and many liberal commentators" (for being reckless and delusional) is to be expected.

But wait! There's more! A non-specific, not-yet-extant movement of Righteously Patriotic Centrists is apparently right on the verge of rising up and saving us all because:

"...serious, vibrant societies don’t sit by and do nothing as their governments drive off a cliff."

Like all Modern Conservatives, Bobo simply unremembers inconvenient facts that stand in the way of his pet theories. In this case, it is the grossly inconvenient fact that, since even before those heady days of the media obsession with Conservative lies about Clinton the Depraved Monster, Clinton the Secret Commie, Clinton the Rapist and Clinton the Murderer, it has been Bobo's Conservative Movement which has been gleefully driving this country off cliff after cliff after cliff. And plowing right through the "Catcher in the Rye" mobs of Liberals who -- at each junction -- were trying to block their serial, headlong plunges into one disaster after another all along the way.

So rather than facing the horribly painful reality of our nation's recent past, Bobo instead takes another loooooong hit off that Reagan crack-pipe, squints into a imaginary bright future and invents an entire movement of imaginary Patriot Centrists:

"...a movement of people who don’t feel represented by either of the partisan orthodoxies;"

Because...

"...competition between the parties [is] total and fratricidal."

And...

"...orthodox liberals and conservatives have their idea networks, and everybody else is intellectual roadkill."

The reality, of course, is that while the Left has become a vital, frustrating and rambunctious movement which easily contains the pragmatic remains of Liberalism, the exiled remnants of Rockefeller Republicanism and almost everything in between, the Right is a rotting, brain-dead hulk whose body is kept shambling and shrieking along with massive jolts of racism, Christopathy and recycled Bircher Paranoia administered by the same old perverts who have been pulling their strings for generations.

But I do agree with one thing David Brooks has to say;the current system has been torqued to the point where it is irreversibly broken , and change is coming.

However, unlike Bobo's imaginary Velveteen Revolution, where Hero Centrists will gather in his back yard for Koolaid, pixie dust cookies and unicorn burgers before sallying forth and in a movement which --

...may be a third party or it may support serious people in the existing two. Its goal will be unapologetic: preserving American pre-eminence. It will preserve America’s standing in the world on the grounds that this supremacy is a gift to our children and a blessing for the earth.

-- I have a feeling that the coming movement is going to be highly focused and highly pissed off at those who brought us to this crisis, especially those members of America's economic, political and media royalty who have used their positions of power and public influence to enrich themselves while leading a great, God-fearing nation ever deeper into Hell.

In which case, I sincerely hope it is a peaceful revolution, based on mercy, truth-and-reconciliation and shared sacrifice for greater purposes.

Because if it isn't, I have a strong feeling that I know what sort of people will be riding shotgun

in its tumbrels.