Mein Führer! I can walk!

Now that his tax cuts are safely in the bank, David Brooks has once again learned to stop worrying and love Budget Cuts.

Deep, Painful Budget Cuts.

Of course, Republicans are slightly too wanton to do it right, and Democrats are (apparently) too timid or fuzzy-headed or (one assumes) beholden to dirty Commie Labor Unions, so as with virtually every other column he has ever written (that wasn't cheerleader a failed war, boostering a failed economic policy, loving up some new GOP phenom (John Thune) or faithful manservant (Scooter Libby), or desperately trying to distance himself from the brutal, bloody catastrophe of a Conservative Movement he helped create and to which he owes his entire career)...once again the New York Time's Republican Goldilocks finds the perfect solution exactly in the imaginary middle.

To accomplish his budgetary miracles, Mr. Brooks boldly proposes the following three step plan:

1. Cut the bad stuff.
2. Don't cut the good stuff.
3. Repeat.

Wowser.

Better hurry up and go look now, because once the NYT Paywall Blast Shield goes up (again) you won't be able to sup on the mutton of Mr. Brooks' genius for free anymore!

Marie Davis Burns (thx for the catch. anon) from Reality Chex carves the roast for us today in the NYT Comment Section:

We're in the mess we're in because of people like you, Mr. Brooks -- people who helped promote the Republican agenda & helped get Republicans elected. Now, come to find out, as if no one had ever mentioned it before (oh, wait, it was spelled out in the Republican campaign policy guide "Plague to America"), they have taken a cleaver to programs that matter to average Americans but won't help Republicans get more votes in 2012.

Now you're trying to redecorate the barn after the horse has trashed it. Too little, too late.

And no use making the excuse, "Well, I didn't want some of those ultra-right-wingers to win." You played right into their hands. You've written more than one column extolling the virtues of careless "moderate" Republicans like Paul "Privatize Social Security" Ryan and Mitch "Destroy Public Unions" Daniels. There's nothing moderate about taking us back to the early 20th century. (There's plenty that immoral about it.) The only substantial difference between so-called "moderate" Republicans & tea-partiers is that moderates clean up a little better. They couch their anti-American policies in fancier rhetoric. And charts. But they're all cut from the same cloth -- cut back on programs, rights and wages for middle-income Americans & decrease responsibilities for the rich -- lower their taxes, privatize, deregulate, get "the government" off their backs.

Today in a speech to the nation's governors, President Obama -- who I keep reminding myself is a Democrat -- boasted that his budget proposal -- the one you so admire -- had the lowest ratio to gross domestic product since the administration of Dwight Eisenhower. This is a shameful admission coming from any politician -- much less from a self-described Democrat -- when we are trying to pull out of a recession brought on by irresponsible banksters and their equally irresponsible government "regulators." President Obama talked about painful cuts when he should have been talking about painful expenditures and painful new taxes on big corporations & the much-put-upon rich.

You brought us these people who are ruining the nation, Mr. Brooks. You have a lot of nerve suddenly adopting the pretense that you wish they would behave a little better. They don't have to, thanks to you and other irresponsible members of the media who either promoted them or failed to stand up to them.

You are watching the Decline and Fall of America, sponsored by the Republican party & a complicit Fourth Estate.

"Gemli" from Boston also does a fine job of driving in the spikes down among the dozens of NYT commenters. all of whom seem to know vastly more about the history of the Republican Fiasco Years and Mr. Brooks' role in them than does Mr. Brooks:

When I hear conservatives talk about the economy I am reminded of a type of stroke that makes the sufferer unable to recognize half of their body. Mr. Brooks can’t see his left side, that’s for sure. Only the right, deficit-cutting side is operational. Only by starving the old can the young thrive. Only by crushing unions can workers flourish. Instead of funding schools, we have to find ways to creatively strangle their resources.

Conservatives cannot even mention raising revenue. They physically can’t say the words, much less consider the actual possibility. They’re as afraid of t-a-x as they are of s-e-x, another taboo subject that makes them sweat and mutter and make up crazy medieval punishments for things like family planning, unwed mothers, and gay people. Make everybody hurt, that’s their motto.

You may remember that conservatives destroyed the economy. But we can’t talk about responsibility for the meltdown, because apparently that’s somehow controlled by the left side of their brains. We can’t talk about the wars, either, which put untold billions into the hands of war profiteers that could have been used to build schools by the hundreds.

And so now, after years of Republican's running completely amok, running up deficits the likes of which the country had never seen before and driving the global economy to the brink of ruin without a single fucking peep from the Pig People Base, the minute the black Democrat from Chicago takes the oath of office we are now suddenly in a budget cutting arms race and the same people who never uttered a single peep about budgets when George W. Bush was bleeding the treasury white are now vying to see who can kick the crap out of the poor, the weak and the sick the hardest.

USA!USA!