London Drudge is Failing Down

You know E.J., over here they call their apartments "flats" and their elevators "lifts"!

What a country!

So our Mr. Brooks spent his 800 words New York Times Op-Ed ration today write a slobbery mash note to Britain thanking them for how well Mr. Brooks believes they have put into practice the Brooksian Vision of the perfect political system:

"It is dominated by people who live in London and who have often known each other since prep school. This makes it gossipy and often incestuous. But the plusses outweigh the minuses."

And why not?

After all, the Fictional British System Mr. Brooks has invented has everything America's Greatest Conservative Public Intellectual could possibly want: an awesome class system (now a bit down on its heels, but still), spiffy uniforms, jellied eels, a Queen and Margaret Thatcher. Hell, even its home-grown Conservatives are perfect accent pieces for someone like Mr. Brooks -- not the hateful, vicious, thugs who actually run Mr. Brooks’ Movement (and about whose nature and lineage he continuously lies), but toothless, Precious Moments Figurine Conservatives -- 

-- that come in a variety of festive designer colors. Silly little fops who imitate Mr. Brooks' oeuvre in flattering miniature: perching on the mantle of the media and regurgitating little puddles of American Hippie Punching dogma on command.

Not at all like our giant ass-ache of a country that Mr. Brooks ominously warns us "Americans" not to feel "smug or superior" about.

Glenn Greenwald takes up the challenge of taking today's ritual whacks at the indestructible Bobo pinata:

...

Brooks is widely loved by establishment figures because he thinks like them, speaks for them, and tirelessly defends their interests, most especially with this democracy-hating mindset. The obvious flaw in his post-financial-crisis fantasy was that the near-economic-collapse was the direct result of the very council of oligarchical elites he yearned to empower ("the safe heads from the investment banks. . . people like [former Goldman CEO Hank] Paulson . . . [and former Goldman CEO] Robert Rubin") -- just as the architects and bipartisan cheerleaders of the Iraq War (prominently including Brooks) continue to wield Seriousness status and exert dominance over America's foreign and military policy.

But more generally, what Brooks so envies about British political culture -- a small, incestuous, aristocratic, homogenized group of trans-ideological elites harmoniously resolving their differences -- is exactly what already drives American policy and politics. And that is what establishment spokespeople like Brooks always mean when they yearn for "bipartisanship"...

The estimable Aramis of "Barkers and Rubes" also gets in some sweet licks here.

Several weeks ago, at a little meet-up at a nearby eatery, as I was getting wound up about some damn thing or other, Arvan of sexgenderbody wisely noted something that I occasionally forget (and that I am elaborately expanding and paraphrasing into my own native tongue): that America really is an empire, ruled primarily out of D.C. and New York by a small group of incredibly powerful interests who pay good money to remain thoroughly insulated from the messy, dying remnants of democracy as it thrashes around on the slaughterhouse floor. That the maddening insipidity and jaw-dropping mediocrity of imperial spokesmen like Brooks is merely a sign that they are performing their function -- protecting their paymasters from scrutiny or harm -- exceedingly well.

All passages are blocked, all bridges are guarded and the Empire has command of the air and controls all the high ground. And nothing I say, nothing Glenn Greenwald says, nothing Matt Taibbi says...nothing whatsoever is ever going to affect the slightest change in status or power or reach of people like Mr. Brooks.

Nothing.

And why?

Well, consider for a moment that many of the reforms which would dramatically change the American political system in ways that Mr. Brooks finds so laudable are well within reach right here in America and always have been. Everyone who is not a liar or a congenital imbecile knows what the problems are: our media -- the nervous system of our democracy -- is hopelessly broken and compromised, and monied interests have turned the American political system into an open, reeking whorehouse.

If you want to fix American politics, get rid of the fucking oceans of money and all the attendant corruptions that go with it. If you want to fix the media, put a public premium on individuals and institutions that tell us the truth, and a public sanction on individuals and institution that lie to us

Problem solved.

Except it isn't because the "problem", as Malone says in, "The Untouchables" is not figuring out where the booze is.

Everyone knows where the booze is.

The problem is, who wants to cross Capone?

And in a world where politics remains contentious but where partisan fights are governed by a deep respect for courtesy, comity, and honesty...

....Administrations that use national tragedies to lie us into illegal wars would be impeached and imprisoned.

...Hate Radio would be a shameful perversion like unto horse porn, enjoyed by freaks in secret in their basements at night.

...Fox News would have been nuked from orbit long ago. Just to be sure.

...and David Fucking Brooks would be scratching out a living writing seed ads for Grit Magazine.

And as Mr. Brooks knows full well, the oligarchs that he so loyally serves will never permit that world to come to pass.

(BTW, I did this Photoshop of Mr. Brooks back in January of this year. Prescient? Not at all. Read any random 3-4 Brooks columns and his inner Peeved Monarch just sorta leaps out at you.)