The Greatest Fraud in American Journalism

Has now written his 3,327th identical column on the same subject.

Exciting!

It seems that there are these two crazy groups (in this case three: "banker, Democratic Keynesian or staunch Republican")...

...which are all somehow exactly equally and oppositely wrong in exactly the same way.

What planning!

"The tax cut brigades and the Medicare/Spending brigades are well organized."

In the middle of these crazy factions we once again find Our Mr. Brooks, shedding big, mayonnaise-y tears and pleading for Reasonableness.

"The people in my group (you might call us conservatives) are more likely to embrace a low and steady approach to fiscal policy. Control debt. Control entitlements. Keep tax levels reasonable and the tax code simple.
...

People in my camp form a silent majority. But we have been astonishingly passive during these budget negotiations. ...The people who believe in balance and the fundamentals sit piously on the sidelines. "

(Yes, Mr. Brooks really is a big enough fartknocker to call his Imaginary Army of Reasonableness by Nixon's vintage phrase, the "silent majority".)

Sadly, the bunny-snug happiness of the serene Reaganesque homeland of this long-suffering "silent majority" is once again being thwarted-- thwarted I tells ya! -- by reckless scumbags.

On.

Both.

Sides.

"But they are bracketed on all sides — by the tax cut and Medicare brigades, by the wonks hatching budget gimmicks that erode trust, by political hacks who don’t want to lose their precious campaign issues: tax cuts forever, Medicare spending without limit. "

Sigh.

I'm not going to bother to debunk the comically transparent lies Mr. Brooks embeds throughout his column. Lies about Democrats. Lies about this nonexistent Center he prats on endlessly about. Lies about Conservatism. Lies about health care reform. Lies about the stimulus.

Why bother? They're really nothing but the same lies Mr. Brooks robotically repeats in virtually every one of his columns, and by this point he surely knows they are lies.

He gets shredded, corrected, updated and upbraided in the comment section of every column he writes, and in a dozen blogs within hours of his column dropping twice a week (I no longer bother to submit comments as they get scrubbed more often than not.)

So far as I know (have unintentionally made myself into one of the blogosphere's resident experts on Mr. Brooks' habits, history and folkways) Mr. Brooks has never responded in any venue anywhere to any of the by-now thousands of thoughtful, factual critiques, emails, letters to the editor, comments and posts written about his terrible, terrible opinions.

So far as I know, outside of a few, snide remarks about the Cheetos-smeared denizens of the febrile swamp of the blogoshpere, Mr. Brooks has never once acknowledged that this vast and growing tide of comments and criticism even exists.

(The one, telling exception I know of being the time Mr. Brooks leaped to a mawkish, fact-free defense of the sacred memory of St. Ronald Reagan by going after one of his colleagues who had pointed out that Reagan had frequently and deliberately played an entire dog-whistle orchestra when courting the Southern White bigot vote during the 1980 Presidential election. Mr. Brooks was swiftly and completely gutted and humiliated by fact-toting mobs of human beings [including one of his NYT colleagues] who actually knew and lived American history instead of just majoring in it at the University of Chicago and apparently sleeping through most of the lectures on the 20th Century. Since that last foray into the joys and perils of life outside his Imperial Bubble, Mr. Brooks more-or-less permanently retreated behind the luxurious skirts of the Gray Lady, never again to venture into any of the dark and scary reality-based parts of town lest he once again find himself pansted and paddled by his betters.)

But as I said, despite the fact that Mr. Brooks obviously feels it is too risky to even acknowledge the vast array of data and logic that debunks him, it is by now simply impossible for him not to know that he is lying.

And that we on the Left obviously know he is lying.

And that he knows that we know that he knows.

And so on.

But clearly at the New York Times, it does not matter how inept, transparent and laughably predictable Mr. Brooks lies have become: Mr. Brooks has landed the greatest job in American "journalism" for life because Bill Keller and the Sulzberger family obviously need him there on the parapet of the American Empire touting the fuck out of the Villager Party Line. And because that is Mr. Brooks' real job, he has slowly stopped bothering to even pretend to write anything but exactly the same Centrist drivel over and over again.

And so, in that spirit, here is a reprint of my post "How To Write a David Brooks Column" from one year ago.

Because a year later, not a single word of it need to be changed.

How To Write a David Brooks Column

...you too can learn to write a New York Times Opinion Page Editorial just like America's Last Reasonable Conservative, David Brooks!

In just 10 Easy Steps you'll be punditting like a pro!

1) Pick a subject. Any subject. From Tasseled Loafers to Torture, it literally does not matter.

2) Quote extensively from one person or group on the subject. It's OK to just more-or-less copy and paste in big hunks of what whatever-you-happen-to-be-reading-at-the-moment to flesh out your 800-word column. Here at the Times we call that "research"!

3) Quote from some other person or group on the same subject who appears to hold a different opinion. If no actual opposition exists, just put on your Magic Green Jacket and invent an opposing opinion.

4) Although such is not the case with today's subject, as often as possible, try to impute these fictional distinctions to the different hemispheres of the political Universe. So no matter how bigoted, reckless or just bugfuck crazy the Right behaves, you just go right ahead and blandly assert with no supporting evidence whatsoever that the Left is equally and oppositely bad in exactly the same qualities and quantities. Here at the Times we call that "seriousness"!

5) Discover in your final paragraph or two that -- amazingly! -- the precise midpoint between those two completely artificial positions on an imaginary spectrum just happens to be exactly the Right and Reasonable answer!

Oh boy!

6) Rinse and repeat. No matter what the subject, no matter how false or bizarre the equivalence, just rinse and repeat. Twice a week.

7) Every week.

8) Year.

9) After year.

10) After year.

Long ago this stopped being a "style", and started being a fetish, Mr. Brooks

It's called "Asymmetriphobia": a horror of asymmetrical things.


Seek help.

UPDATE: Over at Reality Chex, Marie Burns does what she can,

...
To your claim that "The world economy is a complex, unknowable organism," you should add, "... to me." The world economy is not unknowable to economists who study it. But you have come late to the game & you can't expect to catch up.
...

You write, "Democrats argued that through gigantic deficit spending, they could bring unemployment rates down sharply and produce a 'summer of recovery.'" Guess what? They did not effect "giant" spending. Senators Lieberman, Snowe & Collins severely limited the size of the stimulus. (Forgot that, didn't you?)
...

but Our Mr. Brooks really is quite hopeless.

Because whenever reality and Mr. Brooks' perniciously ignorant ideology come into conflict, reality will always take it in the neck.