Stupid Shit David Brooks Says, Ctd.

As I have pointed out many time in the past, Mr. Brooks often saves his most sulfurous loaves of Centrist feculence for his weekly "Conversation" with Gail Collins, which one shrill Commie pariah once described as:

[A] nails-scratching-on-the-chalkboard-of-life exercise [in which] New York Times op-ed columnist Gail Collins gamely plays the role of the genteel, matronly hostess whose schtick is to nervously laugh off the fact that, between bouts of butt scooting its bleeding sphincter all over her lovely duvets, a very large mad dog is running amok at her soiree and tearing the throats out of her other guests.

More canapes?

Across the table at the excruciatarium sits Our Mr. Brooks -- the mad dog's owner who (sort-of-but-not-really-see-it's-very-complicated-and-involves-Niehbur) disowned the dog once it dragged the third mutilated corpse into the conversation area (where he was incorrectly explaining something about The 60s), and tossed it at Mr. Brook's feet -- joking weakly that cleaning up after house pets can sometimes be a nuisance, and Tom Friedman told him once that lemon juice and a little seltzer can get all kinds of household stains out of one's duvets, and have you ever noticed how Liberals are generally very naughty.

My, aren't we having a lot of weather this year?

This all peppered with Lockhorns-grade unfunny jokes about big, wide, slow-moving targets like, say, Ron Paul.

The result comes across as feverishly hollow and forced as a family that has made a pact never to speak of The Bad Thing That Happens When Daddy Drinks, trying to navigate across the mine-laden surface of another morning-after of splintered furniture and angry bruises...

In this week's exciting installment, Mr. Brooks

...reacts to Ms. Collins' observation that the Republican Party has gone mad:

Gail, did you accidentally leave the TV on and absorb a night’s worth of MSNBC subliminally in your sleep? Your partisan ya-yas are flowing. By the way, if you did, have you seen the world’s most embarrassing promo spots, the ones directed by Spike Lee in which the hosts are put in front of some big infrastructure project or the White House and forced to give a pious speech as if they are high school kids running to be Robert Moses? Why can’t MSNBC hosts unionize and put an end to this humiliation?

...opines gustily on the influence of money on politics:

I have never seen compelling evidence that fund-raising levels powerfully influenced a presidential race. Whether Romney outraises Obama or vice versa is totally unimportant.

...takes on the silly, Liberal phobia that the GOP's endgame somehow involves the elimination of entitlements:

If there is anybody who wants to eliminate entitlements, I haven’t met that person. Wanting to reform the schools with charters is not exactly handing them over to Enron.

...and, finally, in a dazzling display of subject mastery that would surely put the average 4th grader's American History book report to shame, Mr. Brooks shows off his fancy University of Chicago bachelors degree by expounding on his latest Big Stupid Theory that some of  last11 decades were "primarily political" and some were not.

I was going through the decades of the 20th century to try to see which of them were primarily political decades. That is to say, was the most important thing that happened that decade political or not? My results follow:

1900s — Industrialization. Not Political.

1910s — World War I. Political.

1920s — Consumer culture and beginning of mass prosperity. Not Political.

1930s — The New Deal. Political.

1940s — World War II. Political.

1950s — Suburbanization. Not Political.

1960s — New Frontier, Civil Rights, Vietnam. Political.

1970s — Feminism. Not Political.

1980s — Reagan Revolution. Capitalist Revival. Semi-Political.

1990s — Silicon Valley. Not Political.

2000s — 9/11, Afghanistan and Iraq. Political.

Which, as long as you factor out things like the rise and fall of McCarthyism, the Cold War, the rise of industrial unions, the rise of big city machine politics, feminism, the entire constellation of thuggery, extortion and high crimes encompassed by the word "Watergate", the first Presidential resignation is United States history, the deployment of the Republican Southern Strategy, the rise of Jerry Falwell and the Christian Right, the myriad crimes and acts of treason that made up the "Iraq/Contra" scandal, the rise of Newt Gingrich and the formal adoption of lying and slander as the basic vocabulary of the Republican Party, the years of GOP witch-hunts and defamation spent by the GOP to topple the legally elected government on Bill Clinton, the impeachment of Bill Clinton, Bush v. Gore...then, by God, this list makes perfect sense!

Congratulation, Mr. Brooks, you have finally achieved the pinnacle of success in your field -- being paid  princely sums to make big boy boom-boom every week in the pages of America's Newspaper of Record.