History is Bunk, Ctd.

In 2004, after writing a long, scurrilous column castigating John Kerry for his hypothetical future "passive approach...in the face of radical Islam", his purported complete lack of interest "in reforming the entitlement programs that are asphyxiating government" and his flip-flopping, his "monumentally selfish" careerism and for being (as Mr. Brooks overhead some unidentified older boys saying in the bathroom) "the guy who refuses to wait in lines at restaurants because he thinks he's above everybody else", Mr. Brooks concludes (emphasis added):

"I'm not allowed to tell you how I'm going to resolve these contradictory impulses (Times policy). But if Kerry wins, I hope he'll pick three things he wants to do - for the country, not himself - and stick with them. And if Bush is re-elected, I hope he will see his win not as vindication, but as a second chance to act effectively on the visions that inspired hope in the first place."

And in 2012?

In 2012, the same Mr. Brooks who could not endorse in 2004 because of "Times policy" notoriously went out of his way to endorse Mitt Romney precisely because of Mr. Romney's complete lack of a visible conscience or an personal conviction about anything made him the ideal candidate to use magic Moderate Conservative Jedi tricks to bring what Timothy Noah refers to as the Republican "Protection-Racket government" to heel and get them to stop trying to kill the country to prove whatever batshit point in enthralling them this week.

Because, according to America's Most Respected Conservative Public Intellectual, the best possible way to convince the Teahadists to see sweet reason would be to help them defeat their most hated enemy, Barack Obama (not the real POTUS, mind you, but the fictional straw POTUS that Mr. Brooks routinely props up in order to make his ridiculous arguments) and a complete capitulation to their agenda.  

The Upside of Opportunism

By DAVID BROOKS

Published: October 29, 2012 

...

The bottom line is this: If Obama wins, we’ll probably get small-bore stasis; if Romney wins, we’re more likely to get bipartisan reform. Romney is more of a flexible flip-flopper than Obama. He has more influence over the most intransigent element in the Washington equation House Republicans. He’s more likely to get big stuff done.

Not that any of this matters at all -- at this point, Mr. Brooks could just doodle stick figure drawings of himself playing with his own poo and the Times would print it -- but if any future historians give a shit about how deeply broken America once was, I like to think that while they sift through the rubble of our  era using a copy of Mr. Brooks' future 12-volume fake history -- "How Liberals Destroyed Ronald Reagan's America" -- one of them might stumble across enough fragmentary evidence of the truth to provoke some investigation into what really fucked this country up, and who was really to blame.