Today's lesson: Context

Pop Quiz:  Who wrote this?

The opposition party opposes. It doesn't feel any responsibility to come up with positive alternatives. Its main psychological need is to be against its nemesis at all costs. If the governing party steals one of its ideas, it will oppose that idea.

In this way the opposition party is pushed further and further to the edge. It loses control of its identity - it's simply a negative reactive force to whatever the governing party happens to be doing at the moment. It finds itself in a cycle of opposition, negativity and irrelevance.

If you guessed anywhere in the ballpark of "Some damn Dirty Fucking Hippie", sadly, you would be wrong.

This was written by New York Times columnist David Brooks.

Eight years ago.

Just after George W. Bush's began his Epic Fail attempt to bulldoze Social Security, and just before the entire Bush Administration went tits-up and Mr. Brooks was forced to sprint like Hell away from its burning wreckage, dive into a "Both Sides Do It" spider-hole and hide out from his own words for the rest of his career.

At that moment in history, Wingnuttia needed all-hands-on-deck.

It especially needed one of its own with to use his newly-minted New York Times credentials


to quickly mount a loud, spirited, lie-and-misdirection based defense of George W. Bush's radical attempt to roll back the New Deal.

Here are Mr. Brooks' remarks in their original, 2005 packing material:

...
He has made the hard choices. By facing up to the fact that there are going to be benefit cuts, he's offended Newt Gingrich, Jack Kemp, the supply siders and other important Republican constituencies.

So how has the St. Francis of Assisi wing of the Democratic Party responded to Bush's challenge? Does it applaud him for doing what it has spent the past years telling him he should do? Of course not.

The Democratic leadership has dropped all that shared sacrifice talk and started making demagogic appeals to people's narrow self-interest. Nancy Pelosi cries out that Bush's progressive indexing idea means "cutting the benefits of middle-class seniors." Representative Sander Levin protests it "would result in the biggest benefit cut in the history of Social Security."

What about the sober chin-pullers - the fiscally prudent worriers and deficit-fearing editorialists? Have they come out and applauded Bush for his courage? Are they mobilizing to take advantage of this moment? No, their silence is deafening.

And what about those moderate Democrats? For two decades they've been courageously saying we need to means-test Social Security, so we can focus our resources on those who need it. Now Bush has embraced their view. Are they saying that since Bush has moved so far in a redistributionist direction that perhaps the Democrats should budge slightly, too? Of course not. They're inventing lame reasons to explain why they shouldn't be for the policy they have been for over the past 20 years. Bush could tell them he loved their mothers and they'd invent reasons to be against him. Politics trumps policy.

George Bush has been willing to address a long-term, politically thorny problem. He's pursued it doggedly while most members of his party wish he would just drop it. But his Democratic counterparts are behaving like alienated junior professors. No productive ideas. No sense of leadership. Just half-truths from the peanut gallery.

This is the difference between the party with a governing mentality and the party with the opposition mentality. The governing party leads. It takes the arrows. It casts about for productive ideas and slowly absorbs the other party's good ones. Bush has now absorbed progressive indexing of retirement benefits.

The opposition party opposes. It doesn't feel any responsibility to come up with positive alternatives. Its main psychological need is to be against its nemesis at all costs. If the governing party steals one of its ideas, it will oppose that idea.

In this way the opposition party is pushed further and further to the edge. It loses control of its identity - it's simply a negative reactive force to whatever the governing party happens to be doing at the moment. It finds itself in a cycle of opposition, negativity and irrelevance.

...

And before it is swallowed by the Memory Hole forever, here, in part, is how one, fringe, pariah Dirty Hippie tried to correct the damage Mr. Brooks was inflicting from within the wall of his NYT fortress.  (For the record, I had this written and posted about two hours after Mr. Brooks' column dropped.  Man, I sure could crank 'em out back when I thought it made a difference.)

...don’t you remember the giddy, Catholic School Girl days of early 2005, drunk with a fake mandate, when your party, BoBo, decided that Social Security would be the next target of the Fuck The New Deal steamroller?

Don’t you remember President Bush bragging in private that he was going to get rid of Social Security?

Don’t you remember the crowds of Bush Young Pioneers chanting “Hey, Hey. Ho, Ho. Social Security has got to go”?

Don’t you remember Cato Institute scrubbing their website once their own pet phrase -- “Private Accounts” -- was finally market-tested and found to be a disaster?

Don’t you remember the leaders or your party being outraged that Dem’s kept using the phrase “Private Accounts” which your party had been touting...even insisting that the Dem’s had invented it.

Don’t you remember that you guys won? The House, the Senate, the White House, the majority of governorships, the majority of judged...and yet once Lootapalooza took to the road and people started to notice that other than gutting the program via Private Accounts, Bush had no plan whatsoever, you all responded like you always do...by blaming the Democrats.

(BTW, yes, we do have a plan. It’s called “Social Security”.)

Don’t you remember that even Republicans finally had to admit that Private Accounts have nothing whatsoever to do with SS solvency?

Do you bother to remember that any honest scoring of Private Accounts yields a two-trillion dollar price tag? Enough to, you know, destroy the program...which as you damned well know has been the plan from the start.

Don’t you remember when Brit Hume went on teevee and simply lied his Botox-less Gumby ass off by cutting a certain quote by Roosevelt apart and pasting it together like a ransom note? And hey, by the way, has he or any of the rest of the Pravda Right lost their cushy news gigs yet for Deliberately Lying to the Public? Or it just always nakedly, brazenly “IOKIYAR” these days?

And finally, track back to the top of this post and take a good look at that picture. That was your party's First response to Social Security: Whip up a Molotov Cocktail of gay-bashing, traitor-baiting and fucking over the elderly and start lobbing it at anyone who dared question Dear Leader’s attempts to eviscerate Roosevelt’s Legacy.

So when you get caught with one chubby paw in the SS cookie jar and the other up grandma’s skirt (and I won’t even venture a guess as to where you prehensile tail is lodging itself these days) you are again simply incapable of admitting error or honestly critiquing any bullshit your Masters spout, no matter how overtly ridiculous.

Instead, when confronted with your own grotesque mendacity, you all go right to the All-Purpose, Iraqi Clusterfuck Playbook: Deny, deny, deny. Attack, attack, attack.

Or to misquote a legal truism as old as Imperial Rome, “When the Facts are with you, argue the Facts. When the Facts go against you, argue the Law. When the Fact and the Law both go against you, blame the Democrats, scream at the top of your lungs, and hope no one notices what an asshat you are.”

But we do notice, BoBo.

Oh yes we do.

David Brooks remains on Book Leave.

But his public record remains open and available to anyone who bothers to take a look.