Another Useless Post About Fucking "Reasonable Conservatives"

The Conservative Public Intellectual end of America's long, puke-flecked political bar is a dismal and frankly creepy place these days.  

All of that ferociously partisan bunting they proudly hung all over the joint during their wild, hippie-punching salad days during the Age of Bush have long since oxidized and curled into tiny, black fists like so many dead spiders.  One after another, the Great White Hopes of the Moderate Right have burned out, leaving nothing but the gloom from the exit lights and the feverish, Hate Radio glare from the other end of the bar to keep their weepy little corner lit.

It's life Jim, but not as we know it.

Like their louder, angry-drunk Teabagging cousins, the higher brain functions of the Conservative Public Intellectual are gone, but their madness is of a quieter, more desperately ruined kind.   Because they're not yet completely, knee-walking drunk, they remain aware that their Movement is sitting in a pile of shit.   But because they are Conservatives and are therefor congenitally unable to tell the truth about who they really are and what they have really done, they cannot bring themselves to admit that they lost control of their own electoral bowels decades ago and that the pile of shit in which they sit is a shitpile of their own making.

And because they are Conservative Public Intellectuals, they have to use their public writings and appearances to invent all kind of novel theories about how all that shit got there.

For example. David Frum thinks all that shit miraculously precipitated out of thin air in 2009  (coincidentally just before David Frum got drummed out of the Conservative Clubhouse in 2010):

I wrote recently about the bad habits among Republicans that have enabled this week's debt crisis, the latest in a long series of crises since 2009.  

Whereas David Brooks (taking yet another vacation from his New York Times "book leave" vacation) thinks the shitpile in which his is buried to his Windsor knot has something, maybe, sorta to do with the 1960s.

And Liberal overreach.

And people becoming less trusting.  

All very sad and inexplicable: 

DAVID BROOKS: I would say, though, that it's a generational-long thing. The trust really begins to go down in the late '60s, early '70s.

MARK SHIELDS: That's true.

DAVID BROOKS: So, Vietnam and Watergate played a big role.

But then I would say -- it might be an ideological point -- the expansion of government into all areas of life, without really being able to deliver, like on the war on poverty and on other things, I think that probably hurt.

MARK SHIELDS: Over-promise.

DAVID BROOKS: It's over-promise, and it's also a case where you have just become a less trusting society.

If you ask Americans, do you trust the people around you, for most of the 20th century, yes, I trust my neighbors. I trust people around me. Now majority, no, I don't trust people around me. We have become more -- less deferential to institutions, less social trust in general.

And it's hurt all sorts of institutions, the media, government, law, but government among them.

For the Conservative Public Intellectual, all of the trust-annihilating atrocities committed by Republican presidents and congresses during the decades when those Conservative Public Intellectual were carrying water for those Republican presidents and congresses simply do not exist.

Had no bearing on anything

Never.  Happened.

As I wrote back in my epic, 2007 award-ready, four-part series comparing the career of David Brooks to William Faulker's "A Rose for Emily", it's not as simple as people like Mr. Brooks merely being serial liars. Instead, they have developed a complex, politically useful and economically profitable, necrophiliac relationship with their own delusions:

...

Like Miss Emily, Mr. Brooks fell into a passionate and ill-considered love long ago. But the Conservative Myth to which Bobo gave his heart never really existed, and any vestige of it in the Real World died long ago.

Like Miss Emily, Mr. Brooks simply cannot not cope with the cold reality that the object of his affection is stone dead and has been for decades, and so, like the legions of privileged, white Republicans just like him, he has gone quietly mad.

And because he cannot cope with the idea that what he loved is a lie, like Miss Emily, Mr. Brooks has instead set up housekeeping with the putrefying corpse of his Once And Future King.

He sleeps with it.

Chats with it.

Holds tea parties with it.

And will not tolerate any back sass about its goodness and purity.

Like so many Modern Conservatives, David Brooks has been fucking the moldering remains of something long dead, gone and rotten for so long, it started to seem normal to him. And sharing a political marriage bed with a corpse in a kind of ideological necrophilia also just so happens to very much suit the despicable goals of the vile, little monsters who actually own and operate Brooks’ Party and his Movement.

...

And this, in the end, is what truly makes them Conservatives.