Fundraiser Day Three: Hippies Cost Penn State $60M

Or so David Brooks may very well have written this story if he hadn't been on "book leave" from his day job at the New York Times:

Penn State to Pay Nearly $60 Million to 26 Abuse Victims

Penn State has agreed to pay $59.7 million to 26 sexual abuse victims of the former assistant football coach Jerry Sandusky in exchange for an end to their claims against the university, Penn State announced Monday.

Of the 26 settlements, 23 are fully signed and three are agreed to in principle, with final documentation expected in the next few weeks.

Rodney A. Erickson, the president of the university, called the settlement “another step forward in the healing process for those hurt by Mr. Sandusky, and another step forward for Penn State.”

He added, “We cannot undo what has been done, but we can and must do everything possible to learn from this and ensure it never happens again at Penn State.”

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Think I'm kidding?

Because blaming the 60s was sure as shit how Mr. Brooks explained away this entire tragedy back in 2011:

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Of course, as reported, the Penn State Child Rape Cult had little or nothing to do with the so-called "Bystander Effect" -- random strangers reacting with cowardice to a random crime -- and everything to do with Power.

With corrupt, institutional Power.

With powerful people at the top of a corrupt hierarchy lying about matters of life and death...and people further down the food chain who depend on those at the top for their livelihoods and professional identities going along with those lies because that's how corrupt hierarchies work:

But of course, powerful people lying about matters of life and death is not material about which Our Mr. Brooks "reports", but instead is the contaminated water in which he swims.

From his full-throated support of the Operation Iraqi Clusterfuck and contempt for the filthy hippies who opposed it...to his full-throated support of the Scooter Libby and contempt for the filthy Lefties who opposed him...to his full-throated support of the Oligarchs and his contempt for the filthy Occupiers who opposed them..to his full-throated support of Paul Wolfowitz and his contempt for the filthy anti-Semites who questioned him...Mr. Brooks' career has had one, utterly consistent and very profitable theme: Afflicting the afflicted and comforting the comfortable.

And so when any powerful, depraved institution anywhere -- from the Bush Administration to Wall Street to Penn State football -- splits wide open long enough to spill the rot in its belly out into the sunlight...well-fed Kowakian monkey-lizards like David Brooks

are always on hand to scuttle into the breach where they immediately begin to deflect and diffuse away from Power (and towards the imaginary sins of imaginary Liberals) --

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MR. BROOKS: I don't think it was just a Penn State problem. You know, you spend 30 or 40 years muddying the moral waters here. We have lost our clear sense of what evil is, what sin is; and so, when people see things like that, they don't have categories to put it into. They vaguely know it's wrong, but they've been raised in a morality that says, "If it feels all right for you, it's probably OK." And so that waters everything down. The second thing is a lot of the judgment is based on the supposition that if we were there, we would have intervened.

MR. DIONNE: Right.

MR. BROOKS: And that's just not true.

MR. GREGORY: But I have to challenge you on that point.

MR. DIONNE: Yeah.

MR. GREGORY: Is it really that we don't know right from wrong? Is there anybody who doesn't know that sodomizing a 10-year-old boy in a shower by another man is wrong?

MR. BROOKS: But if you...

MR. DIONNE: Exactly.

MR. BROOKS: If you're alert to the sense of what evil is, what the evil is within yourself and what evil is in society, you have a script to follow. It's not a vague sense. You have a script to follow. And this is necessary because people do not intervene.

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-- any blame for the deeply-rooted depravity that had clearly been putrefying at the heart of those institutions for years (by Mr. Brooks' logic, the child rape cult at the heart of the Catholic Church could only have been the product of the free-wheeling, godless, anything-goes attitude for which Catholicism has so long been famous.)

On any other day I would have said that Michele Bachmann's complete, on-camera psychotic break from reality was the most astonishing freak-show on display at the Mouse Circus, but not today.

Today the sight of Mr. Brooks -- a man who has grown rich and powerful as the craven "Reasonable Conservative" apologist for the incompetence, corruption and outright malevolence of other rich and powerful men -- staring mildly into the camera and lecturing America on evil and "taking personal responsibility, regardless of what the rules are" left me literally speechless with astonishment.

Today Mr. Brooks walked off with the prize.

And no one intervened.

Update: Mr. Brooks decided to re-plow this ground in the New York Times on Monday.