Will No One Rid Me Of These Troublesome Conservatives?

Asks America's most famous Conservative Public Intellectual

Here now, David Brooks -- still on "Book Leave" from his day-job at The New York Times -- faulting Speaker of the House Barack Obama for not controlling his Party:

DAVID BROOKS: ...Now, I concede that most of the blame probably has to go to the Republicans.

But I do not think Barack Obama's off the hook here entirely. I do think, overall, it has been a long-running problem for this administration that they didn't find a way to isolate the Tea Party and work with the other Republicans to create a governing majority, and that still holds.

Now they're going to try to do it, and I hope they do. Maybe they can carry it over into immigration and other things. But it's been a problem for the administration, unable to get -- to separate the small rump group from the rest of the Republicans, who they could have worked with.

Wow.

In case you ever wondered how a mediocrity like David Brooks gets paid fat stacks, this is how : faithfully regurgitating Beltway talking points.  This time he's horking up the last, backwash-clotted lees of this Summer's runaway Mainstream Media hit, "Why won't Barack Obama fix all this by waving his Enchanted Leadership Wand?": the tragic tale of the *Magical Negro President who could have ensorcelled the GOP into reversing course 180 degrees, growing opposable thumbs, climbing down out of the Stupid Tree and giving up their publicly stated goal of destroying his Administration...

...but refused to do it out of spite.

Or something.

Eventually, Mr. Brooks finally gets around to where he always gets around to: advising President Obama to capitulate to Conservative anarchy and extortion because, um, well, uh...

DAVID BROOKS: If [President Obama] holds back and says, I'm not negotiating until we do the debt ceiling, he's asking the Republicans to give away all their leverage before he starts negotiation. They are not going to do that. So, he more or less has to do that to avoid a...

The real answer to "What the fuck is David Brooks even talking about?" is, of course, the same as it ever is. Mr. Brooks cannot, cannot, cannot admit that his Republican Party and his Conservative Movement is simply doing exactly what it was designed to do -- harness the collective electoral power of fundies, bigots and other dregs of American society and laser-focusing them on annihilating what's left of our democracy -- with impressive efficiency.

DAVID BROOKS: Yes, I would say the big effect is on trust in government.  You know, I think it's the most important statistic, so I quote it all the time. When they ask people, as they have for decades, do you trust government to do the right thing most of the time, if you go through the first half or the first 70 years of the 20th century, 70, 80 percent of Americans trusted the government to do the right thing most of the time.

I don't exactly know what the number is now, but it's not 70 percent. It's probably around 22, 23 percent. And so there's just no trust in government. And this will just amplify and fortify that belief that people think Washington is just screwed up.

Weird how those statistics are always right at Mr. Brooks' fingertips, and yet when he whips them out to prop up one more, baldly ridiculous Both Sides lie, it never occurs to anyone to point out that the plunge in public confidence tracks precisely with A) a whole litany of Republican scandals, high crimes and Constitutional betrayals starting with Watergate, and B) the rise of a huge, well-funded Modern Conservative Movement which flooded the media with the single, unified message that the entire federal government was a vast, Commie/Liberal/America-hating plot to steal your hard-earned money and give it to mooching minorities. take away your guns and make your children gaaaaaay.

Like the rest of his Beltway fraternity, Mr. Brooks cannot admit that Ted Cruz is his bastard child just as they cannot admit that we America-hating Liberals have been 100% right all along as we warned the country that one day these rough wingnut beasts would come slouching out of the Conservative whelping box to destroy this country.

And so we get face saving fairy tales of a President refusing to use his mad cajolomancy skills to get the Republican Party Mr. Brooks helped to create to stop behaving like the monster which Mr. Brooks can no longer stand to look at. 

*From Wikipedia:

The Magical Negro is typically but not always "in some way outwardly or inwardly disabled, either by discrimination, disability or social constraint," often a janitor or prisoner. He has no past; he simply appears one day to help the white protagonist. He usually has some sort of magical power, "rather vaguely defined but not the sort of thing one typically encounters." He is patient and wise, often dispensing various words of wisdom, and is "closer to the earth." The magical negro will also do almost anything, including sacrificing himself, to save the white protagonist, as exemplified in The Defiant Ones by Sidney Poitier, the prototypical Magical Negro movie. 

 The Magical Negro serves as a plot device to help the protagonist get out of trouble, typically through helping the white character recognize his own faults and overcome them. Although he has magical powers, his "magic is ostensibly directed toward helping and enlightening a white male character...