Sunday Morning Comin' Down: The Whimper Soldier

If all you knew about David Brooks was what you had gleaned from his almost-continuous appearances on most of America's most popular political talk and public interest programs over the last six or seven years, you may not know that, not very long ago, Mr. Brooks was very busy building his career out of publicly masturbating to the fantasy that a Strong Man on a Red, White and Blue Horse would appear to reshape the global order to David Brooks' specifications.

For years and years he and his fellow neoconservatives at the Weekly Standard constituted a veritable drum circle of pasty-faced, faux-macho, chickenhawk imperialists, all militating night and day for Murrica to man the fuck up and start knocking off countries that needed knocking off.  And if you weren't down with their program for World Reboot starting with Operation Iraqi Cakewalk, you were obviously a stupid, befuddled, cranky, fringe nut hippie who deserved nothing but the jeering ridicule of Very Serious people like David Brooks.

Then, a few years later, this happened (with emphasis added and a big h/t to Nicole Belle at Crooks and Liars):

DAVID GREGORY:

But this is what Putin is counting on. And by the way, he made the same calculation in 2008 about President Bush. But it's interesting. Think about the world when Saddam Hussein took over Kuwait. And that President Bush said, "This will not stand." The international world order was a very different thing. What does it take for the U.S. to singularly use its influence today as opposed to in earlier years?

DAVID BROOKS:

Well, people might say, "Why do we care? It's far away, it's a country, we don't know much about it." But Rich alludes to the real problem here, which is we had a post-Cold War era, which has not been great, but it's been a lot better than the 19th century. And there have been some undergirding facts of that era.

The first is, you don't have spheres of influence. Russia can't say, "We sort of control everything. We control everywhere where our people are." The second is that you don't go invading other countries, breaking down the laws. It's complicated, but you basically have some stability. And within that stability, you can have global trade, you can have free movement of people.

And Putin is this radioactive individual who wants to create history, large ego, large Russian nationalism, which is whipped up all around him. He is a fundamental threat to this order. And so that's why it matters. It matters to the economy, it matters to the way the world conducts itself for a couple years.

Now if you were a normal human living in a sane world, you might well presume that any reporter -- even the greenest freshman high school newspaper cub still working the sucky-cafeteria-meat-loaf beat -- would use David Brooks' long, slow, fat pitch right up the middle to crank his lying, neocon ass all the way out to Waveland Avenue.  After which, even the merest stripling, lost-dog-found! child-with-a-blog reporter would have the wherewithal to wheel on David Gregory and shove a few lightening bolts up his ass to remind him that, between Gulf War I and Crimea the world actually turned a few times and the United States pissed away irreplaceable blood and treasure and international credibility on the most reckless and ill-conceived military clusterfuck in American history thanks to people like the guy in the bright pink tie

sitting ...

right ...

in ...

front ...

of ...

you.

But you do not live in a sane world.  You live in a world where David Gregory instead chose to summon all of his superhuman powers of anti-journalism to keep himself from asking his very good friend and Torah study-buddy --

"[Jeffrey] Goldberg’s Torah study group in Washington includes David Brooks, David ­Gregory, and former U.S. ambassador to Israel Martin Indyk..."

-- anything remotely resembling a follow-up question about any major, world event which might have happened in, say, Iraq, in, say, the last decade which may have chastened the American public on the matter of sending our children overseas to fight and die for David Brooks' wet dreams.

Meanwhile, over on The Fox -- where it is always Take an Unreconstructed War Criminal to Work Day -- Paul Wolfowitz got another shot at the spotlight (h/t Crook and Liars) and decided that we can't look in the rear view mirror because Hitler!

And because Paul Wolfowitz is the second luckiest man in America, no Iraq War veteran caught him in the alley behind Fox News HQ and beat him until he couldn't pee straight.

And who is the luckiest man in America?

Well, since you asked so nicely...

So excited to have @ananavarro & Bill Kristol join our outstanding @ABC political team. Both brilliant, original thinkers #ThisWeek

— Jonathan Greenberger (@greenbergerj) February 2, 2014

I remember back when ABC News had better sense than that.  From the Seattle Times in 1999 (right around the time Mr. Greenberger was learning out how to cope with toddlers at the Jewish Community Center's day camp in Columbus, Ohio):

ABC Dumps Bill Kristol As It Deals With Sagging `This Week'

By Howard Kurtz
The Washington Post
WASHINGTON - ABC executives, worried about sinking ratings as Sam Donaldson and Cokie Roberts fall behind Tim Russert's "Meet the Press" on NBC, are starting to overhaul the once-mighty "This Week."

The first victim is Bill Kristol, a conservative presence for three years on the shoot-the-breeze Sunday round table. The Weekly Standard editor taped his last show Wednesday after being told that his contract would not be renewed.

The axing of Kristol comes three months after the departure of the show's executive producer, Dorrance Smith, who, like Kristol, worked in the Bush White House. Several sources confirmed that contrary to the public announcement at the time, Smith was forced out by ABC News President David Westin, who has had an increasingly strong hand in the program.

Smith said Kristol "added a much-needed different perspective from a conservative viewpoint, which I don't think they have any interest in trying to fill. They're tone-deaf when it comes to political evenhandedness. . . . Rather than being journalistically honest, they're much more comfortable with people who share viewpoints closer to their own," he said of ABC management.
...

Smith, a friend of Linda Tripp from their days in the Bush White House, has told friends that he believes ABC management was displeased with some of the reporting he helped provide during the Monica Lewinsky scandal...