The Most David Brooks Thing

The algorithm which generates David Brooks "columns" has extruded in a long time:

Over the past few years, liberals and conservatives have been arguing over which growth model is best. But, of course, there’s no need to choose. Both models are more or less working.
...

Washington is not the cause of polarization; America is. The irony is that something good about America (economic pluralism) is contributing to something bad (segmentation and political trench warfare).
...

The 2014 campaign has been the most boring and uncreative campaign I can remember. Democrats cry, “My Republican opponent is an extremist loon!” Republicans cry, “My Democratic opponent once shook hands with President Obama!” There’s not even a Contract With America, nor many policy suggestions of any sort. Most campaigns just remind preconvinced voters how bad the other party is.
... 

Because Both Sides, Bitches!

Wanna a little taste of the economic advice the Sage of the Acela Corridor was doling out 13 years ago?

The Democratic party proceeded to work itself up into a collective aneurysm. Dick Gephardt—who, when given the chance to play the demagogue, never goes halfway—said that the United States now faces "an alarming fiscal crisis." Democratic national chairman Terry McAuliffe said on Face the Nation that it had taken Bill Clinton eight years to build up the surplus, but Bush was able to "blow it in eight months." Other Democrats rose up en masse to declare that the Bush administration was going to bankrupt Social Security/the federal government/western civilization because the administration was going to have to "raid the Social Security trust fund."

At the time, Mr. Brooks never concealed his ugly, Conservative Liberal-stomping glee as he referred to any suggestion by Democrats that surpluses would ever end as "stupid", "brainless" and "self-destructive" behavior at a level "that will be unsurpassed in our lifetime."

Want a little more?   Here is Mr. Brooks again in 2001, positively wallowing in Conservatism's post-causality economic fad du jour:

Yes, There Is a New Economy

Thanks to once-in-a lifetime productivity gains, Bush's plans are easily affordable

MAR 19, 2001

...

This year's tax and budget debate really comes down to one essential question: Is the money going to be there? The Congressional Budget Office projects surpluses of about $ 5.6 trillion over the next 10 years. The Republicans insist that those projections are conservative, so the government can afford to return $ 1.6 trillion to the taxpayers and still have money left over for Social Security, Medicare, and an $ 800 billion contingency fund. The Democrats cry that projections are notoriously inaccurate, that the tax cuts will blow a hole in the budget, and that the Bush administration's risky scheme (which sailed through the House last week) would cast us back into the days of piling debt.

...

In other words, if you wade through the economic literature, it's hard not to agree with the Cleveland Fed's Jerry Jordan: We are living at a once-in-a-generation moment of economic opportunity. As productivity grows, the economy will grow. As the economy grows, revenues will grow, maybe beyond what the CBO projects. The real question about the Bush tax cuts, then, is not, Can we afford them? The real question is, Why are they so small?

In case you were looking for a link to Mr. Brooks' abashed columns recanting his many, many stupid economic prognostication, his aggressive cheer-leading of Bush's disastrous Iraq Fiasco, his endless columns mocking and sneering at those stupid, craven, hateful, insane Liberals who refused to climb on the Dubya Bandwagon and so forth...well, I don't have any such links to give you because Mr. Brooks has never recanted -- or even acknowledged -- any of the horrid things he wrote.

Why do I keep bringing him up?

Because Mr. Brooks has built an entire, ridiculously lucrative career slandering and lying about people like me.

Because Mr. Brooks remains a Conservative in the most important Conservative traits of all: compulsive dishonesty, unalloyed cowardice and a pathological refusal to ever apologize or even admit error.

Because Mr. Brooks' obsessive Both Siderism remains the Big Lie that enables all the rest of Conservatism's little lies.

And because by now it is painfully clear no one else in the entire constellation of mainstream media heavies is ever going to hold Mr. Brooks accountable for anything he says or does, no matter how absurd or appalling,

There's just me, and a few of others, piling up our leaky little sandbags against a massive, pulverizing tide of such bullshit, while Mr. Brooks goes about the business of moving forward, not backward; upward, not forward; and always twirling, twirling, twirling towards freedom!