Remember, It's Not a Lie if David Brooks Believes It

A peek inside the deeply dishonest mind of the Leader of the Imaginary Whig Party:

I think the ones who think it was an unprecedented grab of executive power are probably on the right side, but that’s me. Politically, we have had four years without a single law being passed in this country, a major piece of legislation. We’re now going to have two more.

This is going to end. This is going to — this period of gridlock is going to end some day, and people will actually cooperate, they will do things, they will build coalitions, they will pass things by a majority vote by the way the Constitution designed.

But what happened last night will make that harder and push that date further on. The sort of unilateral action the president took will make passing immigration reform harder and it will make other reform harder.

The number one issue in this country is restoring the legitimacy of government. And I don’t care whether he thinks he was — whether the president thinks he was justified or not. By the way, the Republicans did — and the somebody have certainly behaved as obstructionists at times. Somebody’s going to step out of this cycle, and he just embedded the cycle another few feet deeper.

...

This is actually the clearest summary of Mr. Brooks' internal operating environment that has seeped through his bland Wall of Both Siderism in awhile.

Of course the there is no "cycle"; there is just David Brooks' Republican Party smashing everything it touches and then -- through Very Serious Henchmen like Mr. Brooks -- simultaneously sabotaging the cleanup crew and blaming both sides for the rubble.

And, of course, there has been someone who has spent the last six years trying over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again to "step out of this cycle".  That person is President Barack Obama.  And as Mr. Brooks knows perfectly well, every single fucking time President Barack Obama has tried to reach out to David Brooks' Republican Party he has pulled back a stump, after which David Brooks' Republican Party salted the Earth behind him and ran off to Fox News screaming about birth certificates and death panels and Benghaaaazi.

But from the congenitally dishonest Mr. Brooks we will never hear a word of that.  Instead we 

get Mr. Brooks standard issue dispersal of any direct criticism of David Brooks' Republican Party by parsing the actual facts of the case equally between Both Sides -- an actual, fact-based Liberal side...and a Conservative side which Mr. Brooks just pulls out of his ass:

And it looks a little something like his:

First, constitutionally, my paper did a good story on whether this was constitutional. And the White House did get 10 pretty serious legal scholars to say it was. There’s a vast number who think it wasn’t. And so I guess the legal scholars are divided.

No. They're not divided.

The idea that the immigration plan just announced by President Obama is a lawless power grab is absurd. As the Justice Department legal analysis that was just released amply demonstrates, much of the advance criticism of the president’s action has been uninformed and unwarranted. The opinion is well-reasoned and at times even conservative. The president is not acting unilaterally, but pursuant to his statutory authority. Wide discretion over deportation priorities has long been conferred on the executive branch by Congress, and it is being exercised in this case consistent with policies such as family unification that have been endorsed by Congress.

Mr. Brooks just needs it to appear that way so he won't look like just another skeevy, wingnut hustlebuck liar.

Fortunately for him, he has pretty much the entire Beltway Media lined up to help him sell this bilge. And he can say this all with a perfectly straight face because inside Mr. Brooks' blighted skull, the Republican Party you and I see putting the torch to everything we hold dear every day somehow isn't the real Republican Party.

You see, the Real Republican Party (a division of True Conservatism) is run by calm, reasonable professionals.  And, as Mr. Brooks has been promising since the 1990s, that sane and sensible Republican Party is always juuuust around the corner,

And I think there’s the Michele Bachmanns of the world. I don’t know what they want to do, chop off New York and Illinois and send it off to another country or something.

But the John Boehners and the Mitch McConnells are not going to let that happen. There is not going to be a government shutdown. They’re probably not even — going to fund the immigration agencies that are involved in this. So, the extreme will not happen. The Republican Party has changed a lot in the last year. It’s a much more establishment party.

The leadership is back in control...

And on those rare occasions when President Barack Obama has stood up to the actual Republican Party and not Mr. Brooks pretend Republican Party, Mr. Brooks freaks completely out.  For example, back in 2011, you may recall that (as one outcast wretch once put it):

This week, the President was forced to very, very reluctantly admit that the Dirty Hippies might just have actually had a point all along, which according to the terms of Our Mr. Brooks' gold-plated servitude meant he needed to be barked at.

And bark bark bark went Our Mr. Brooks:

...

This wasn’t a speech to get something done. This was the sort of speech that sounded better when Ted Kennedy was delivering it. The result is that we will get neither short-term stimulus nor long-term debt reduction anytime soon, and I’m a sap for thinking it was possible.

Yes, I’m a sap. I believed Obama when he said he wanted to move beyond the stale ideological debates that have paralyzed this country. I always believe that Obama is on the verge of breaking out of the conventional categories and embracing one of the many bipartisan reform packages that are floating around.

But remember, I’m a sap. The White House has clearly decided that in a town of intransigent Republicans and mean ideologues, it has to be mean and intransigent too. The president was stung by the liberal charge that he was outmaneuvered during the debt-ceiling fight. So the White House has moved away from the Reasonable Man approach or the centrist Clinton approach...

After which, predictably, the worst people in America ate him alive:

The Right -- the same Right which the charter of Our Mr. Brooks' Centrist Neverland says must be endlessly appeased and compromised with...right up until they shit all over you...after which their psychotic intransigence should be met with ever greater acts of appeasement and compromise...forever (or "pre-compromise, followed by acquiescence to right-wing priorities") -- predictably ate Our Mr. Brooks alive.

This is why Mr. Brooks is consistently paired with weak Beltway Centrist flutterbunnies like Ruth Marcus.  Because any actual Liberal in command of the basic facts could tear Mr. Brooks transparently fraudulently claptrap to confetti in under a minute, and the entire Beltway Media machine is set up for the expressed purpose of preventing that from happening.

But you already knew that.