10 Years After: 2005 -- David Brooks: All RAM/No Hard Drive

Early David Brooks stuff.
Doing the roadwork.
Working the bag.
Inventing a genre.
And for a long time, this was a pretty lonely beat.

From May, 2005. 

All RAM. No Hard Drive.


GOP Demagoguery? What are you talking about?

Jesus, if he just wouldn’t rouge up his idiot baboon-ass and wag it around so provocatively, I could go to the gym and get out and enjoy a sunny day in my beautiful city.

However...

Calling Democrats' Bluff

By DAVID BROOKS

Published: May 8, 2005

Don't take people at their word. Don't listen to them when they tell you how to be virtuous.

They're faking it. They don't care about virtue, or you or the common good. They're just taking opportunistic potshots under the guise of sermonizing. They're just a bunch of hypocrites.

...

OK, let me break in just for a minute to say that while I don’t usually follow BoBo’s advice, in this case, since he is so stamp-his-tiny-porcelain-hoof insistent, and has set the table so nicely, just this once I’ll go along and agree that...

You’re a hypocrite.

A pie-faced, Rattus Americanus Accomodationist hypocrite.

A puckered hole where an actual journalist should be hypocrite.

An “I don’t care that my Right Wing Masters have packed the Constitution into cattle-cars and have dispatched it to The Year of our Lord 1391...but the speed at which we’re rocketing down the tracks makes my tummy hurt sometimes” hypocrite.

The Fundy AmWay vertical marketing plan’s top New York Sales Representative...hypocrite.

A Spy in the House of ‘Duh...hypocrite.

I just poked my finger right though your spongy skull. Now go ahead, smell my finger. Smell’s like “hypocrite” doesn’t it?

Is that what you had in mind, or should I continue?

Onward...

...Over this time, Democrats have been hectoring President Bush in the manner of an overripe Fourth of July orator.

...

Sometimes you had to walk through Democratic precincts in a gas mask, the lofty rhetoric was so thick. But now we have definitive proof that they didn't mean it. It was all hokum.

Over the past few weeks, the president has called their bluff.

...

So how has the St. Francis of Assisi wing of the Democratic Party responded to Bush's challenge? Does it applaud him for doing what it has spent the past years telling him he should do? Of course not.

...

Are they saying that since Bush has moved so far in a redistributionist direction that perhaps the Democrats should budge slightly, too? Of course not. They're inventing lame reasons to explain why they shouldn't be for the policy they have been for over the past 20 years. Bush could tell them he loved their mothers and they'd invent reasons to be against him. Politics trumps policy.

...

This is the difference between the party with a governing mentality and the party with the opposition mentality. The governing party leads. It takes the arrows. It casts about for productive ideas and slowly absorbs the other party's good ones. Bush has now absorbed progressive indexing of retirement benefits.

The opposition party opposes. It doesn't feel any responsibility to come up with positive alternatives. Its main psychological need is to be against its nemesis at all costs. If the governing party steals one of its ideas, it will oppose that idea.

...

This is what's infected the Tories in Britain, and it's infected the Democrats here. When a Republican president embraces progressive indexing, something big is happening. When the Democrats oppose it, you know their party has betrayed an animating ideal.

Short answer: Drop private accounts and we’ll talk.

Drop ‘em right now. They were a Trojan Horse for the actual Bush Plan which is to raze all things Roosevelt. They have been glaringly shown to be a Poison Pill specifically designed to gut the program.

Admit it. Drop it. Move on.

And then we’ll talk about Shoes and Ships and Sealing Wax...oh, and since we’re talking about Shared Sacrifice, we will also be talking about rolling back the Bush Billionaire Tax Bonanza to mere Clinton-era lavishness help pay for everything, right? Hell, we’ll even talk about how to help Americans save for their retirement, but on a different day, and only once you put Private Account Gun down, and step away from Grandma.

But until then, you have no credibility whatsoever. (“Credibility?” Look it up.)

Longer response? Well, since you mentioned it...

You know, I was watching the Timmy Russert’s Dance Fever today and saw a funny thing.

I saw Joey Joe Joe Junior Carville heroically resisting the urge to invite his Gorgon Spouse to climb up her own ass and vanish in a Ourobourian fart of completely deranged hatred, which is now also officially completely unmoored from Reality. Doesn’t even stop by the Real World anymore for dinner. Doesn’t even call up Reality once a year for eight minutes on Mother’s Day.

The question she was posed was about Arch GOP Fucknut Goblin, Pat Robertson’s comments about judges (sorry, tha would be the Reverend Fucknut Goblin. Jesus must be sooo proud.)

You remember, right? It was only a week ago, which I know qualifies as an off-limits, “youthful indiscretion” kind of thing in Bush-land and is all backwardsy-looking, but still...you remember, right? When Roberson declared that the Liberal Judiciary was a far, far worse threat to the nation than a “few, bearded terrorists” that “fly planes into buildings”?

Worse than Nazis. Worse than Commies. Those Evil Judges, they positively out-Heroded Herod!...and MoveOn.org has taken out an ad saying that that was an extreme position...so Timmy asked Our Miss Matalin about that very thing, and she came out Very Strong against Irresponsible Demagoguery.

She thought it was Awful. Just Awful!

And for a glorious moment I thought someone, somewhere on the Right had finally, finally, finally had awaked from beneath the lethally suffocating blanket of lying propaganda under which they all so eagerly snuggle and spoon.

That one of these hand-puppets finally scared up a just a little of the same Towering Moral Outrage with which the were so amply over-stocked during the “Let’s Fuck Up Bill Clinton” years...and decided that they could no longer abet a profoundly anti-freedom, anti-liberty, anti-democratic, anti-Christian Oil Junta.

And then the she opened her big, carp mouth and made it clear that it was the position of the Left that she was denouncing. Loudly. Con Mucho Venomous Gusto. Oh, sure, perhaps Robertson’s statement were “injudicious”, but it was the Left’s response to the Reverend’s call for judicial jihad that we’re the real outrage.

All while James Carville doodled distractedly. And one can only speculate what sort of “a hundred F-16s strafing a certain unhinged harridan” kind of cartoon art Jim-Boy was sketching out while The Wife publically cuckolded him by danced merrily with the Devil right in front of hubby; frenching Old Scratch Himself flush on the mouth, on teevee, on Sunday morning no less.

Man, what ever happened to the good old Cardinal Fundy Virtue of a wife “submitting graciously to the servant leadership of her husband”? Good thing she’s not actually married to the Bile Ducts that she so rabidly defends, ‘cause I think they favor a more vigorous, physical form of errant-spousal-discipline than just a few stern words. And what they would do to her would surely mess up her Immodestly Non-Burka Suit, and her Harlot lipstick.

Ah well.

Why bring this up?

Because she’s you, BoBo. You in drag.

At some molecular level you are just exactly that desperately unwilling to face up to the cancerous horror running mad and free though the guts of your own party. And to cope, you summon up heroic levels of doublethink to wish away the True Nature of the ogres and trolls that you obey so slavishly: a denial that has become so pathological that you invert the very ugliness that you serve but dare not name, and project it wildly outward onto the rest of the world.

Then again, from your position in the Political Catamite Seat, kneeling obediently between Deal Leaders thighs and fighting Condi for the post of Fluffer-In-Chief, it’s probably a little hard to actually see the Dear Leader’s lips move, or hear what he and his friends are talking about, so how about you spit out the Presidential Predator Drone for a minute, come up for air, and join us on a little jaunt down memory lane:

(Very recent memory too, which is why one can only assume that it was the muffling effect caused by having GW’s Sans-A-Belts wrapped around your skull, that caused you to miss the GOP Social Security Hit Parade. Funny, 'cause it was in all the papers...)

Or don’t you remember the giddy, Catholic School Girl days of early 2005, drunk with a fake mandate, when your party, BoBo, decided that Social Security would be the next target of the Fuck The New Deal steamroller?

Don’t you remember President Bush bragging in private that he was going to get rid of Social Security?

Don’t you remember the crowds of Bush Young Pioneers chanting “Hey, Hey. Ho, Ho. Social Security has got to go”?

Don’t you remember Cato Institute scrubbing their website once their own pet phrase -- “Private Accounts” -- was finally market-tested and found to be a disaster?

Don’t you remember the leaders or your party being outraged that Dem’s kept using the phrase “Private Accounts” which your party had been touting...even insisting that the Dem’s had invented it.

Don’t you remember that you guys won? The House, the Senate, the White House, the majority of governorships, the majority of judged...and yet once Lootapalooza took to the road and people started to notice that other than gutting the program via Private Accounts, Bush had no plan whatsoever, you all responded like you always do...by blaming the Democrats.

(BTW, yes, we do have a plan. It’s called “Social Security”.)

Don’t you remember that even Republicans finally had to admit that Private Accounts have nothing whatsoever to do with SS solvency?

Do you bother to remember that any honest scoring of Private Accounts yields a two-trillion dollar price tag? Enough to, you know, destroy the program...which as you damned well know has been the plan from the start.

Don’t you remember when Brit Hume went on teevee and simply lied his Botox-less Gumby ass off by cutting a certain quote by Roosevelt apart and pasting it together like a ransom note? And hey, by the way, has he or any of the rest of the Pravda Right lost their cushy news gigs yet for Deliberately Lying to the Public? Or it just always nakedly, brazenly “IOKIYAR” these days?

And finally, track back to the top of this post and take a good look at that picture. That was your party's First response to Social Security: Whip up a Molotov Cocktail of gay-bashing, traitor-baiting and fucking over the elderly and start lobbing it at anyone who dared question Dear Leader’s attempts to eviscerate Roosevelt’s Legacy.

So when you get caught with one chubby paw in the SS cookie jar and the other up grandma’s skirt (and I won’t even venture a guess as to where you prehensile tail is lodging itself these days) you are again simply incapable of admitting error or honestly critiquing any bullshit your Masters spout, no matter how overtly ridiculous.

Instead, when confronted with your own grotesque mendacity, you all go right to the All-Purpose, Iraqi Clusterfuck Playbook: Deny, deny, deny. Attack, attack, attack.

Or to misquote a legal truism as old as Imperial Rome, “When the Facts are with you, argue the Facts. When the Facts go against you, argue the Law. When the Fact and the Law both go against you, blame the Democrats, scream at the top of your lungs, and hope no one notices what an asshat you are.”

But we do notice, BoBo.

Oh yes we do.

And oh yes we still do.