Now That The War in Iraq Is No Longer Over

If your knowledge of Mr. David Brooks is limited to following his multi-continent "Morality Now!" book and speaking tour and retweeting that one column over and over and over again --

The Moral Bucket List http://t.co/sltmc2h6Vu

— David Brooks (@nytdavidbrooks) April 11, 2015

-- you may not realize that he has a secret identity!

Hard to believe, I know, but it's totally true!

When he not delighting audiences around the world with his lecture on the importance of honestly, personal integrity, and good character he can usually to be found back hard at work at his real job: indefatigably cranking out yet another "Both Sides Do It" column to add to the gargantuan pile of Both Siderist bullshit he has already generated by extruding ideologically identical columns, week after week.

Month after month.

Year after year after year.

As relentless as the tides, with only an occasional break for long vacations or to sneak off in the middle of caviling The Poors on the Teddible Teddible Dangers of broken families to get quietly divorced or to finishing up a book on the importance of honestly, personal integrity, and good character or whatever.

As Liberal misfits have been documenting ad nauseum since the dawn of blogging, the "Both Sides Do It" fairy tale is by far the most popular, lucrative and useful lie the mainstream media tells.  A veritable cottage industry, generating one variation after another of the same Big Lie you will hear everyone from presidents and captains of industry to your Crazy Uncle Liberty repeating catechistically every time reality veers terrifyingly close to exposing the fact that the Dirty Hippies have been right all along.   And for his work as an early and assiduous adopter of this Big Lie, Mr. David Brooks has been feted and rewarded beyond the dreams of Avarice.

But to remain strong and vital, the Big Both Siderist Lie must constantly be refreshed with the bullshit of repetition, and this is where Mr. Brooks really excels, because as sure as the sun does rise in the East, if you pick virtually any David Brooks column out of the pile on virtually any subject, you will always find the Both Siderist razor in the apple (from me, in 2014):

...

And since we know that since the post-Bush David Brooks is biologically and contractually incapable of writing any column expressing any opinion on any subject without a big, steaming load of Both Siderism right in the middle, you will be unsurprised to find this razor in the apple (emphasis added):

The weakness with any democratic foreign policy is the problem of motivation. How do you get the electorate to support the constant burden of defending the liberal system?

It was barely possible when we were facing an obviously menacing foe like the Soviet Union. But it’s harder when the system is being gouged by a hundred sub-threshold threats. The Republicans seem to have given up global agreements that form the fabric of that system, while Democrats are slashing the defense budget that undergirds it.

And so, knowing this, you have no business being surprised that in the dead-bang middle of Mr. David Brooks' column on Iraq today in the New York Times you will find this (emphasis added):

This attempt to impose top-down solutions, combined with President Obama’s too-fast withdrawal from Iraq, has contributed to the fertile conditions for the rise of ISIS.

And this, whatever-the-fuck it is:

Central politicians love centralization. But this is the wrong recipe for an exploding Middle East.

And having demonstrated my thesis that Mr. Brooks is a Both Siderist doody-head hiding inside a briar patch of "morality" words, I am tempted to move along to other things, but I feel I must tarry a moment longer to make one more point.

Because if your knowledge of Mr. David Brooks is limited to shaking your head in impotent rage that he has gotten rich and powerful repeating the same, ridiculous Both Siderist bullshit over and over again in one column after another you may not realize that he has yet another secret identity!

Hard to believe, I know, but it's totally true!

You see, the reason Mr. Brooks was an early and assiduous adopter of the Big Both Siderist Lie is because the previous Big Lie on which Mr. Brooks staked his fortune -- the Big Lie that Liberals Are To Blame For Everything -- ran outta gas right around the time the Bush Administration which Mr. Brooks had so ferociously supported started to implode.

So of course he and his fellow travelers in the mainstream media needed to manufacture a gargantuan pile of Both Siderist bullshit most riki-tik.  How else to bury the equally gargantuan pile of Liberals are Terrorist-Loving Dupes and Monsters bullshit on which they had all built their careers?

Here is Mr. Brooks from 2003, making an excellent living by calling you and your friends muddle-headed, hate-crazed idiots who will probably spend the rest of your stupid lives swaddling yourselves in one convenient delusion after another rather than admit the simple fact that you were wrong, wrong, wrong!

The Collapse of the Dream Palaces

Mass destruction of mistaken ideas.

APR 28, 2003

...Now that the war in Iraq is over, we'll find out how many people around the world are capable of facing unpleasant facts. For the events of recent months confirm that millions of human beings are living in dream palaces, to use Fouad Ajami's phrase. They are living with versions of reality that simply do not comport with the way things are. They circulate and recirculate conspiracy theories, myths, and allegations with little regard for whether or not these fantasies are true. And the events of the past month have exposed them as the falsehoods they are.

...

Finally, there is the dream palace of the American Bush haters. In this dream palace, there is so much contempt for Bush that none is left over for Saddam or for tyranny. Whatever the question, the answer is that Bush and his cronies are evil. What to do about Iraq? Bush is evil. What to do about the economy? Bush is venal. What to do about North Korea? Bush is a hypocrite.

In this dream palace, Bush, Cheney, and a junta of corporate oligarchs stole the presidential election, then declared war on Iraq to seize its oil and hand out the spoils to Halliburton and Bechtel. In this dream palace, the warmongering Likudniks in the administration sit around dreaming of conquests in Syria, Iran, and beyond. In this dream palace, the boy genius Karl Rove hatches schemes to use the Confederate flag issue to win more elections, John Ashcroft wages holy war on American liberties, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and his cabal of neoconservatives long for global empire. In this dream palace, every story of Republican villainy is believed, and all the windows are shuttered with hate.

My third guess is that the Bush haters will grow more vociferous as their numbers shrink. Even progress in Iraq will not dampen their anger, because as many people have noted, hatred of Bush and his corporate cronies is all that is left of their leftism. And this hatred is tribal, not ideological. And so they will still have their rallies, their alternative weeklies, and their Gore Vidal polemics. They will still have a huge influence over the Democratic party, perhaps even determining its next presidential nominee. But they will seem increasingly unattractive to most moderate and even many normally Democratic voters who never really adopted outrage as their dominant public emotion.

In other words, there will be no magic "Aha!" moment that brings the dream palaces down. Even if Saddam's remains are found, even if weapons of mass destruction are displayed, even if Iraq starts to move along a winding, muddled path toward normalcy, no day will come when the enemies of this endeavor turn around and say, "We were wrong. Bush was right." They will just extend their forebodings into a more distant future. Nevertheless, the frame of the debate will shift. The war's opponents will lose self-confidence and vitality. And they will backtrack. They will claim that they always accepted certain realities, which, in fact, they rejected only months ago.

This is the same man who now makes an even more fabulous living and commands the respect of leading civic, political, media and religious leaders by relentlessly preaching the snake-oil of Both Siderism and lecturing other people on the importance of morality, modesty, honesty, integrity and good character.  

A fact on which I shall dwell bemusedly as I make my way though the wasteland of the want ads in my local paper once again.