Iron Dave

Mark your calendars kids, because this was the day that David Brooks took the neighborhood kids out for a drum circle in Bryce Park and The Talk about What It Means To Be A Man:

...

So the ideal man, at least in polite society, gracefully achieves a series of balances. He is steady and strong, but also verbal and vulnerable. He is emotionally open and willing to cry, but also restrained and resilient. He is physical, and also intellectual.

Today’s ideal man honors the women in his life in whatever they want to do. He treats them with respect in the workplace and romance in the bedroom. He is successful in the competitive world of the marketplace but enthusiastic in the kitchen and gentle during kids’ bath time...

OK, a word of caution for you young men out there. While there is nothing wrong with this specific combination of bromides, as a rule you should be hella suspicious of advice on masculinity from someone about whom his own wife once said "[David Brooks] writing about emotion is like Gandhi writing about gluttony."

David Brooks is dead inside, kids, and however many aphorisms he memorizes, it's all cogs and spokes and spools of Conservative magnetic tape under the hood.  And as a rule the living should be very cautious about taking advice from the non-living.

Later on, after a fluttering round of verbal fisticuffs in which Mr. Brooks repeatedly scuffs Donald J. Trump's ankles with charges that he is (gasp!) a p-i-g pig --

Trump embraces a masculine identity — old in some ways, new in others — built upon unvarnished misogyny.

-- Brooks continues journaling about this horrifying discovery that his Republican Party is full of ...(gasp!) ... Republicans!

...

I’ve grappled with determining how much to blame Trump’s supporters for his rise. Many of them are victims of economic dislocation and it is hard to fault them for seeking a change, of course, even if it is simplistic and ignorant.

But in the realm of cultural politics, Trump voters do need to be held to account. They are participating in a descent into darkness. They are supporting a degrading wrong. This is the world your daughters are going to grow up in.

Mr. Brooks, for what it's worth, here's a word of advice on masculinity from a man living as socially far away from the Acela Corridor socially as Terminus is from Trantor and it is the same advice I have offered to you on many, many occasions over the years.  You see, in addition to being "successful in the competitive world of the marketplace but enthusiastic in the kitchen", a real man also takes responsibility for the bastards he fathers, no matter how professionally crippling or personally horrifying that obligation may be,

From me, five long years ago:

Well Into Their 117th Trimesters


David Brooks and David Frum both suddenly decide they really don't want to keep Reagan's baby.

Earlier today Mr. Brooks placed his order for a political D&C through pursed-lips and a frowny face by rewriting Reality's Timeline so that he was somehow never a part of the 30-year lead-up to the Giant Pig Party Implosion at the end of the Empire we see bearing monstrous fruit all around us.

Mr. Frum, more comically, decided instead to pretend that the person most responsible for the Giant Pig Party Implosion at the end of the Empire...was the Reasonable-to-a-Fault Democratic President! Because he has so far failed to put Frum's Republican Party down like the sick animal that it is, and failed to clean up the toxic partisan sewer that David Frum helped create..despite Mr. Frum and every other Conservative douchebag in America being warned to beware just exactly these consequences for the last 30 years by two generations of Liberals:

Obama's Weakness Made Debt Crisis Worse
...
"Then, as Republicans discovered the power of their new tool, the president decided to assume they were bluffing, that they would never actually do anything so reckless. Waking up to the reality of the situation too late, he commenced bargaining by offering what he assumed would be an irresistible deal. Wrong again. The Republicans did resist. So Obama offered an even better deal — which predictably only whetted the GOP appetite for still more.

...
Instead, he appealed again and again to Republicans’ spirit of responsibility. Good luck with that."

Which is such a triumph of pure, lying, cornered-rat-desperate Republican anti-logic that it really deserves to be featured as an exhibition sport in the 2012 Summer Olympics.

Both Mr. Frum and Mr. Brooks are sticking to the most tried-and-true method of Beltway Insider lying -- namely, heroically disavowing any knowledge whatsoever of their own previous and well-documented actions:



All they know is, somebody had better come along God damn soon and rid them of these Ogre Babies that they somehow have growing in their tummies for reasons they dare not explain.

I guess it's a good thing neither of them live in Kansas.