My Last Pointless Post About David Brooks: UPDATE

Probably.

Because once Donald Trump ascends to the Peacock Throne there will be no need for carping losers like me to carp any longer about the outsized and toxic influence of well-heeled parasites like Mr. David Brooks of New York Times.

After all, Mr. Trump has promised to immediately wipe every tear from our eyes, and there will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things will pass away.

So we've got that going for us.

And then, on the Second Glorious Day of his 1000 Episode Reich, he has solemnly promised to loosen enough libel laws and appoint enough mob lawyers to his People's Revolutionary Supreme Court to silence his America-hating critics for good and all.

But, until that great coming home day for Murrican Freedumb, we shall have to endure many media indignities, including and especially the pious whining of cosseted Beltway Conservatives who have spent their entire adult lives leveling ideological forests and blasting through political mountains in order to make straight the way for the very monster from which they now, suddenly, recoil in horror.

So what is Mr. David Brooks of the New York Times up to the day after the newly anointed leader of his Party delivered his rousing "Ein Volk.  Ein Reich.  Ein Con Man" speech to a mob of ecstatic Trumpshirts?

Well lemme tell ya, Mr. David Brooks of the New York Times is not happy.  No, not happy at all.

Brooks:

Welcome to a world without rules. (I want you to read this paragraph in your super-scary movie trailer voice.) Welcome to a world in which families are mowed down by illegal immigrants, in which cops die in the streets, in which Muslims rampage the innocents and threaten our very way of life, in which the fear of violent death lurks in every human heart.

driftglass:  In other words, welcome to the world of Fox News and Hate Radio as it has existed for the last 20 years.  Welcome to the world of the Republican base voter.  Welcome to the world whose existence David Brooks has been paid a lot of money by the New York Time to pretend does not exist.

Brooks:

Sometimes in that blood-drenched world a dark knight arises. You don’t have to admire or like this knight. But you need this knight. He is your muscle and your voice in a dark, corrupt and malevolent world.

driftglass: You mean like this guy?

Brooks:

Such has been the argument of nearly every demagogue since the dawn of time. Aaron Burr claimed Spain threatened the U.S in 1806. A. Mitchell Palmer exaggerated the Red Scare in 1919 and Joe McCarthy did it in 1950.

driftglass: You mean like this guy?  (From CBS News, September 8, 2004)

Cheney: Wrong Vote Invites Attack

Vice President Dick Cheney says the United States will risk another terrorist attack if voters make the wrong choice on Election Day, suggesting Sen. John Kerry would follow a pre-Sept. 11 policy of reacting defensively.

"It's absolutely essential that eight weeks from today, on Nov. 2, we make the right choice, because if we make the wrong choice then the danger is that we'll get hit again and we'll be hit in a way that will be devastating from the standpoint of the United States," Cheney told supporters at a town-hall meeting Tuesday.

...

Brooks:

And such was Donald Trump’s law-and-order argument in Cleveland on Thursday night. This was a compelling text that turned into more than an hour of humorless shouting. It was a dystopian message that found an audience and then pummeled them to exhaustion.
...

driftglass: You mean like these guys?

Brooks, still freaking out:

Trump has replaced biblical commitments with a gladiator ethos. Everything is oriented around conquest, success, supremacy and domination. This was the Lock Her Up convention...

On the other hand, there are good reasons to think that this law-and-order focus is a significant mistake, that it over-reads the current moment of Baton Rouge, Dallas and Nice and will not be the right focus for the fall.

In the first place, it’s based on a falsehood...

driftglass:   Because, yeah, when has a Republican campaign based on monstrous falsehoods ever succeeded?

Brooks, winding down:

...

There’s no actual agenda being put in its place, just nostalgic spasms that, as David Frum has put it, are part George Wallace and part Henry Wallace. Trump’s policy agenda, such as it is, is mostly a series of vague and defensive recoils: build a wall, ban Muslims, withdraw from the world.

This is less a party than a personality cult. Law and order is a strange theme for a candidate who radiates conflict and disorder. Some rich children are careless that way; they break things and other people have to clean up the mess.

But then, what are we to make about Brooks, from less than two years ago?

The big Republican accomplishment is that they have detoxified their brand. Four years ago they seemed scary and extreme to a lot of people. They no longer seem that way.

Perhaps that Mr. Brooks is a Stone.  Cold.  Liar.

You see Mr. Brooks, some of us remember that a rich Republican child named Bush already spent eight, long and ugly years smashing everything he touched.  And we also remember that you were pretty okay with that right up until the screeching of the wheels coming off the Bush Administration combined with the roar of a bunch of loud-mouthed, disreputable Liberals finally made a din so fucking loud that even you could no longer ignore it.

At which point you abruptly abandoned your position as the Beltway's leading Bush New York Times-friendly water-boy and morphed seamlessly into the Beltway's High Priest of Both Siderism.

And I have already pounded my head bloody against that wall 1,000 times, so why go into it again?

Instead let's leave it at this.  When the corporation interests you serve so dutifully -- the corporations who pull your strings and fill your pockets and own your industry -- decided to let the Bush Administration and their cronies like you in the media and the GOP's wretched, racist, pig-ignorant base completely off the hook for the crimes they committed against this country during the worst Administration in modern American history...

,,,and then decided to let them get away with lying about it...

,,,and then decide to let them get away with sabotaging every effort to clean up the wreckage and ruin they left in their wake...

,,,and then decide to let them get away proclaiming as an article of Party Faith that the reason the damn gummint don't work no more and all the jobs are gone is because the Kenyan Usurper and his Red Witch have secretly colluded with foreigners and degenerates to betray us all into the hands of criminals and terrorist...

...that was when the rise of a beast like Trump became inevitable.

UPDATE:

By the way, something kind of amazing seems to have happened to Mr. Brooks' column in the last 12 hours. Three different sections which are cited at Daily Kos and The Rectification of Names in which Mr. Brooks explicitly slaps around "mealy mouthed pseudo-Trump accommodationist[s]" and praises Ted Cruz's political acumen appear to have been completely excised sometime during the night.

For the record, here they are, as near as I can figure:

But this is not a normal convention. Donald Trump is dismantling the Republican Party and replacing it with a personality cult. The G.O.P. is not dividing; it’s ceasing to exist as a coherent institution.

The only speaker here who clearly understands this is Ted Cruz. He understands that the Trump phenomenon is probably not going to end the way a normal candidacy ends. It’s going to end catastrophically, in November or beyond, with the party infrastructure in tatters, with every mealy mouthed pseudo-Trump accommodationist permanently stained.

I’m not a Cruz fan, but his naked ambition does fuel amazing courage. As the Republican Party is slouching off on a suicide march, at least Cruz is standing athwart history yelling “Stop!” When the Trump train implodes, the docile followers who are now booing and denouncing Ted Cruz will claim they were on his side all along.

Also for the record, if Mr. Brooks' speculation that, once this shit all goes south on them, the accommodations will all claim they never believed what they now claim to believe sounds at all familiar to you, well it should.

It is the exactly same line Mr. Brooks was running back in 2003 when he was eagerly writing columns about what Hell there would be to pay for the dirty hippies "Now that the Iraq War is over"...

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.

Turns out it Mr. Brooks was right...in a way.  There was a group of ideological dead-enders who were incapable of admitting that they were wrong.  A group who frantically backtracked, lied, "extend[ed] their forebodings into a more distant future" and threw their energies into shifting the frame of the debate so that "right" and "wrong" no longer mattered.

That group was called Conservatives.

Conservatives like David Brooks.

Turns out it Mr. Brooks was also wrong...in a way.

At no point did those who were catastrophically wring about the Iraq War ever lose their "self-confidence and vitality".  Bulwarked as they were by an army of crackpot billionaires and corporations with infinitely deep pockets, they just kept lying, denying and refining their argument that history began on January 20, 2009 and that anything anyone may or may not have said before then was lost to memory of man.

And they are all still doing quite well.  I hear that many of these liars and frauds are honored guests on various serious political teevee shows.  Some of them are cited as wise and sage thinkers on NPR. Many are  are invited to give TED talks and sit on panels at the Aspen Institute and occasionally advise presidents.

I hear that some of them even have jobs-for-life at the New York Times.