David Brooks Goes Back To Being Awful

Having donned his buckskins and revived his "Touching Indians" tour long enough to toss off a column about the mountains and the prairies and the whole rest of that song, Friday evening Mr. David Brooks of The New York Times suited back up in proper Serious Beltway Thought-Leader attire and returned to being awful.

His venue of choice?

PBS, one of Mr. Brooks's Happy Places, where no one would dream of coming within a parsec of violating the Beltway Iron Rule of David Brooks.

At first, Mr. Brooks just sat a wincing, morose shiva for his Republican Party, which was fine as far as it went.  And if he had just stopped here --

DAVID BROOKS: ... I think we’re a little clearer on where the Republican Party is.

You know, the Trump campaign began really seriously with the Muslim ban. It continued with a series of racial things about the wall. It continued Charlottesville and the reactions. And what’s happened is the racial winking and content, the identity politics has become a rising motif in the Trump administration, especially as everything else including economic policy and economic populism has fallen away.

And that’s meant the Republican Party or at least some portion of it, and I don’t know how big, has become more of a white ethnic party, ethnic nationalist party. That has made life impossible for a lot of people who signed up as Republicans but didn’t sign up for this. And we’ve had fights within Republicans on a lot of different issues on taxes, on wars and things like that.

But this is upon which parties break apart because you can’t Republican — if the Republican Party becomes a party aligned with bigotry in some overt way or in any way, you can’t be a Republican and try to be a decent person and be a part of it. And I’ve watched within my friends here in Washington, friendships ending in a way I never really seen before. And friendship ending I think in the evangelical world, friendships are ending.

And Senator Danforth had an op-ed today and Gary Cohn is put in this position. And so, what you’re seeing is a hint of a rupture the likes of which I really haven’t seen before.

-- I swear I would not have said a mumblin' word.

But of course, as we know from long experience, Mr. Brooks is completely incapable of stopping there.  Because the central tenet of Mr. Brooks true faith demands that every single fucking atrocity perpetrated by Mr. Brooks' Republican Party must immediately be transmuted into one more cloying, lying sermonette on the Evils of Both Sides.

And so (emphasis added):

DAVID BROOKS...  I just think the Trump administration is going to wander into these fields more and more in the months and years ahead, simply because they don’t have an economic agenda, there’s very small chance of tax reform, they don’t have the populist thing they can bring to people. And so, what they have is this ethnic nationalism. And they are frankly going to be helped sometimes by Democrats or by radicals on the left who are going to deface the Thomas Jefferson statute or do something like that. And then that’s [cat nip] for Donald Trump. He can say they’re defacing Thomas Jefferson.

So, then the identity politics of the left and identity politics play off each other and you get this war of people who think that white and black are the only two categories in life and they should have some sort of political war over this and it begins to look like the Sunnis and Shiites. And as I say, that’s a Republican Party that decent people don’t want to be a part of, frankly.

Make no mistake. telling this particular lie over and over again in every venue on the occasion of every Republican catastrophe is Mr. Brooks' sole job.  Everything else he does is gingerbread and after dinner mints.  Propping up this lie is why the Sulzberger family pays him a king's ransom year after year for writing the same shitty drivel over and over again, year after year.  Propping up this lie is why none of his Very Respectable Beltway colleagues ever dare to question the ridiculous predicate of the shitty drivel he cranks out. over and over again, year after year.

Because this lie -- the Big Lie of Both Sides Do It -- is what keeps them safe.  Keeps them employed.  Keeps the monster they helped to create at arm's-length.

To slightly misquote Michael Corleone, they're all part of the same hypocrisy.  And if this Big Lie ever collapses, they all know that it will take all of them down with it.

Behold, a Tip Jar!