David Brooks Says Trump's "Sabotage and Fuck You" EO Might Turn Out Great For Everybody

Every now and then a nondescript little man from Wingnut Central Command shows up at Mr. David Brooks' door to remind him that it is time once again to renew his Conservative credentials.  It is a brief but critical ritual upon which Mr. Brooks' entire professional life literally depends.  After all,  it isn't the word "American" or "author" or "political and cultural commentator" in his CV that The New York Times shells out crazy money to slap on it's op-ed page every week:

David Brooks is a conservative American author as well as political and cultural commentator who writes for The New York Times.

It's the word "conservative" they're renting.  It is the word "conservative" which has given Mr. Brooks entree to the  corridors of power, gigs on NPR, PBS and NBC, book contracts and a job-for-life at the NYT which pays for Mr. Brooks' various hearths and homes and travels and book tours.

So every now and then he needs to get his "conservative" card punched again.  And of course, given the nature of Conservatism, this means he needs to say something horrible and blatantly untrue in some public forum somewhere.  This time around, the forum was The News Hour, and the horrible and blatantly untrue thing was this:

...

On health care, they are dismantling it. There will be a period of disruption. But what was interesting to me about the CBO analysis of what they’re doing, after this period of disruption, there will be more people insured, not less. So it won’t look like Obamacare, but as the markets respond, there is a possibility that more people will be insured.

And so it’s not a simple, oh, we’re just tearing everything apart

Mr. Brooks lives on another planet and no one on his world wants for necessities of life.  No one in his social circle will ever be affected personally by anything Donald Trump does (except for those yummy yummy tax cuts for the wealthy) and so there is no need for Mr. Brooks to trouble himself by learn anything about how, say, insurance works.  For those of you with longer memories, you might recall how remarkably similar this sounds to Mr. Brooks' equally blase approach to the policies of the last Ambulatory  Fuckup Generator that his party installed in the White House.

Behold the inerrant economic wisdom of Mr. David Fucking Brooks!

David Brooks from March 2001

Yes, There Is a New Economy

...

In other words, if you wade through the economic literature, it's hard not to agree with the Cleveland Fed's Jerry Jordan: We are living at a once-in-a-generation moment of economic opportunity. As productivity grows, the economy will grow. As the economy grows, revenues will grow, maybe beyond what the CBO projects. The real question about the Bush tax cuts, then, is not, Can we afford them? The real question is, Why are they so small?

David Brooks, September 2001

The New Stupid Party

LONG AGO, the Republican party was nicknamed the Stupid Party, and at times Republicans have done their best to live up to the label. But after the past week, it is perhaps time to acknowledge that when it comes to brainless, self-destructive behavior, the Democratic party has achieved a level of excellence that will be unsurpassed in our lifetime.

Last week the Congressional Budget Office came out with a budget forecast. The report immediately got submerged in a chatterstorm about whether Congress or the White House would dip into something called the Social Security trust fund, but the essential facts are these: The CBO economists estimated that the federal government will run a surplus of about $150 billion in 2001. That’s a lower surplus than the CBO estimated a few months ago, before the economic slowdown, the Bush tax cut, and the recent congressional spending splurge. But even in these adverse circumstances, the surplus is still projected to grow to about $200 billion a year in 2004 and close to $300 billion a year by 2006.

The Democratic party proceeded to work itself up into a collective aneurysm. Dick Gephardt—who, when given the chance to play the demagogue, never goes halfway—said that the United States now faces "an alarming fiscal crisis." Democratic national chairman Terry McAuliffe said on Face the Nation that it had taken Bill Clinton eight years to build up the surplus, but Bush was able to "blow it in eight months." Other Democrats rose up en masse to declare that the Bush administration was going to bankrupt Social Security/the federal government/western civilization because the administration was going to have to "raid the Social Security trust fund...

I could go on at much greater length,  but since I already have, I see no reason to repeat the exercise.  It is sufficient to say that even the most cursory glance at Mr. Brooks actual record as a Conservative Public Intellectual shows three things.

First,  judging by any objective standard, Mr. Brooks is a colossal failure at Having Opinions about Things.

Second, given his long record of failure at Having Opinions about Things, by any objective standards, it is insane that he continues to reap lavish financial rewards and peer-group respect that are clearly unrelated in any way to his actual job performance.

Third, no one talks about it. Seriously.  Other than a few asshole Libtard bloggers in flyover country, no one talks about this.  And the conspicuous uniformity with which no one talks about this is what makes it so damn eerie [See "The Adventure of Silver Blaze"

Gregory (Scotland Yard detective): "Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?"

Holmes: "To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time."

Gregory: "The dog did nothing in the night-time."

Holmes: "That was the curious incident."]

And the reason for this is, I think, really very simple.

The corporations who run our media don't give a shit about any of this stuff.  Truth?  Falsity? Depravity?  The casual, sadistic infliction of harm on millions of Americans?  It does not affect them at all.  Just grist for the media mill.  What they do care about, deeply, is controlling the narrative.  Specifically, the narrative that Both Sides are to blame for every problem.  And so, to keep selling that corrosive and patently ridiculous narrative, they need Reasonable Conservatives they can plug into any medium.  They need reliable deacons of the  High and Holy Church of Both Siderism who can hit their marks and deliver the doxology of their toxic faith on any platform.

In other words, the need people exactly like Mr. David Brooks.

And to be of value to them, they need for him to keep that magical, golden word in his CV -- "conservative" -- active and up-to-date. 

And to do that, every now and then Mr. Brooks has to sally forth into the world and assert something that blatantly awful and wrong and astonishingly ignorant. 

And this he has now done.

Mission Accomplished, Mr. Brooks.

Mission Accomplished.

Behold, a Tip Jar!