Once again David Brooks has risen from what should have been a career that died of shame 15 years ago to collect his filthy New York Times lucre by squeezing out one more Both Sideist turd, which he once again double-dips by recycling the entire thing on PBS's Antique Pundit Roadshow --
"The two parties are entrenching. The people in rural America really like Republicans, the people in urban...America really like Democrats," says @nytdavidbrooks. "That sows a division....It's a sense you get two different electorates...having two different conversations." pic.twitter.com/ckQVBKzw0i— PBS NewsHour (@NewsHour) November 2, 2018
-- while Mark Shields shakes his wattles and fum-fuhs about how Democrats don't have a message and anyway, what about The Illegals?
Mark Shields: Well, I mean, the Democrats have essentially been, we're going to be a check, a balance, we want balance restored, we're going to be a check on Donald Trump.
They have obviously emphasized health care and the Republicans voting 54 times to repeal the Affordable Care Act, and now saying that, well, but we want to preserve the preexisting condition.
But there isn't an overarching Democratic message. And I think the Democrats, quite frankly, even in the face of the caravan, have not had a coherent or united message to answer for it, I mean, that maybe — I think at some point, they have to assert that illegal immigration is illegal...
And once again, Andrew Sullivan is cashing his wingnut welfare cheque by preening over the fact that he was a Never Trumper before it was cool, and then chucking his old Iraq War running buddy, Max Boot, under the chin while chiding him for being naive:
The most striking thing about Max Boot, the former neocon who has become one of the most passionate Never Trumpers, is his naïveté. After decades of diligence in the ranks of the conservative movement, it took the emergence of Trump to make him see that almost everything he previously trusted and believed in could disappear overnight. I’m glad he has seen the light on this, and enjoyed his book, The Corrosion of Conservatism, as a memoir of that naïveté. It’s a devastating dissection of conservatism’s degeneracy in America.
The notion of Andrew Sullivan -- who has spent his entire life writing fan fiction about Imaginary America while hiding out from Real America -- scolding Max Boot for being naive has the kind of rich, dense irony that one should only nibble in small bites over a large cup of coffee.
However, as an official representative of the vituperative foul-mouthed blogger of the Left community, let me add that Mr. Boot's book may indeed be the most "devastating dissection of conservatism’s degeneracy in America" since...
...the publication of every other book that comprises America's hot, new fiction genre -- "Never Trumping" -- in which the protagonist pretends to be shocked to discover that their Republican Party was full of ... OMFG! ... Republicans all along!
Which, in turn, may collectively be the most "devastating dissection of conservatism’s degeneracy in America" since...
...literally everything Liberals have said or written about Conservatism over the past 40 years.
Of course, as once wag pointed out almost a decade ago, "hating government (in its Evil Liberal puppet masters) is THE central organizing principle of the Conservative Movement". It is the "fucking Guanine and Adenine [of their] fucking political DNA". Which means that wherever they are on the Conservative continuum -- whether they're a Conservative who lives, out and proud, in President Stupid's Racist Ass Crack, a Conservative who spent decades building the monster machine that manufactured President Stupid's Racist Ass Crack and now would like to get paid for saying "Ooopsy" -- all Conservatives are perpetually searching for a way to offload the blame for their sins and malignancies onto the backs of the Dirty Hippies.
For the 97% of Conservatives who think Donald Trump is an answer to their mingy little racist prayers, they assign blame to Liberals in their usual, straightforward, shoutycrackers way: While the Fake News clouds the minds of real Murricans. Nancy Pelosi, Maxine Waters and the Kenyan Usurper are conspiring to march a George Soros-funded army of marauding butchers and rapist across the boarder to murder your white wife and make your kids use transgender bathrooms.
However, for the Brain Caste of Conservatism -- the 3% whose tummies now feel all icky because they all just found out yesterday that their Republican Party is full of Republicans! -- blaming Liberals for the atrocities of Conservatism is much more l akin to sneaking out at 2 AM to toss their trash into our yard. Their excuses must be much more circuitous and metaphysical and Both Sidery. Because while the rituals and liturgies of their Conservative cult have failed every single time they have been applied in the real world, they continue to believe, in the words of the mighty Digby, that Conservatism itself cannot fail, it can only be failed.
Which means it will never be possible for most of them to admit the plain and obvious truth that the Left has been right about the aright all along.
So while its great that Andrew Sullivan will cast his one vote in Washington D.C. in opposition to the Party of Trump --
That’s why I will vote Democrat next Tuesday.
-- as a Liberal, I am not going to forget for one minute that the support of virtually every Conservative Never Trumper is of the any-port-in-a-hurricane variety and comes freighted with a lifetime of seething contempt for me and everything I believe in.
I have many issues with the Democrats, as regular readers well know. None of that matters compared with this emergency. I don’t care, in this instance, what their policies are. I am going to vote for them. I can’t stand most of their leaders and fear their radical fringe.
And so I hope for a broad and clear Democratic victory on Tuesday. Of course I do.
And I temper that hope with the sure and certain knowledge that after any measurable Democratic victory, all across the Beltway media, the Never Trump/Both Siderist knives --
But there’s a danger to Damascene moments. It’s so very tempting to replace one tribe with another, one fixed ideology for its opposite, and to make that conversion the central part of your identity. There’s an American tradition of this, from Whittaker Chambers to David Brock. When I read Jennifer Rubin, I see the same trope.
-- will be coming out for you and me faster than you will believe possible.
Behold, A Tip Jar!
5 comments:
Although our main residence and voting place is MD (outside DC), we have had a farm in the Shenandoah Valley of western VA. It’s a pretty conservative place with liberal small urban enclaves. I have been pleasantly surprised that the engaging Democratic Congressional candidate, Jennifer Lewis, in this gerrymandered district has support from many small business people who you think, stereotypically, would be hardcore conservative but she has an actual track record on dealing with the opioid crisis and the rural environment, which believe it or not have real resonance out here. The electorate models overwhelmingly white with almost no African-Americans but a sizeable Hispanic population, which, I suspect, rarely votes so she’ll probably lose but her opponent is also a first time politician (a conservative lawyer) because this was the seat of the now retiring and hideous Bob Goodlatte. Even his own son gave the maximum to Jennifer.
But this is Brooks lazily generalizing rural Trumpers, urban liberals. Most of Trump’s votes, statistically came from comfortable suburban voters not the rural poor. The latter either don’t vote or only vote in small numbers because there aren’t that many of them.
I wake every morning wishing I'd been wrong way back in the halycon Reagan era. That acquiring massive military might would not create an "All dressed up with no place to go" conundrum for the chickenhawk neo-con flock, nesting in positions of power, resulting in perpetual war. That "spending our way to prosperity" would not loot, rob, and ransack the common wealth. That covert and off-book foreign mucking about wouldn't destabilize the planet. That trebling federal spending, returning less to the States, while cutting taxes, would not result in a cascade of spending and debt insanity. That slashing holes in the safety net would not threaten our national security. That deregulation, M & As and disinvestment would not scuttle our manufacturing might. Andonandon goes the list of what could and has gone wrong on the Reagan Detour. We're now far beyond the Rubicon, So here's hoping Ronnie's fevered dream of a newly restored to glory America will rise from the ashes, but don't bet on it.
Geez, who writes like this?? There's only one folks.
He's the Barren of Bothsidistan, DF'inB.
I looked up his astrology chart to get an angle on this guy.
I found holyshit he is 7 days younger than Obama. And the difference between Aug. 4, 1961, and Aug. 11 is that Aug. 11 was a partial eclipse of the Sun. In Leo, the worst invocation for a solar eclipse.
He's a bad man. He knows he's faking it.
His mortal fear is being exposed as a fraud.
He's got nothing. No light. He's hollow.
Leo manifests in children and posterity.
What bothers Brooks most is he is a Barren.
... of No-siderism.
No matter how fast the knives come out, I will believe it.
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