From today's New York Times:
A New Center Being BornThis time, the Mr. Brook's ideal "Center" appears to be about 20 degrees to the Left of Barack Obama, and for people who live on the outside of the Walled Garden of Elite Drivel wherein Mr. Brooks dwells, this might seem very confusing.
You see, like the physics behind time slowing down and mass increasing as you approach the speed of light, the way Mr. Brooks' "Center" has continuously skittered all over the political landscape over the past 20 years seems to defy common sense and observable reality. After all, for decades Mr. Brooks' Republican Party has been plunging unabated through ever more grotesque depths of depravity and madness, while the Democrats have tried in every way imaginable to contain, constrain, compromise and otherwise cool their tiny, fevered, racist brains.
So how (one may reasonably ask) is it still possible, for Mr. Brooks' "Center" to continue wildly zigging and zagging like a terrified rabbit trying to avoid becoming lunch?
Because, kids, Mr. Brooks' "Center" is magic! Hell, it's the fucking Philosopher's Stone!
Think about it.
It is only through his unswerving allegiance to a wholly imaginary "Center" that Mr. Brooks has managed to turn the dross of his shitty prose into New York Times paycheck gold. We know this because, for the past 15 years, issuing dire warnings about The Extremes on Both Sides and singing the praises of the imaginary Center is literally the only column he writes.
But there is no Center, which is why, like Zeno's Paradox of the Arrow, Mr. Brooks' "Center" never arrives anywhere. Why it has never been pegged to a set of policies one could debate or even a loose set of principles that one could describe without sounding like an idiot. Instead, as your humble scrivener has pointed out many, many times, Mr. Brooks' "Center" has always been fraud. As Mr. Brooks demonstrates in every single fucking column he has ever written including the turd he squeezed out today --
Many fly off to extremes, to the Donald Trump right or the Bernie Sanders left. Most of the rest of us feel adrift, gloomy and politically homeless.-- his "Center" is merely a mathematical function.
Mr. Brooks' work product is not in any real sense "opinions" wrestled with and committed to paper by a human being. They are the stale iterations of a mindless algorithm which is constantly seeking to return to its factory default settings even as the real world constantly knocks it off balance. It is all ridiculously easy to see once you bother to start looking for it. For example, during the 2016 primaries, Mr. Brooks Both Siderist sermonettes were all about "Trump and Sanders":
Hillary, for you the whirlwind is Bernie Sanders. For the rest of you it’s Donald Trump...Trump has no actual policies and Sanders has little chance of getting his passed.And yet the supporters don’t care. Sanders and Trump......the Trump and Sanders phenomena.In debates Sanders is uninhibited by the constraints of reality, so his answers are always bolder. Trump speaks from the id, not from any policy paper, so his answers are always more vivid.Many Americans feel like they are the victims of a slow-moving natural disaster. Sanders and Trump...I’d love to see one of you counter the Trump and Sanders emotional tones with a bold shift in psychology...Let Trump and Sanders shout, harangue and lecture...Let them [Trump and Sanders] deliver long, repetitive and uninterrupted lectures...Let them [Trump and Sanders] stand angry and solitary. You run as part of a team, a band of brothers...Let them [Trump and Sanders] assert that all our problems can be solved if other people sacrifice...Let them [Trump and Sanders] emphasize the cold relations of business (Trump) or of the state (Sanders)...Let them [Trump and Sanders] preach pessimism...Sanders and Trump have adopted emotional tones that are going to offend and exhaust people over time.
And once we moved to from the primary to the general election, the Brooks Both Siderist algorithm simply swapped out "Bernie Sanders" and swapped in "Hillary Clinton":
And almost exactly one year ago, we find Mr. Brooks has long since swapped out "Hillary Clinton" and swapped Bernie Sanders back in, along with "angry Sanders socialists and social justice warriors", "left-wing radicals" and "Saul Alinsky":The two main candidates, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, are remarkably distrustful...
They have set the modern standards for withholding information — his not releasing tax and health records, her not holding regular news conferences or quickly disclosing her pneumonia diagnosis...
Both have a problem with spontaneous, reciprocal communication with a hint of vulnerability...
Both ultimately hew to a distrustful, stark, combative, zero-sum view of life...
Trump’s convention speech was the perfect embodiment of the politics of distrust...Clinton’s “Basket of Deplorables” riff comes from the same spiritual place...
Both the Trumpian populists and the social justice warriors are more intent on denouncing the people they hate than on addressing the concrete problems before them...(For more see "David Brooks: Both Siderism Is a Farce that Gives Us Meaning".)
This constant, rightward-moving imaginary midpoint between the fiction Jets on the Left and the very real Sharks on the Right, happens so fast that it frequently glitches the David Brooks Algorithm. For example, even when Mr. Brooks gets from a Democratic president exactly what he has asked for, he is reduced to simply lying to pretends it isn't happening so that he can go right making a fortune bitching about the Extremes on Both Sides. This is a pathology which a tiny, hardy band of Brooksologists (including your's truly) wrote about extensively during the Age of Obama, and which all the usual Beltway media suspects completely ignored because it conflicted with their mad dash to canonize Mr. Brooks as the Sage of the Acela Corridor. For the memory or morally-impaired, here is a snippet from Jonathan Chait in 2013:
David Brooks Now Totally PathologicalYes, that's both Mr. Brooks and former George W. Bush chief speechwriter, senior Republican policy adviser and reliable Beltway Republican stalactite, Michael Gerson, each of whom have gone from a lucrative career penning op-ed columns excoriating Barack Obama for being so fucking calm and reasonable that he exposed what a toxic, racist shitpile their Republican Party had become...
Moderate Republicanism is a tendency that increasingly defies ideological analysis and instead requires psychological analysis. The psychological mechanism is fairly obvious. The radicalization of the GOP has placed unbearable strain on those few moderates torn between their positions and their attachment to party. Many moderate conservatives have simply broken off from the party, at least in its current incarnation, and are hoping or working to build a sane alternative. Those who remain must escape into progressively more baroque fantasies.
The prevalent expression of this psychological pain is the belief that President Obama is largely or entirely responsible for Republican extremism. It’s a bizarre but understandable way to reconcile conflicting emotions — somewhat akin to blaming your husband’s infidelity entirely on his mistress. In this case, moderate Republicans believe that Obama’s tactic of taking sensible positions that moderate Republicans agree with is cruel and unfair, because it exposes the extremism that dominates the party, not to mention the powerlessness of the moderates within it. Michael Gerson recently expressed this bizarre view, and the pathology is also on vivid display in David Brooks’s column today...
...to a lucrative career penning op-ed columns looking with alarm at the toxic, racist shitpile their Republican Party has become and wondering very loudly why someone doesn't do something about it!
Proving once again, as Mark Twain said, "The trouble ain't that there is too many fools, but that the lightning ain't distributed right."
And so today, as a dog returns to its vomit, Mr. Brooks returns to the same --
A Second G.O.P.-- Whig Fan Fiction --
By DAVID BROOKS
January 28, 2013
The Conservative FutureBy DAVID BROOKS-- he has been peddling to rich idiots --
November 19, 2012
Party No. 3-- for decades:
By DAVID BROOKS
August 10, 2006
How to reinvent the G.O.P.
By DAVID BROOKS
AUG. 29, 2004
This time, the political spectrum will be magically upended in exactly the way Mr. Brooks approves by an outfit called the Niskanen Center, about which I have already written because it was 100% inevitable that David Brooks would be latching onto their Grand Plan for a !New!Republican!Party! and riding it for all he's worth. (See "The Little Red Hen Institute for Libertarian Futurism".)
Boswood sums it up the absurdity of Mr. Brooks' new Centrist man-crush here:
DF Brooks discovers a mixed exonomy without realizing he (and the “exciting” RW Institute he cites) are describing the US until the ‘80s when he joined the group that’s been tearing it down. @Yastreblyansky @Mr_Electrico @bluegal @DougJBalloon @IrreverentDuo @AndreaR9Md— Boswood (@Bosengood) December 21, 2018
Also, as I mentioned here, both the Niskanen Center and Mr. Brooks are conspicuously silent about what exactly they plan to do about the fifty-million-strong Republican zombie horde that Mr. Brooks' party spent the last 40 years carefully engineering. A zombie horde which has been programmed to stomp the shit out of anything they are told to attack by anyone with a big enough megaphone and who knows the proper code words.
I suspect that, as always, men like Mr. Brooks plan to stay safely within their walled gardens, enjoying the fruits of wingnut welfare and scolding us dirty Libtards for not being more humble and civil as we do the grueling and thankless work of undoing the mess they have made of our country.
Then and only then, once the heavy lifting is done, they will emerge from their well-appointed panic rooms to try to steal from us by fraud and flummery a victory we will have won by hard work and sacrifice.
Well fuck that.
Behold, a Tip Jar!
4 comments:
"You see, like the physics behind time slowing down and mass increasing as you approach the speed of light, the way Mr. Brooks' "Center" has continuously skittered all over the political landscape over the past 20 years seems to defy common sense and observable reality."
This is totally not fair to the theories of relativity, that totally make sense once you embrace their fundamental concepts! DFB has no such underlying basis for making sense.
And, no, something something dirty hippies does not count as sensible.
Good afternoon, Mr. Glass.
I skipped to the end of the column (Meet the New Messiah, Same as the Old Messiah), and found...
[David Brooks has been a columnist with The Times since 2003. He is the author of “The Road to Character” and the forthcoming book, “The Second Mountain.”]
I looked up "The Second Mountain..."
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/217649/the-second-mountain-by-david-brooks/9780812993264/
He's in Buddha mode again. Your sarcasm awaits.
Be seeing you.
When a plurality of that fifty-million strong Republican zombie horde that Brooks refuses to acknowledge even exists think REPUBLICANS won the 2018 midterms and the majority of the rest just think it was just a tie, it becomes obvious what Mr. Brooks et al. (and white privilege frat boy dumping grounds like the Niskanen Center) are doing is NOT trying to call forth country club conservatives to reform the Right.....but to build and maintain redoubts throughout the Beltway and in our nation media in order to attack the Left's response as dangerous and radical.
We know the NYT is paid (by the FNC advertisers) to print Brooks. The paper is a business and can afford to spare column space to Brooks for the right price just like taking dick pills for sale ads.
"Trump speaks from the id, not from any policy paper, so his answers are always more vivid." DFB
More vivid to say the least. Not even the republican in the hallucination detox stage of the Rehab process. Could not envision his delusion any more clear or as DFB declares as "VIVID".
I continue to await impatiently for DFB to address and adult circumcisions that must take place in the bridging of the divide between the GOP's two most centered caucuses.
Explaining to us leftist long haired malcontents. The immaculate bridging of two centers and the right is fortunate and sophisticated to have many centers..
Both sides of the Right wing extreme centers, to be exact.
If the NAZIs can merge with the KKK then spiders and butterflies can live together.
As in life, all the Butterfly need do is to go to the middle of the spider's web. Meeting the spider half way to feed the party.
Since first experience with a DFB Abstract word collection, (what other call a column). Is DFB has continually desperately attempted to offer up a one side of the both sides Paradox.
Paradox; a seemingly absurd or self-contradictory statement or proposition that when investigated or explained may prove to be well founded or true.
{{{{ let me point out, , The qualifying , "may prove to be well founded or true". Is what always eludes what DFB offers. As if their is a dysfunction somewhere between his thoughts traveling to his typing fingers. We know DFB does not proof read. If he did, he would not release them for print.}}}}
paradox Continued-
"in a paradox, he has discovered that stepping back from his job has increased the rewards he gleans from it"
synonyms: contradiction, contradiction in terms, self-contradiction, inconsistency, incongruity; More
a statement or proposition that, despite sound (or apparently sound) reasoning from acceptable premises, leads to a conclusion that seems senseless, logically unacceptable, or self-contradictory.
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