Now That His Republican Party Has Succeeded in Nearly Destroying Our Experiment In Constitutional Government...

...Mr. David Brooks of The New York Times has decided he doesn't wanna write about politics no more.  

Probably a wise move.

After all, with every single fucking thing Liberals have warned about the Republican Party for decades (and that Mr. David Brooks has savaged and pooh poohed for decades) coming true with a vengeance, no one is currently in the market for more exciting David Brooks tales of the miraculous Republican Party renaissance that is just around the corner!

Instead The New York Times is now paying Mr. Brooks to tour the country promoting his book and writing feel-good stories about on the goings on in church basements and community centers.

A Nation of Weavers 

... 

The college student in the Midwest who is convinced that she is the only one haunted by compulsive thoughts about her own worthlessness. The Trump-supporting small-business man in Louisiana who silently clenches his fists in rage as guests at a dinner party disparage his whole way of life. 

These different kinds of pain share a common thread: our lack of healthy connection to each other, our inability to see the full dignity of each other, and the resulting culture of fear, distrust, tribalism, shaming and strife...

There is very little to disagree with in the sentiment that "People should nicer to each other" and that's kinda my point.

Over the past 16 years at The New York Times, Mr. Brooks' has had only one job: by any means available, deflect responsibility for the catastrophes his Republican Party has created away from his Republican Party.

The problem Mr. Brooks has faced all along was the fact that his Republican Party really is a shitpile of bigots and imbeciles who like to smash things, which meant as he was up in the First Class cabins trying to bail out the GOP one delicate one teaspoon at a time, the actual Republican Party was below decks giddily blowing ever larger holes in the hull.  So, as the frequency of Republican-authored catastrophes has continually escalated, and the jubilation with which the Republican Party base danced around the bonfires they were making of our civic society has became so wanton that they could no longer be ignored, the Both Siderist scam which has been Mr. Brooks' bread-and-butter has become less and less viable.

In fact, thanks to your hard work, Both Siderism is now turning into such a widely ridiculed public punchline, that we find even it's most relentless practitioners like Mr. Brooks are once again trying to slide quietly into yet another line of work.  One where he still gets to shake his fist righteously and indiscriminately at "politicians" --

But it has also changed my moral lens. I’ve become so impatient with the politicians I cover! They are so self-absorbed!

-- but where he is free to pretend that the ruin his party is visiting on this country ids somehow completely unrelated to him and can instead focus on using the bulk of his 800 words to deliver homilies about community and humility that only a beast could disagree with.

Meet the new David Brooks: America's Community Calendar and Religion Beat Reporter.

Now you may find it weird that, at a time when local and national newspapers are laying off reporters by the hundreds, The New York Times is cool with letting its most senior Conservative op-ed writer opt-out of writing about the things he was hired to write about and, instead, decide to cover the sorts of "Pot Luck and a Prayer" stories that cash-strapped local newspapers often job out to interns when they cover them at all.

But I don't think it's weird at all because, as America's leading Brooksologist, I don't look at Mr. Brooks as a journalist.  Instead, I see him as a kind of long-running, crackpot Dharma Initiative social psychology experiment conducted by The New York Times.  An experiment designed to find out what would happen if you gave a Conservative mediocrity a giant bag of money and an unlimited expense account and let him write whatever the hell he wanted with no supervision whatsoever.  An experiment that was supposed to be shut down 15 years ago after it became clear that Mr. Brooks was going to use the influence his position at the Times afforded him to go right on being apocalyptically wrong about damn near everything, damn near every the time, except on a much larger stage, and with much more deleterious effects. 

An experiment which is still running because, unfortunately, the New York Times lab assistant in charge of monitoring the it was laid off in 2005 and, on his way out the door, as a final "Fuck You" to his employers, decided not to turn the thing off.  And so it has been rolling along, unattended and out of control, all this time because there is no one left at the Times who can remember why Mr. Brooks was hired in the first place, or what it was he was supposed to be doing.  And the sheer inertia created by the fact that he is still there has everyone too freaked out to ask any questions about it, because they're all convinced that someone hire up the food chain must have approved it for reasons they've never chosen to share with lesser mortals, because otherwise Mr. Brooks surely would not have been allowed to continue cranking out drivel on the Time's dime on for so long.

And thus, by a fortuitous combination of a disgruntled employee, systemic institutional incompetent, repetition and failure, has Mr. Brooks become the most influential Conservative public intellectual in America.

Behold, my Twitter Legal Defense Fund!