Pastor Dave at the Aspen Institute

I understand the first few sessions were a bit rocky.

Oh boy!

Columnist and Author David Brooks to Lead New Aspen Institute Initiative Under Leadership of Incoming President and CEO Dan Porterfield - The Aspen Institute https://t.co/beJkezLBRr via @aspeninstitute

— Mary Ann Novak (@manovak43) February 22, 2019

For those of you who are not America's leading Brooksologist, let me begin by telling you that Mr. David Brooks' long career as America's Most Ubiquitous Conservative Public Intellectual, has taken many hilarious turns.

Mr. Brooks began as a staunch and relentless promoter of every bad idea in the Republican Party's trick bag, from massive, unpaid-for tax cuts, to George Bush's Iraqi Debacle.  From the Huffington Post back in 2008:

Let’s take David Brooks of The New York Times, for example, and what he wrote exactly five years ago when he was writing for The Weekly Standard. Ironically, he even attacked his present employer, The Times. The Weekly Standard, of course, was edited by Bill Kristol, who has an even worse track record on the war. Naturally, not one, but both, of them were later rewarded with key New York Times op-ed slots. Two for the price of — two!

Brooks is among those who have long argued that they actually got the war right, but Donald Rumsfeld made it wrong. In other words, war good, Rummy bad. He has emphasized that he and many of his fellow pundits had it right at the time in urging more boots on the ground. They were “prescient,” he relates. But Rumsfeld and his crowd “got things wrong, and the pundits often got things right.”

He never cites any of his own views at the time, obviously hoping that readers will place him among those pundits that “got things right.” And also: please forget that he was a strong supporter of the invasion to start with.

In fact, he bears special blame — shame — not only for his writing, but for serving as senior editor of the most influential pro-war publication, The Weekly Standard.

He may want you to forget what he wrote five years ago, but here’s a trip down memory lane with Our Mr. Brooks...

For a lesser human, the fact that virtually every public position Mr. Brooks had ever held turned out to be catastrophically wrong and every Liberal he had slandered along the way turned out to be right, might have been a career-killer.  But for reasons that no one dares to explain to us lesser mortals, Mr. Brooks' professional standing is protected by the entire Beltway media with the zeal of a glutton guarding his lunch.

And thus liberated from any fear of accountability and borne aloft by unearned wealth and status, Mr. Brooks discovered that he was free to simply pretend he had never been a dutiful spear-carrier in the Bush Administration's mob of spirited wingnut defenders.  From that moment on Mr. Brooks could simply float above mere humanity, spinning out one asinine economic and cultural theory after another, radically revising history and contradicting his own previously-held positions whenever the need arose.  (See "The Beltway Iron Rule of David Brooks".)

He could hold forth on the importance of marriage and the ruination that divorce visits on the proles even as he was discarding his own wife to take up with his research assistant (from Slate):

This morning, David Brooks published an enigmatic column titled “The Thought Leader” that basically offers a satirical recounting of the life and times of a member of America’s opinion elite. The column set off a lot of intra-office debate, in part over the question of how self-aware Brooks was while writing the piece. Something I learned in the discussion is that Brooks and his longtime wife, Sarah, were getting divorced as of last month. That’s an awful experience, and it’s hard not to feel sad for anyone going through it. 

At the same time, I really do think it puts the question of self-awareness squarely on the table. Brooks’ columns have frequently worried about the “dangerous level of family breakdown” in America, and have specifically put this crisis of family stability at the center of class politics. You’ll never see a Lorenz curve plotting the drastically inegalitarian distribution of capital in the United States in a David Brooks column. Instead you’ll hear about how that kind of thing is a distraction from the real issue of the lower orders’ own misbehavior...

He could take up the cause of completely rewriting the history of American Conservatism: to flense it of all of the Conservative social, political economic and foreign policy debacles that make Mr. Brooks wince and repackage the whole era as a fairy tale of noble Whigs being led through treacherous hippie country by the humble David Brooks.

He could go into the lucrative business of reassuring his corporate underwriters with increasingly ludicrous political prognostications such as...

...however unhinged and racist  the GOP may appear to be, based on his privileged, insider knowledge and personal contacts within the Brain Caste of the Right, you can take his word for it that an awesome Republican Renaissance is just around the corner, and...

...whatever was motivating the hysterical Republican backlash against Obama, it certainly wasn't racism...

"Well, I don’t have a machine for peering into the souls of Obama’s critics, so I can’t measure how much racism is in there. But my impression is that race is largely beside the point." -- David Brooks, 09/17/09.

...and don't worry, Rubio will save us!


But all of these side hustles were subsidiary to Mr. Brooks most consequential lateral career move -- the shift from loyal Bush Administration stooge and Liberal-basher to his elevation to the position of Pope of the High and Holy Church of Both Sides Do It -- 

-- about which I have already shouted a few thousand posts into the abyss, so one more would seem...showy.

I mention it here only to point out that, as predicted on this lil' blog ("Now That His Republican Party Has Succeeded in Nearly Destroying Our Experiment In Constitutional Government..." ) thanks to your hard work, Both Siderism is now turning into such a widely ridiculed public punchline, that we find even its most relentless practitioners like Mr. Brooks  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 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.

And a few days later, a trouble-making stranger passed me this press release from The Aspen Institute from last year which had somehow escaped my attention and which explains everything very neatly:

Columnist and Author David Brooks to Lead New Aspen Institute Initiative Under Leadership of Incoming President and CEO Dan Porterfield

Washington, DC, March 20, 2018 ––Aspen Institute President and CEO-elect Dan Porterfield announced today that New York Times op-ed columnist and author David Brooks will lead a new Aspen Institute initiative to understand and reduce the growing fragmentation, alienation, and division around the country.
...

“The defining problem of our era is national fragmentation,” said Brooks. “The spread of bitter divisions has been growing along class, cultural, geographic, racial, religious and political lines. Fortunately, over the past few months, thousands of people and organizations have begun seeking to reweave the nation’s social fabric. The animating thought behind the project is that for all the wonderful work local community healers are doing, they can only change history if they become a social movement.”

“The Aspen Institute is perfectly resourced to spark this effort and David Brooks is its ideal leader,” Porterfield commented...

“We rely on the open exchange of ideas, the mutual respect of the participants and the strength of values-based leadership to help shape a better society.  David Brooks is one of our country’s most thoughtful and incisive commentators.  For years he has had the opportunity to observe and diagnose these troubling changes in America. We are thrilled to have David at the helm of a project focused on healing a divided country.” [James S. Crown, Chairman of the Aspen Institute Board of Trustees.]

Yes indeed, Mr. Crown.   For years David Brooks has had the opportunity to observe and diagnose these troubling changes in America.

In fact, given the unlimited editorial freedom and lavish resources The New York Times furnishes him, you might even say that Mr. Brooks was given a unique opportunity to observe and diagnose these troubling changes in America

And yet somehow he has managed to blow it.

Every.  Single.  Fucking.  Time.

Behold, my Twitter Legal Defense Fund!