David Brooks: Sorry / Not Sorry

Fair warning: I'm going to bury the lede for this post.

Way down at the bottom.

So if you want the socko ending -- and it is a socko ending -- jump to the last few of paragraphs, clip them, and send them to The New York Times op-ed page editor, with a short note explaining why Mr. David Brooks should be sacked immediately ( I  would do it myself, but after 14 years of working the David Brooks beat, it's pretty clear that the Times is not interested in anything unpleasant that anyone has to say about Mr. Brooks.)

But since I have no editor peering over my shoulder, tapping her watch, reminding me that the deadline approacheth and I'm already way over my word count, I'm going to amble a bit, as is my wont.  If that doesn't suit you, well, this probably the one and only professional characteristic which Mr. Brooks and I share:  neither of us can be fired from out writing gigs.

Of course the reasons that neither of us can be fired are diametrically opposed.

My job is safe because I answer to no one and my "salary" is whatever gets dropped in my tip jar during any given week.  It's really that simple.

However reasons that the House of Sulzberger has kept Mr. Brooks on as the Faith and Humility reporter for the Acela Corridor Pantograph despite his many long years of unstinting failure and terrible writing are probably manifold and ultimately unknowable to anyone outside of The Club.

On the other hand, I do believe that one can usually suss out what any organization values in any of its marquee employees by deducing what characteristics that employee routinely brings to their work.

For example, today, in order to force every American political crisis and scandal since Watergate into the Procrustean Bed of of his delicate Beltway Both Siderist sensibilities, Mr. David Brooks set about simply amputating any reference to the validity, severity or context of each individual scandal.  Thus his readers learned that while, sure, Nixon was bad --

Richard Nixon’s downfall was just and important, but...

-- it is upon the "but" in this sentence that the real moral of today's Both Siderist sermonette hangs.

So, sure, Nixon was bad, but...

...it opened up the mouthwatering possibility that you don’t need to do the hard work of persuading people to join your side. Instead, you can destroy your foes all at once through scandal.

And then comes the inevitable torrent of Both Siderist moralizing...

The accused’s political opponents assume maximum guilt. Imaginative pundits take a few dots of information and connect them to vast if speculative constellations of guilt. “I hear the indictments are coming down next week,” they whisper to one another.

Members of the accused’s party attack the investigators themselves. They get to enjoy their own sense of spiritual superiority when it turns out the scandal is much smaller than it appeared, which is almost always the case.

It’s all a wonderful game....

...in which all scandals...

... Iran-contra, Whitewater, Valerie Plame, Benghazi, Solyndra, swift-boating. 

...all basically same scandal.  Nothing more than political stink bombs of various olfactometric calibers lobbed by Both Sides for no reason other than to disrupt the good order of Mr. Brooks' imaginary Grand Bargain, Center-Right, Lieberman/McCain, President Rubio Washington D.C.

And, yes, you read that right.  According to Mr. Brooks, Iran/Contra was pretty much the same as Benghazi.  And the Swiftboating of John Kerry was more-or-less indistinguishable from the outing of an undercover CIA agent.

Put a pin in this one.  We'll get back to it.

And because Mr. Brooks' only job at The New York Times is the ritual recitation the same, maudlin tale of Both Siderist woe over and over and over again with minor variations --

Two political parties, both alike in indignity,
In fair Washington, where we lay our scene,
From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,
Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean...

-- he goes right to the same cast of stock villains and heroes he always uses to stage his tired little puppet show.

The part of the brutishly vengeful Montagues will, of course, once more be acted out by Democrats:

Maybe it’s time to step back from the scandalmongering and assess who we are right now. 

Democrats might approach this moment with an attitude of humility and honest self-examination...

And in the role of the equally reckless and bloody-minded Capulets we once more find:

Republicans and the Sean Hannity-style Trumpians might also approach this moment with an attitude of humility and honest self-examination.

But who is the real star of this drama?   Noble, star-crossed and stranded in the Sensible Center?
Well obviously it's David Fucking Brooks himself  (emphasis added) --

And what about the rest of us? What about all the hours we spent speculating about the Mueller report, fantasizing about the Trump ruin or watching and reading speculation about these things? 

-- and, presumably, the 15 new very special friends he made during his Hegira to the Heartland.

And yet, using only what he could glean from William Barr's truncated, cherry-picked, four-page re-imagining of the criminal justice system to exclude crimes committed by presidents (from Salon) --

Back in 1992, the last time Bill Barr was U.S. attorney general, iconic New York Times writer William Safire referred to him as “Coverup-General Barr” because of his role in burying evidence of then-President George H.W. Bush’s involvement in “Iraqgate” and “Iron-Contra.” 

General Barr has struck again — this time, in similar fashion, burying Mueller’s report and cherry-picking fragments of sentences from it to justify Trump’s behavior. In his letter, he notes that Robert Mueller “leaves it to the attorney general to decide whether the conduct described in the report constitutes a crime.”

As attorney general, Barr — without showing us even a single complete sentence from the Mueller report — decided there are no crimes here.Just keep moving along.

Barr’s history of doing just this sort of thing to help Republican presidents in legal crises explains why Trump brought him back in to head the Justice Department...

-- and without ever seeing a single paragraph of the Mueller Report (which is, at the moment, being embargoed by Mr. Brooks' friend and fellow Republican, Mitch McConnell) and ignoring the daily assaults Donald Trump has committed against our democracy since the day he took office, Mr. Brooks has nonetheless decided that the only way to turn that scandal frown upside-down and save the republican is for every Democrat who ever called President Stupid a treasonous shithead to make an immediate, fulsome and heart-felt public apology:

It’s clear that many Democrats made grievous accusations against the president that are not supported by the evidence. It’s clear that people like Beto O’Rourke and John Brennan owe Donald Trump a public apology. If you call someone a traitor and it turns out you lacked the evidence for that charge, then the only decent thing to do is apologize.

But here's an odd thing.  A very odd thing.

Did you notice what was completely absent from Mr. Brooks' list of co-equal scandals that divided Murrica?

The Iraq War.

The entire Iraq War.  All the Bush Administration lies that put us there.  The Bush Administration lies that kept us there.  All of the terrible, grinding, pointless slaughter.  The looting of our treasury to enrich the Dick Cheney's cronies.  The torture.  The kneecapping of democratic institutions.  The crippling of America's international reputation. The trashing of our allies.

And, of course, the massive dose of reckless madness it injected into the already-deranged Republican Party.  The open-season on Iraq War opponents that was declared here at home.

All of it -- the entire debacle -- just fucking gone.  Like a fart in a firestorm.

And all of it  -- the entire debacle --  enthusiastically promoted by none other than Mr. David Brooks who was, at the time, the Senior Editor of The Weekly Standard and in overall charge of their fanatically pro-Bush, pro-War tone and messaging.  And boy howdy, did Mr. Brooks use his position to kick the shit out of us poor, dumb Libtards over and over again.

In fact, it would be fair to say that using his position at The Weekly Standard to establish his bona fides as a leading Conservative Iraq War pimp and scourge of the Liberal dregs is what sold The New York Times on handing him a job-for-life in the first place.

Here's a sample from that body of work:

In certain circles, it is not only important what opinion you hold, but how you hold it. It is important to be seen dancing with complexity, sliding among shades of gray. Any poor rube can come to a simple conclusion -- that President Saddam Hussein is a menace who must be disarmed--but the refined ratiocinators want to be seen luxuriating amid the difficulties, donning the jewels of nuance, even to the point of self-paralysis.

And another:

Meanwhile, among the smart set, Hamlet-like indecision has become the intellectual fashion. The liberal columnist E. J. Dionne wrote in The Washington Post that he is uncomfortable with the pro- and anti-war camps. He praised the doubters and raised his colors on behalf of 'heroic ambivalence.' The New York Times, venturing deep into the territory of self-parody, ran a full-page editorial calling for 'still more discussion' on whether or not to go to war.

And another:

Their supposed demons--Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Doug Feith, Donald Rumsfeld, and company--occupy their entire field of vision, so that there is no room for analysis of anything beyond, such as what is happening in the world. For the peace camp, all foreign affairs is local; contempt for and opposition to Wolfowitz, Perle, Rumsfeld, et al. is the driving passion. When they write about these figures it is with a burning zeal. But on the rare occasions when they write about Saddam, suddenly all passion drains away. Saddam is boring, but Wolfowitz tears at their soul. You begin to realize that they are not arguing about Iraq. They are not arguing at all. They are just repeating the hatreds they cultivated in the 1960s, and during the Reagan years, and during the Florida imbroglio after the last presidential election. They are playing culture war, and they are disguising their eruptions as position-taking on Iraq, a country about which they haven't even taken the trouble to inform themselves.

And another: 

This parochialism takes many forms, but all the branches of the opposition to the war in Iraq have one thing in common: Iraq is never the issue. Something else is always the issue. For Schama and many others, the Bush crowd is the issue. They stole the election. They serve corporate America. They have bad manners. This is the prism through which Maureen Dowd, Molly Ivins, and many others view the war. Writing in the Boston Globe, Northwestern University's Karen J. Alter psychoanalyzes the groupthink mentality that she says explains the Bush crowd's strange obsession with Iraq.

And another:

For most in the peace camp, there is only the fog. The debate is dominated by people who don't seem to know about Iraq and don't care. Their positions are not influenced by the facts of world affairs. When you get deep enough into the peace camp you find fog about the fog. You find a generation of academic and literary intellectuals who have so devoted themselves to questioning meanings, deconstructing texts, decoding signifiers, and unmasking perspectives, they can't even make an argument anymore.

And,what the hell, let's do one more:

Finally, there is the dream palace of the American Bush haters. In this dream palace, there is so much contempt for Bush that none is left over for Saddam or for tyranny. Whatever the question, the answer is that Bush and his cronies are evil. What to do about Iraq? Bush is evil. What to do about the economy? Bush is venal. What to do about North Korea? Bush is a hypocrite.

In this dream palace, Bush, Cheney, and a junta of corporate oligarchs stole the presidential election, then declared war on Iraq to seize its oil and hand out the spoils to Halliburton and Bechtel. In this dream palace, the warmongering Likudniks in the administration sit around dreaming of conquests in Syria, Iran, and beyond. In this dream palace, the boy genius Karl Rove hatches schemes to use the Confederate flag issue to win more elections, John Ashcroft wages holy war on American liberties, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and his cabal of neoconservatives long for global empire. In this dream palace, every story of Republican villainy is believed, and all the windows are shuttered with hate...

My third guess is that the Bush haters will grow more vociferous as their numbers shrink. Even progress in Iraq will not dampen their anger, because as many people have noted, hatred of Bush and his corporate cronies is all that is left of their leftism. And this hatred is tribal, not ideological. And so they will still have their rallies, their alternative weeklies, and their Gore Vidal polemics. They will still have a huge influence over the Democratic party, perhaps even determining its next presidential nominee. But they will seem increasingly unattractive to most moderate and even many normally Democratic voters who never really adopted outrage as their dominant public emotion...

And so, having leveled so many serious charges against us Bush-hating, terrorist-loving simpletons on the Left and having long since been proven completely and irrefutable wrong, not by four pages of cherry-picked sentence fragments assembled by "Coverup-General Barr” but by history itself, according to Mr. Brooks' own theology, doesn't he owe us Bush-hating, terrorist-loving simpletons on the Left one helluva fulsome and heart-felt public apology?

Well as luck would have it, I just so happened to be in attendance at Elmhurst College's storied Hammerschmidt Memorial Chapel eight and a half years ago when a nice, polite, Liberal lady in the audience put exactly this question to Mr. David Brooks.

And standing at the pulpit of a church, invoking the name of Reinhold Niebuhr, America's leading Conservative public intellectual very calmly lied to her face:

In fact, if you have followed the careers of Beltway Republican op-ed opportunists like Mr. Brooks for any length of time, you cannot fail to notice that, among their ever-shifting standards of personal and professional ethics, they always included conspicuous carve-outs and exceptions for themselves and their fellow travelers.

And that, boys and girls, is how you bury the lede like a pro.

Update:  Both No More Mister Nice Blog and Yastreblyansky do yeoman's service once again.

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