David Brooks Begins To Notice The Weather Becoming Inclement

Shiny things.  Falling from the sky. Might be Reagan come back to Earth. I'll call you back!

As I may have pointed out once or twice, since before the dawn of recorded history, Mr. David Brooks of The Weekly Standard and thence The New York Times has spent a considerable fraction of his career representing that his Republican party was either in the middle of a Glorious Renaissance or that a Glorious Republican Renaissance was just around the corner.

In fact, even as the Big Shiny Thing in the Sky turned out not to be St. Reagan come back to judge the living and the dead, but this guy come to prove that the Left had been right about the Right all along...

...Mr. Brooks, being a resourceful parasite opted to fly-fly-fly right over the inconveniently incriminating here-and-now and into that Bright Conservative Future which David Brooks still swore, by God and Emile Durkheim, was Just Around The Corner...

The Post-Trump Era  

As awful as Donald Trump is, it will be exciting to witness the coming re-creation of the Republican Party...

This is a wonderful moment to be a conservative. For decades now the Republican Party has been groaning under the Reagan orthodoxy, which was right for the 1980s but has become increasingly obsolete.

Really?  Decades you say?  Wow.  That sure is a long time.  Funny that Mr. Brooks never fucking mentioned that during all the decades he was promoting the imminent arrival of the Glorious Republican Renaissance which was just around the corner.

But now that Mr. Brooks has convinced the Sulzberger family to let him to build a new career for himself as the Faith and Humility Reporter for the Acela Corridor Pantograph and travel the world monetizing his midlife crisis, it appears Mr. Brooks no longer feel constrained to paint a happy-clappy smile on the face of the GOP Monster Machine that he spent his career helping to create.

David Brooks in yesterday's New York Times.

The Coming G.O.P. Apocalypse
Stumbling blind into the age of diversity.

Read the whole thing if you wish.  For my money is the very definition of a "tale, told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing" and even if you were to strip off the name and title and hand it to me in a dimly lit room with only 90 seconds to scan it, I could tell you the name of the author and his purpose in writing it by the telltale spoor to be found in every David Brooks column.

First, the razor in the apple.  The obligatory, gratuitous, drive-by Brooks-brand Both Siderist slandering of the Left which, no matter how many craters the Republican party pounds into the Earth, you will still find in virtually every single David Brooks column 

There is a conservative way to embrace pluralism and diversity. It’s to point out that there is a deep strain of pessimism in progressive multiculturalism: blacks and whites will never really understand each other; racism is endemic; the American project is fatally flawed; American structures are so oppressive, the only option is to burn them down.

And, second, some old-fashioned wingnut welfare log-rolling by using his New York Times column to drive traffic to the website of his former employer's idiot son-in-law:

Matthew Continetti recently identified the key blocs on the new right in an essay in The Washington Free Beacon. These included the Jacksonians (pugilistic populists), the Paleos (Tucker Carlson-style economic nationalists), the Post-Liberals (people who oppose pluralism and seek a return to pre-Enlightenment orthodoxy).

You know kids, if you want to know Who's Who at the Wingnut Zoo, don't waste your valuable time on Bill Kristol's idiot son-in-law's week-old hot take.  Instead, join me on a short trip to that place where Conservatives fear to tread.

The Past!

To a time when Matthew Continetti was but an intern at "America's most respected journal of white supremacy" and Mr. David Brooks was completely losing his shit  on the op-ed page of The New York Times --

The Harry da Reid Code

Harry Reid sits alone at his kitchen table at 4 a.m., writing important notes in crayon on the outside of envelopes. It's been four weeks since he launched his personal investigation into the Republican plot to manipulate intelligence to trick the American people into believing Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

Reid had heard of the secret G.O.P. cabal bent on global empire, but he had no idea that he would find a conspiracy so immense.

-- because Harry Reid --

Reid now knows that in the late 1990's, Dick Cheney and other Republican officials used fluoridated water in the State Department and other government agencies to brainwash Clinton administration officials into exaggerating the threat posed by Saddam Hussein.

Harry Reid sits alone at his kitchen table at 4 a.m., writing important notes in crayon on the outside of envelopes. It has been four weeks since he began investigating this conspiracy and three weeks since he sealed his windows with aluminum foil to ward off the Illuminati. Odd patterns now leap into his brain. Scooter Libby was born near a book depository but was indicted while at a theater. Karl Rove reads books from book depositories but rarely has time for the theater. What is the ratio of Bush tax cuts to the number of squares on a frozen waffle? It is none other than the Divine Proportion. This proves that Leonardo da Vinci manipulated intelligence on Iraq and that the Holy Grail is a woman!

-- was saying true things --

Harry Reid sits alone at his kitchen table at 4 a.m. He knows now that seven centuries ago at a secret meeting of the Bilderberg Society-Trilateral Commission-American Enterprise Institute, the six High Lords of the Secret Order of the Neocons decided to implant alien life forms into potential Democratic officials that could be activated in case there was a need to manipulate intelligence on Iraq.

-- about Mr. Brooks' --

Harry Reid sits alone at his kitchen table at 4 a.m. Odd thoughts rush through his brain. He cannot trust the letter "r," so he must change his name to Hawwy Weed. Brian Lamb secretly rules the world by manipulating the serial numbers on milk cartons.

-- beloved Republican party:

Reid realizes there is only one solution: "Must call a secret session of the Senate. Must expose global conspiracy to sap vital juices! Must expose Republican plot to manipulate intelligence!"

Harry Reid sits alone at his kitchen table at 4 a.m.

Back to the Year of Our Lord 2005 when I was using my little blog to work up up a very serviceable, two-part "Field Guide to the GOP" which turned into quite the Liberal group project and which I share with you now in abbreviated form.

Neocons:   Pasty conquistadors. Loveless, Democracy-attachment-disorder plotters. Thinks of America as prey to be plucked, fucked and chucked. And then whittles down the wishbone to make into lock picks to break into other lands.

Meocons:  Meocons spill their seed on the ground, on the baby sitter, on the Statue of Liberty, in your fey Liberal latte, and positively RPG it all over our future.

Geocons:  I’ve got nothing against a little town. Grew up and moved in and out of several as a wee driftglass. Small towns have fine, kind people in them. They also have some of the most mentally and morally landlocked creatures I have ever met. People who, with great respect to John Mellencamp, have been...

“...mis-educated in a small town
Taught a debilitating fear of Jesus in a small town
Used to daydream in that small town
That Queers and Negroes would be taught to fear me.”

Theocons: Swaggering molesters of the Gospels. The worse of the lot, really. They peel the flesh from a perpetually tortured, screaming Living Christ, layer after layer, generation after generation to stitch into misshapen diapers to cover their diseased minds and desiccated souls. Bigots are trash, but bigots who stand on Bibles to lace up the lynching noose in the name of God are the very definition of Evil.

Sixtyocons:  Sixty, as in the aggressively oligophrenic end of the I.Q. pool.  Also known as “the base”.   What one I.Q. site describes as "Slow, simple, supervised” under Employment Options, and another notes, “Generally cannot complete elementary school. Most adults will need help to cope with day-to-day living.”  Unfortunately someone trained the Epsilons to listen to Rush and to wander down to the poling place one every few years and vote for someone they’ve been told is personally endorsed by Johnny Quest.

Cronyocons:  As an entire American city swirls down the drain, Crony Number One reassures Crony Number One Hundred, “Brownie, you doin’ a heck of a job.”

Weeocons:  Baby Republicans. Have an overwhelming need to ferociously support every single thing George Bush has ever said or done no matter how idiotic or mendacity-based...with other people’s blood and treasure. Subsidized cowards with balls as big as Daddy’s Amex, and ego’s as wide as the holes in their souls.

R.E. Leeocons: Narcissistic Confederate-pride addicts bereft of any tangible knowledge of confederate history.

Look! It's a Southern "Nazi"-o-con building a nest!   See how he uses the Constitution as kindling to set Christ on fire!

"On-Bended-Knee”-o-cons -- Any one of several thousand, lightly-closeted, self-hating, Gay Men who occupy positions of prominence in and have sworn an oath of slavish fealty to a certain political party that is intractably dedicated to their eradication

"Chicken-of-the-Sea"-o-cons:  The “...brave, bloody-fingered, typist-warriors who make the Bataan Death March every two hours, from the computer hutch to the fridge to replenish their Cheetoh and Pepsi rations.”

(See also “Anybody-but-me”-o-con.)


“100%-Tax-Free”-o-cons:  “....who long for that great gettin' up mawnin' when they shall be free of taxes and the inner cities free of all those nasty "mud" people who'll just die off from the infrastructure being starved of revenue. After which, the 100%-Tax-Free-o-cons can move back in and reclaim all those beautiful corpse-filled brownstones, of course.”

(See also “Money”-o-cons...)

“Spending-spree”-o-cons:  There ain’t no pork in the Budget.  Alaska needs a Bridge to Nowhere. I need jetpacks for my lawyers. Jack Abramoff’s Cloak of Invisibility desperately needs re-tatting.  And the Emperor needs New Clothes. Again. For Jesus.

Man, if we taxed shamelessness, hubris and puke-inducing hypocrisy, from the Republican Congress alone we could raise enough to run a fat surplus.

“Thievery”-o-con: See also "Jack Abramoff -- Clown Prince of Crime"
Yup. Fits just fine.

"Rupee”-o-con:  They gutted your industry, outsourced your job, and then cried "Foul!" when the same was done to them.

”Ennui”-o-cons: "The blind and uncaring ‘moderates’”

“NIMBY”-o-con:  Not In My Back Yard Ever.

“O-P-P”-o-cons:  The Limited-Government-Fanatic-Except-In-Your-Bikini-Area conservatives who believe that what you put in your puss-puss is their fucking business, and what toxins get dumped into your children's drinking water, isn't.

"Patrick McNee"-o-con: The smart, worldly, tolerant, sexually competent and liberated, dashing Conservative who stands up for the Little Guy, is the undoing of Evildoers everywhere, and could talk Emma Peel out of her leather jodhpurs should the need arise.  Like the, Ivory-Billed Woodpecker, the last know species of this kind of Conservative had not been seen in nature in decades and is widely presumed to have gone as extinct as the Orange-foot Pimpleback Pearlymussel, or has mutated into a Liberal and become George Clooney.

“Anony”-o-con --   Every group has ‘em.  The babbling dorks who just insist on being on your side and do you more harm than good. The conspicuously unbalanced Shouting Out Loud louts who thinks adding LOTS!!!!!!!!! Of!!!!!!!!!!!! Punctuation!!!!!!!!!!!!! makes them sound like less of an imbecile.

Fourteen years later, I believe it all holds up pretty well.  So well, in fact, that it completely disqualifies me for any gig anywhere in the respectable Beltway media :-)

Behold, a Tip Jar!