Friday, November 15, 2019

If David Brooks' Republican Party Had Not Spent The Last Forty Years...




...building political power by stoking relentless, unhinged hatred for government and public service...



...his little Hallmark card celebrating the nobility of government and public service...
In Praise of Washington Insiders
The people who are showing us what public service looks like.

Let me tell you a secret. The public buildings of Washington are filled with very good people working hard for low pay and the public good. There are thousands of them and they are very much like the Foreign Service officers that we’ve seen or are expected to see testifying at the impeachment hearings: William Taylor, George Kent, Marie Yovanovitch and Fiona Hill...
...might not have reduced me to uncontrollable gales of laughter.

Laughter which nearly doubled me over when I hit the Obligatory Both Siderist Paragraph which you will find in virtually every David Brooks column on literally any subject since Mr. Brooks was forced to flee his job as Bush Administration hype man in 2006 and find gainful employment in the burgeoning Media False Equivalence industry:
Trumpian conservatives say that Washington insiders are unelected bureaucrats, denizens of the swamp, the cesspool or a snake pit. Some progressives call Washington insiders the establishment, the power elite, the privileged structures of the status quo.
These are not "Trumpian conservatives".  These are simply members in good standing of Mr. Brooks' Republican party talking and acting exactly as they have been talking and acting for past several decades.

Of course, Mr. Brooks -- who remains the most senior Conservative public intellectual and speaker on all matters political and cultural at The New York Times and PBS and NPR -- completely missed all of this because while Mr. Brooks' Republican party was very publicly turning itself into a deranged, racist monster machine capable of nominating and electing the King of the Birthers, Mr. Brooks was busy entertaining his fans in the "establishment, the power elite [and] the privileged structures of the status quo" with flattering fairy tales about a wholly imaginary Republican party, full of Very Serious People who all just so happened to think and act and sound exactly like Mr. David Brooks.


The Tip Jar Is Open.


4 comments:

Retired Patriot said...

I think he needs another push of that "magic ruralism" medicine pretty stat! RP

Robt said...

Most anyone that ever served in the military and faced imminent probability of being sent into war of in it.

All experienced the formal long time and well fine tuned programming they receive in regards to their "enemy".
WWII- Nips, Japs, Krouts.
Vietnam- Gooks
Middle East wars- Rag heads.
Military leadership promote the programming to dehumanize the enemy. It is easier to kill if the conscience is turned off or rationalized away.
They do not want any, NONE hesitation to pull the trigger.
It seems to me the republicans have been dehumanizing their fellow Americans for their persoanl gains at least since NIXON. It is what Rush bone Head has provided for over 20 years.
Oh yes, They will engage this dehumanizing of their own when necessary. They figure the Donner Party History showed that cannibalism is acceptable and programmable and the conscience can be over rode to eat other humans and all they have to do is present the mental state of desperate times require desperate actions and the dehumanizing of another human for food is about survival. And the GOP is so under great attacks that they are always in that desperate state.
This is superiority that is gifted to very wealthy people who so fear the "rabble" and their insignificant lives or existences.
Koch's, Mercer family, Sheldon Adelson types who will fund all this programming.
Then, there are the want to be's. There are the desperate for the buck. The anything goes for the Greed.

Unknown said...

Sounds about right, "Good stuff"

Jason said...

I never get tired reading your pounding of David F'ing Brooks. Some day he'll be in the old folks home muttering "both sides" sipping a lemonade and playing checkers with Bill Kristol, Howie Kurtz and Chris Cillizza.