From the Annals of the High and Holy Church of Both Sides Do It

Get ready Liberals, because while you weren't looking -- while we were scrambling to feed our families, figure out what to do about schooling our children, mourning our losses and fighting for a better future -- we became just as bad as Donald Trump.

Maybe worse!

It is once again my painful duty to report to you what your new allies and BFFs over at Never Trump central command are talking about behind your back:

Who's Worse: The Left or the Right? 

Spoiler: We're worse.

Demonstrating once again that while the Republican Party (that the Never Trumpers spent their lives building) rains nonstop hell and damnation down on every democratic institution in the land, the one structure which Never Trumpers will defend to their last breathe as if it were the Iraqi Oil Ministry is the High and Holy Church of Both Sides Do It.

Because where else can they go?

It's the middle of 2020 --  the ragged, going-mad-in-the-bunker, ass-end of the Reagan Revolution -- and 97% of their party and their movement took the last train to Trumpville long ago.

What is there left for the Left Behind to do but seek shelter in the basement of the most bomb-proof, shock-proof, fact-proof Beltway lie left standing?

Because Conservatism has always been a synthetic, parasitic ideology, dependent entirely on standing in opposition to...something.  In 2001: A Space Odyssey,  Conservatives would be the other proto-human tribe -- the one that stands athwart evolution and cries "Stop!"  And now that their own movement and party have pantsed them and abandoned them in the wastelands, what is there left for the Left Behind to stand against?

Sure, they could clearly and unequivocally oppose the racist, atavistic forces that grabbed them collar-and-belt and tossed them out of the GOP.  But that would risk admitting that they were complicit idiots.  That -- horrors! -- the Left had actually been right about them all along.

Which they are manifestly incapable of doing, because it would negate everything they have always claimed to believe in.

It would destroy them. 

So to armor themselves against such accidental self-awareness, they need -- absolutely need -- to be seen as the Reasonable Center equipoised between two equally monstrous extremes.

They absolutely need for you and me and the rest of the Left to somehow be as dangerous and destructive as Donald Trump and his myrmidons.

What good luck for them that the corporate media is already top-heavy with enough Bush Regime dead-enders who have already spent the last 15 years repeating this same lie so relentlessly the High and Holy Church of Both Sides Do It is hardened against almost anything short of a direct hit from a Texas-sized meteor.

From me in November of 2016:

Today Mr. David Fucking Brooks finally out-David Fucking Brooksed himself, and I can only look on in awe at how completely banjaxed all internal guidance and ethical mechanisms at The New York Times must be that they actually pay Mr. Brooks real American money to take such an epic Both Siderist dump on their pages.

And here we go.

First, Mr. Brooks resurrects his old boss at The Weekly Standard back into pages of The New York Times, because nothing says "Hey, fuck you, America!" louder than citing the Wrongest Man In America in your second paragraph:

The Future of the American Center

David Brooks NOV. 29, 2016

...

As Bill Kristol told me, the coming Congress may not look like the recent Congresses, when party-line voting was the rule...

Remember back during the last Republican administration when Bill Kristol was allocated a Wingnut Welfare affirmative action slot at the NYT right next to Mr. Brooks, but then got his ass canned for sucking so bad at his job that even they couldn't stand it anymore?

Good times!

Then, of course, comes the deliberate and slanderous false equivalence centerpiece of this dog's breakfast, because hey America, fuck you twice!  I'm David Fucking Brooks and I get to say this shit and get paid for it because...reasons!

The most important caucus formation will be in the ideological center. There’s a lot of room between the alt-right and the alt-left, between Trumpian authoritarianism and Sanders socialism.

Then back to Bill Kristol and a Special Surprise Guest to make it all bipartisany!

For example, Bill Kristol and Bill Galston have worked in the White Houses of different parties and had voted for the opposite presidential candidates in every election for four decades. But Donald Trump has reminded them how much they agree on the fundamentals.

The two Bills have now issued a joint statement calling for “a New Center.”...

Because calling this shit-show the "Project For a New America Center" might has clued people into what was actually going on.

By the way, if you've never heard of Bill Galston, you're not alone.  He is basically a lump of left-of-center clay there to make the scales balance so that Mr. David Brooks of The New York Times can pretend this oldest and hoariest of all Beltway fairy tales is a new and vital idea.  But if you want to learn more about Mr. Galston, you could start with this article by David Weigel from 2012:

Bill Galston, America's Wrongest Columnist

Yeah baby!  Now were cooking!

But the bottle of Don Julio Real which Mr. Brooks has obviously been nursing is down to the backwash, and with only has a scant couple of paragraphs left the crowd holds its collective breathe as wonders, in the space allotted can Mr. David Brooks of The New York Times stick the landing by name-checking the granddaddy of all boutique Beltway Both Siderist scams?

Yes he can!  Yes he can!

The most active centrist organization, No Labels, began six years ago in opposition to polarized, cutthroat politics. The problem with the group back then was that there was no future to a political movement whose first name is “No.” You have to be for something.

But under the leadership of its undeterrable co-founder, Nancy Jacobson, No Labels has evolved...

Then, for style-points, one more flurry of wretchedly dishonest and dishonorable false equivalence -- 

The most important caucus formation will be in the ideological center. There’s a lot of room between the alt-right and the alt-left, between Trumpian authoritarianism and Sanders socialism.

-- and then it's back out on the trail for the next leg of Mr. Brooks Confirmation Bias Tour where Mr. Brooks will report back on an unemployed pipe-fitter that Mr. Brooks will meet in Muncie, IN whose Confederate flags and "Trump That Bitch" bumper-stickers are just his way of telling the world that a two-dimensional debate between Monetarist and Keynesians is insufficient to address the four-dimensional realities of a post-industrial but pre-robotic society...

There's Never a Cancel Culture Around 
When You Really Need It