Mr. David Brooks Indulges Three of His Creepiest Fetishes

The New York Times op-ed page is this man's "Penthouse Forum" -- a clearing house for his own forbidden desires, insatiable needs and unspoken lusts...

Creepy Fetish #1. Inventing an imaginary Third Way along which Mr. Brooks strides humbly between the Extremes on Both Sides:

Mostly I find myself supporting the conservative radicals, leaders who are confident that we can push for big change while defeating the illiberalism of radicals on left and right.

Nothing to add here that I haven't written 1.000 times before. The Big Lie of Both Siderism is Brooks' cathedral, his Bible, his vision of paradise and his 401k all rolled into one.  And no force on Earth is ever going to force him or his hundreds of imitators in the media give this lie up.

Creepy Fetish #2.  Pretending that the Civil War never happened:

In the middle of the 19th century, radicals like John Brown and purists like Horace Greeley gave way to the incrementalist Abraham Lincoln.
...

Lincoln had to slowly bring a whole nation around to the abolition of slavery. He had to compromise and gather a broad coalition to pass the 13th Amendment.

Good Christ at Appomattox, these Very Serious Beltway Pundits just fucking love, love, love them some Lincoln, don't they? They just can't stop dream-casting him into every modern travail. Raising him up like a lantern in every dark and bloody corner into which the Republican Party drags us -- a beacon of presidential rectitude and strength.

And Lincoln really was all those things. And more. This is not what makes Brooks' invocation of the man so appalling.

What's appalling is that Very Serious Beltway Pundits like David Brooks have no love for the actual Lincoln. The guy who is buried two miles from my front door. Instead, they love their imaginary Lincoln just as they love their imaginary Reagan.

Their imaginary Lincoln is a Lincoln without Shiloh or Cold Harbor. A Lincoln without the Wilderness or Vicksburg or the Shenandoah Valley.

Their Lincoln is two-dimensional caricature of the actual Lincoln. A gentle redeemer and uniter, and not the man who went through just about every general in the Union Army until he found one that would do what needed to be done: crush the Confederacy completely, regardless of the cost. One that would bomb their cities, burn their crops, slaughter their armies and starve their citizens until, at last, their will to make a traitor's war against the United States was broken and they finally gave up.

There is no place in Mr. Brooks' gauzy cartoon version of American history for a Lincoln who recognized a mortal threat to the nation coming from a despicable confederacy of its own citizens, and who ruthlessly used every bloody means at his disposal to utterly destroy that threat. No place in his idylls for a Lincoln who offered reunion and reconstruct to the South only after they had been beaten to their knees and forced to accept surrender or face extinction.

If all of that sound familiar it should.  I wrote it the last time Brooks tried to shove Actual Lincoln into the dirt and replace him with Brooks' Imaginary Lincoln ("When Beltway Pundits Dream, They Dream of Imaginary Lincoln".)


Creepy Fetish #3.  Pretending the Dubya Administration never happened and the Republican Party is an entirely different beast than what it self-evidently is.

I’m convinced that if Donald Trump is defeated, revolutionary zealotry will fade as debates over practical change and legislation dominate.

No, no and no.

We already know how the Republican Party will react when they are handed a resounding ass-kicking because it already happened in 2006 and again in 2008.  The racist "revolutionary zealotry" of the Republican base and the reactionary madness of GOP lawmakers did not fade.  Instead, it went thermonuclear...right under Mr. Brooks' nose.

In fact, over the past 20 years pretty much every Republican catastrophe and every lurch the Right has made deeper into Crazytown has preceded by a reassuring pronouncement by Mr. David Brook that a glorious Conservative Renaissance is just around the corner. 

Which is a helluva record.

No Half Measures