David Brooks' Advice To Joe Biden: It's Better To Capitulate Than Never

 

In The New York Times, Mr. "It's Gonna Be Rubio!" is now Mr. "Listen To Mittens!":

Mitt Romney Has Some Thoughts on Our President-elect

Bipartisan efforts aren’t out of the question for Joe Biden, and are less risky than executive action.

But he sneaks up on it.

For example, at the outset it might seem to the casual reader that being punched in the head one million times by the hard-wired nihilism of his Republican Party may have finally beaten into Mr. David Brooks a rudimentary understanding of the actual problem our country faces:

Things don’t get much better in the unlikely event Democrats capture both of Georgia’s Senate seats to achieve a 50-50 tie, broken by the Democratic vice president. Republicans, freed from all responsibility, will go into full opposition mode and nothing will pass when 60 votes are needed to overcome a filibuster. Democrats will try to govern with a razor-thin majority controlled by several relatively conservative Democrats. So Democrats will have ownership of the government without the means to deliver.

And that being punched in the face one million times by the hard-wired nihilism of his Republican Party may have also given him some insight into the only path left open to Democrats to save the nation from the existential threat of the Let-It-All-Burn GOP:

One way was proposed by Senator Elizabeth Warren in a Washington Post op-ed this week: Use executive orders. She suggested some obvious moves Biden absolutely should make on Day 1 — like re-entering the Paris climate accord — but also suggested some big and expensive unilateral policy changes: raising the minimum wage for federal contractors to $15, canceling billions of dollars in student debt.

But of course the seasoned reader knows that this is David Fucking Brooks we're talking about: a man who is, pound for pound, every bit as pathologically incapable of dealing with Reality as Donald Trump.  

And so Mr. Brooks once again lights his Sensible Centrist candle and once again leads his readers down and down and down into the hallucinogenic caverns of an entirely fictional Republican Party which exists only in Mr. Brooks desperate imagination.  

First Mr. Brooks issues Dire Warnings that any attempt to fix with executive orders all that Trump has wrecked with executive orders would lead to unspecified but terrible catastrophe!

With all due respect to Warren, opening the Biden era by stiff-arming Congress and ordering all sorts of big policy changes by presidential diktat could knock the legs out from the Biden presidency.

Second by pulling the lamest, standard-issue wingnut explanation of what "voters" do and do not want straight out of this ass, because Mr. Brooks is very, very lazy:

A better approach starts with the understanding that Biden’s policies remain popular. Democrats underperformed in congressional races because voters hate political correctness, “defund the police” and “socialism.”

And third, by passing along the advice of America's most famous Mormon invertebrate who, despite being the GOP's failed presidential candidate in 2012 has apparently never met an actual Republican in his entire life and apparently slept through the past 12 years of Republican depravity and sedition

“If the Senate refuses to tackle the major issues, then the president will and he’ll just issue executive orders,” Romney said. “Just saying ‘no’ doesn’t enhance our power. It’s a way to cede power.”

You just know that David Brooks' advice to his kids on how to deal with bullies was, "Give them whatever they want, as much as they want, whenever they want it and then suck up to them as hard as humanly possible."

UPDATE: Yastreblyansky has more here.

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