Cover of Time Magazine, February 18, 2013
David Brooks, January 2016: "It's going to be Rubio! I'm telling you, it's going to be Rubio!"
Five years later...
David Frum in The Atlantic:
There Is No Defense—Only ComplicityRepublican senators are shrinking before the eyes of the whole country.To understand what was at issue in the impeachment proceedings today, it helps to look at a video released yesterday by Senator Marco Rubio...There is no defense. There is only complicity, whether motivated by weakness and fear or by shared guilt. And the House managers forced every Republican senator to feel that complicity from the inside out.That feeling of complicity will not change the final outcome of this Senate trial. The weak will be no less weak for being shamed by their weakness; those who share Trump’s guilt will not cease to share it, because that guilt has been blazed to the world. But at least the House case can restrict the personal and political options of the weak and the guilty. If a senator like Marco Rubio did not feel his world tightening around him, he would not look so haunted. The Republican senators are shrinking before the eyes of the whole country. They are all becoming “liddle.” They know it. They feel it. They hate it. But they cannot stop it.
So what happened to Rubio? What happened to the entire GOP?
Nothing. Nothing at all.
They are not "shrinking before the eyes of the whole country".
They are merely being revealed to be the hollow, amoral ghouls and grifters we crackpot alarmists on the Left have always said they were.
No Half Measures
"Stop saying I have no soul! I'm a loud and proud soulless American! You're anti-soulless, aren't you?! I bet you're anti-evil, too! Even anti-malignant indifference! Or anti-stupid!
ReplyDeleteElitist! Cancel Culture! Communist! Chappaquidick!"
No Puppet! You're the puppet! And Chappaquidick is a deep cut these days.
DeleteIt's easy to understand Brooks' dismay. The status quo before Trump was a simple back and forth with an ever-rightward rachet. Power ebbed and flowed,and even the social corruption of parents dressing like their children, and Negro music all over the TV was of no consequence to the elites. Brooks could float from Washington to Yale to Aspen to Davos without once having to think about Nicki Minaj or grown men wearing cargo shorts and backwards baseball hats. It was all predictable and profitable.
ReplyDeleteBut Trump queered the deal. He promised the peasants blood in the streets and they won't settle for speeches and photo ops now. They want Pelosi in wrist restraints, the Squad swinging from lampposts. What's a conservative intellectual to do? Put on a Viking hat and grab a Taser? The gravy train is off the rails and based for a cliff. He may be one of the few Republican pundits who doesn't want Republican rule at the price of suspending the Constitution, because then who needs David Brooks?
And in about another 10 years from now, we will get another Nicole Wallace and Steve Schmidt who cannot get a nice paying TV talk show on right wing media and are more than willing to give up that public true conservative image to weasel a deal on moderate TV.
ReplyDeleteyeah about another ten years. It is so exciting I can hardly wait.
I mean it is not like being trapped on Earth in the United States with the likes of Justice Thomas, Alito, kavy and cony island Barret. FOR LIFE.
Like one of those comets that wiz by every so often rarely.
"Negro music all over TV was of no consequence to elites."
ReplyDeleteThat be my segue. Free FREE creative idea for whomever can Photoshop.
An updated play on that widely seen photo of two water fountains, one marked 'whites only' and the other 'coloreds.'
Instead of water fountains do TV channels.
An old b&w TV with rabbit ears showing FOX logo marked 'whites only.'
Beside a colorful wide-screen TV showing logos of many or all TV channels, in particular News channels, and signage with it saying, 'colorful Blue Planet humankind.'
Or something like that. Not white supremacists.
Speaking of FOX, today's Nick Kristof oped (disowned in his NYTimes propaganda by real Oregonians), interviews Angelo Carasone saying 'unfoxmycablebox' and MediaMatters cites it so no one needs go to NYTimes.
Also, OT, David fucking stupid opinions4payOBO shame2PBS brooks
DfsosB 💚's Rash Lamebrain 1951-2021 Ozark hillbilly unlettered imitator of unreal Nero Wolfe
Republican Mike Pence spent his entire adult life helping create the Republican MAGA mob that wanted to hang him from the gallows built on the spot January 6th with 2x4s likely purchased with funds from a stimulus check signed by Trump. Why this is so confusing and disorienting for assholes like Brooks is the real mystery.
ReplyDelete