For Conservative Pundits Who Have Considered the Democrats When the End of the Right Is at Hand

Once or twice over the history of this little blog in the middle of Middle America I have irresponsibly speculated that the existence of David Brooks could only be explained as some kind of sociology experiment gone wrong.  Something that was begun as a goof by a member of the Sulzberger family, who then wandered off and forgot about it:

You would not know it from reading any of the +1,300 columns that Mr. David Brooks he has written for The New York Time over the past 15 years (which are, for the most part, +1,300 slight variations of the same column) but Mr. David Brooks is so much more than just a man who has gotten wealthy repeating the same bullshit over and over again long past the point where it stopped being funny and started being a cult.

Mr. Brooks is, in fact, a fascinating social experiment:  a social experiment that has gone drastically wrong.  Specifically, an experiment in just how far the Sulzberger family is willing to go and how much they are willing to spend to prop up a mediocrity whose only job is to repeat the same stupefying fairy tale, twice a week, every week, forever.

It should have lasted a year.  Like when the Times hired Mr. Brooks' former boss, Bloody Bill Kristol, to immunize themselves against the angry emails and blog posts of berserk, pro-Bush chicken-hawks.  And then cashiered Kristol after a year because he was a shitty writer and wrong about everything

A year, it should have lasted.  Maybe two, for a goof, or to settle some weird, rich-guy bet...

Sadly, the little experiment in letting Conservative mediocrities like Mr.  Brooks runs wild just to, y'know, see what happens has now run on, wild and uncontrolled, for decades which has resulted in rampant Conservative pundit overpopulation and Conservative bullshit bursting out of the lab and poisoning the entire ecosystem.

One of the more bizarre byproducts of this runamok experiment has been that some of the original experimental Conservative lab rats like David Brooks have begun to adapt by attempting to mutate into what can be charitably described as warped caricatures of the Liberals they used to mock as alarmist crackpots.

So now, like the West Virginians of 2041 who will watch helplessly as their coal mines fill and ash pits overflow with floodwater and think, "Y'know, maybe taking climate change seriously would have been a good idea" David Brooks has begun to peek out from behind the shield walls and barbicans of his Beltway media fastness to behold the toxic wasteland of the Deranged Right that he worked so very hard to create and think...

The Terrifying Future of the American Right

What I saw at the National Conservatism Conference

By David Brooks

Too late pal.  30 years too late.  

And then, skipping lightly over to Mr. Brooks' day-job at The New York Times we find -- 

Joe Biden Is Succeeding

By David Brooks

-- in which Mr. Brooks builds a column out of the simply reading his own newspaper and pointing out the reality of what's happening outside of the Right's toxic wasteland.  Such as this:

All of these [Democratic] bills were written to funnel money to the parts of the country that were less educated, less affluent, left behind. Adam Hersh, a visiting economist at the Economic Policy Institute, projects that more than 80 percent of the new jobs created by the infrastructure plan will not require a college degree.

And this:

The Biden $1.9 trillion stimulus package passed and has been tremendously successful. It heated the overall economy. The Conference Board projects that real G.D.P. growth will be about 5 percent this quarter. The unemployment rate is falling. Retail sales are surging. About two-thirds of Americans feel their household’s financial situation is good.

But the best part is that the benefits are flowing to those down the educational and income ladder. In just the first month of payments, the expanded Child Tax Credit piece of the stimulus bill kept three million American children out of poverty. Pay for hourly workers in the leisure and hospitality sector jumped 13 percent in August compared with the previous year. By June, there were more nonfarm job openings than there had been at any time in American history. Workers have tremendous power these days.

And so forth.

However since David Brooks is David Brooks, it's impossible for any Times column with his name attached to it to be written without a couple of features.

First, there must be Brooks-brand razors in the apple buried somewhere near the middle.  And so, David Brooks, America's #1 unreconstructed Bush War Pimp, must frame America's long overdue exit from the doomed Afghanistan fiasco as

Sure, there have been failures — the shameful Afghanistan withdrawal, 

And since David Brooks, remains America's #1 unreconstructed Both Siderist, he is contractually obligated to scrounge up an Imaginary Dirty Hippie to punch...

...failing to renounce the excesses of the cultural left. 

And second, both this column and his Atlantic article must be written without any recognition whatsoever that the rising tide of toxic Conservative sludge that's now lapping at Mr. Brooks' doorstep would have been impossible without the willing assistance of Conservatives like David Brooks who, for decades, used their enormous media presence to deflect, trivialize and often simply lie about the escalating threat from the Right until it was too late.

Far too late.  

Burn The Lifeboats