And Just Like *That*...

...it's 2014 again.

Not in my view. Biden crippled *himself* by being unable to prioritize or to control the interest groups who made BBB such a behemoth. Lack of judgment, vision and leadership by Biden. Weak weak POTUS.

— Andrew Sullivan (@sullydish) December 19, 2021

And just like *that* the Age of Trump and the source of all toxins running wild through our body politic -- the long and very public disintegration of the GOP into an irredeemable slag-heap of bigots' and imbeciles -- are wiped away.   

Of course, this isn't the first time America's Conservative Public Intellectuals have buried the inconvenient past in a shallow grave.  Not by a damn sight.  Excerpted from my 2012 archives:

From Mr. Sullivan:

What Moderation Means For David Brooks 

Just substitute the word 'conservative' for moderate, and you've basically got my politics. Which is why I believe that Barack Obama has been the best conservative president since Bill Clinton.

Mr. Sullivan's Conservatism is identical to Mr. Brooks' Moderation in that their respective ideological systems amount to little more than what is convenient and enjoyable for each man to believe at any given moment. 

If Mr. Sullivan suddenly developed a taste for pineapple ice cream, within a week he would be penning columns about how "Liking Pineapple Ice Cream" is a cardinal Conservative value because of something something Edmund Burke.  If he got sick on bad Thai food, we would suddenly see a spate of columns discussing bad Thai food and how it is something that only extreme Christianists or Left Liberal would ever put in their mouths.

He is, at best, a flighty dilettante with a wealth patron and does not have the slightest fucking clue about how his adopted country works.

Likewise the Moderate Mr. Brooks adds or subtracts from his lexicon of virtues based almost entirely on how best to hide out from whichever one of his until-recently-held principled positions has gone hideously wrong. 

Not long ago, Mr. Brooks was a vocal champion of the worst of the Bush Era policies. Mr. Brooks made his bones excoriating those of us who doubted the Dear Leader's infinite wisdom. Mr. Brooks used to mock post-partisan centrism-types as dolts and fools. Mr. Brooks even went so far as to write an entire column about how (now that Dubya is triumphant in Iraq!) us hateful, bile-drunk, Liberals (who are incapable of ever admitting when we're wrong) will just sink deeper and deeper into denial, inventing new reasons why their wrong ideas we were really right and revising our own history to pretend they never said and did what they said and did (links for every bit of what I just summarized in this here exhaustive compendium)...

Of course, as regular readers know, almost since the day Mr. Brooks' cashed in his Very Immoderate Liberal-bashing and Bush worship for a job-for-life at "The New York Times", not only has virtually every one of Mr. Brooks' cocksure assertions and predictions gone to shit, but Mr. Brooks has barricaded himself inside precisely the same bullshit bunker of denial, revision and falsification that he once confidently told his readers would be the final, hateful bastion of all the Dirty Fucking Hippies he despises so acidly.

Mr. Brooks does not merely commit every sin he once righteously accused the Dirty Fucking Hippies of being on the verge committing, he now positively luxuriates in them.  He has made an industry out of them, and now lies about the present and shamelessly revises the past quite proudly, publicly and repeatedly, just like the rest of the Conservative Movement always has and will continue to do until they are destroyed (from me earlier this year)...

While digging through my archives looking for the above graphic, I also came across this article from Ezra Klein, then of the Washington Post, putting David Brooks up on blocks and stripping off all the bullshit on which Brooks' had built his column that week:

“If you look at the fundamentals,” writes David Brooks, “the president should be getting crushed right now.” The rest of the column is an attempt to explain why President Obama isn’t getting crushed right now. Brooks settles on Obama’s “version of manliness that is postboomer in policy but preboomer in manners and reticence.” But the premise of the column is wrong: If you look at the fundamentals right now, the president should not be getting crushed. In fact, he should be slightly ahead, which is pretty much where he is in most polls.

Brooks never actually defines what he means by “the fundamentals.” The evidence he provides in his column is mostly an assortment of recent poll results related to how voters feel about the economy, Obama’s plan for the economy, and Obama’s view of the role of government.

It’s not clear how Brooks is deciding which poll results are worth including and which are not. For instance, a new USA Today/Gallup poll finds that “though an overwhelming 71% rate economic conditions as poor, a 58% majority predict they will be good a year from now.” That poll — and others like it — don’t make it into the article.

At the time, I wondered if it didn't bother Ezra 

...how often or nakedly people like Our Mr. Brooks gets caught lying.

I wonder if this frustrates him and I wonder if Ezra will ever bust loose and write a column about how such people maintain their positions even after they are exposed over and over again as arrant frauds?

It's now nine years later.  Ezra Klein has become a made man in the Sulzberger New York Times family where David Brooks is a respected underboss ...

 

...and Ezra now has Mr. Brooks babysitting his podcast while he is away on paternity leave.

So I guess I have my answer.

Burn The Lifeboats