It's Long Past Time for the Doddering Relics of the Glorious Reagan Revolution to Retire

Now that the Party of Reagan has finally shed it's flimsy, ill-fitting William F. Buckley mask and bared it's true, leering racist zombie face it's time for Heroes of the Glorious Reagan Revolution like David Brooks, George Will and Peggy Noonan to slouch quietly off the stage and into history.

Of course, you and I know this will never happen.  That Professional Punditing is a retiring-toes-up sorta deal.  That one day, decades from now, Mr David Brooks will be found keeled over in the middle of writing his New York Times column, leaving it for decades of future scholars to puzzle out how he had planned to end the sentence, "To find the instigators of this travesty, one need look no further than  Extremes on Both Si...aaaargh!"

The Extremes on Both ...Sinfully?
...Silkily?
...Sinusoidally? 

I'm sure many an academic career will one day be built on such theorizing.  And by then the United States will have either become a socialist paradise with colonies on Mars, or a theocratic hellscape where non-believers are shipped off to Salvation Camps in the New Mexico desert.  Or neither of those things.  But in the here-and-now, even as I recognize the futility of what I am writing as I write it, part of me still believes that someone still needs to "document the atrocities", as we used to say back in the days when Blogging was gonna Change Everything!

So what has become of the decrepit Big Thinkers of the Reagan Resolution?

Well, it won't surprise you that, as surely as a dog returns to their vomit, they have gone right back to preaching the gospel of Both Sides Do It.  Of course Trump is still bad.  Very bad.  Very naughty bad. But aren't Democrats very naughty bod too?

Consider the architecture of the two most recent columns but George Will and David Brooks.

At first glance they seem very different.  

Wills' begins as a long scoldy meander about how:

Donald Trump looks increasingly like a stray orange hair to be flicked off the nation’s sleeve

Paragraphs about Trump still being very naughty bad, but his political dick has gone flaccid and the  goobers don't flock to his events in the same numbers as they used to.

Floundering in his attempts to wield political power while lacking a political office, Donald Trump looks increasingly like a stray orange hair to be flicked off the nation’s sleeve.

Brooks, on the other hand, penned a star-spangled tribute to patriotism. 

The Week That Awoke the World

It's what we in the biz call an "easy write". All uplifting trumpet flourishes and marching band snare drums.  

The Ukrainians have been our instructors and inspirers...

We owe them such a debt...

They’ve reminded us that you can believe things with greater and lesser intensity, faintly, with words, or deeply and fervently, with a conviction in your bones...

But then, several paragraphs deep into Brooks' column comes the Both Siderist razor in the apple without which no Brooks column would be complete:

There’s been a restored faith in the West, in liberalism, in our community of nations. There has been so much division of late, within and between nations. But now I wake up in the morning, pick up my phone and am cheered that Sweden is providing military aid to Ukraine, and I’m awed by what the German people now support. The fact is that many democratic nations reacted to the atrocity with the same sense of resolve.

The same is true at home. Of course, there are bitter partisans who use the moment to attack the left for being weak, or to accuse the right of being pro-Putin. There are always going to be people who are happy to be factually inaccurate if it will make them socially divisive. 

The Extremes on Both Sides:  barely a dime's worth of difference between them.

Just as several paragraphs deep into Wills' column comes the inevitable:

From Capitol Hill to city halls, Democrats have presided over surges of debt, inflation, crime, pandemic authoritarianism and educational intolerance. Public schools, a point of friction between citizens and government, are hostages of Democratic-aligned teachers unions that have positioned K-12 education in an increasingly adversarial relationship with parents. The most lethal threat to Democrats, however, is the message Americans are hearing from the party’s media-magnified progressive minority: You should be ashamed of your country.

Trump’s message is similar. He says this country is saturated with corruption, from the top, where dimwits represent the evidently dimwitted voters who elected them, down to municipalities that conduct rigged elections. Progressives say the nation’s past is squalid and not really past; Trump says the nation’s present is a disgrace.

Trump and the Democrats: barely a dime's worth of difference between them.

Because old conservatives never actually change.  They built their brand inventing reasons to hate Liberals, and by God and St. Buckley they're going to keep those embers glowing until two weeks after they've been interred.

Which brings us to Peggy Noonan.  After all, if cobwebby conservative hot-takes from mildewed relics of the old days were booze, Noonan wouldn't just be a bottle of tequila; she'd be the worm at the bottom of the bottle that people dare each other to swallow.  However, as everyone knows, friend of the blog Tengrain owns the clear title to the Peggers critic space, and since I cannot currently come up with the $5 I would need to pay Tengrain for those rights, I will just direct you to his blog and advise you to keep your hands and feet inside the car during the ride.

The Further Adventures of Peggy Noonan

On the other hand, I did run across Pegger's very own bleary state of the union ramble and just can't resist posting the final paragraph here.  Keep in mind that it was written just four days before a mob of her fellow Republicans stormed the capitol in a very-nearly-successful insurrection aimed at decapitating the United States government and installing Donald Trump as a dictator.

...

The past decade saw the rise of the woke progressives who dictate what words can be said and ideas held, thus poisoning and paralyzing American humor, drama, entertainment, culture and journalism. In the coming 10 years someone will effectively stand up to them. They are the most hated people in America, and their entire program is accusation: you are racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic; you are a bigot, a villain, a white male, a patriarchal misogynist, your day is over. They never have a second move. Bow to them, as most do, and they’ll accuse you even more of newly imagined sins. They claim to be vulnerable victims, and moral. Actually they’re not. They’re mean and seek to kill, and like all bullies are cowards.

Everyone with an honest mind hates them. Someone will finally move effectively against them. Who? How? That will be a story of the ’20s, and a good one.

These creatures are the journalistic equivalent of grandpappy's war saber.  Long since rusted into their scabbards, covered in dust and hanging on the wall.  Purely decorative, the reasons behind their being there (and the actual, shameful history behind the relic) long since forgotten, but there they remain  because...well...they've always been there, and taking them down, boxing them up and shipped them off the some minor midwest museum sound like a lot of work and would mess up the balance of the room.

Best to just leave them up there until...whenever.

And this being the case, it seems fitting to wrap up with Kipling's The Old Men, written 120 years ago:

The Old Men

This is our lot if we live so long and labour unto the end – 

Then we outlive the impatient years and the much too patient friend:

And because we know we have breath in our mouth and think we have thoughts in our head,

We shall assume that we are alive, whereas we are really dead.

We shall not acknowledge that old stars fade or stronger planets arise

(That the sere bush buds or the desert blooms or the ancient well-head dries),

Or any new compass wherewith new men adventure ‘neath new skies.

We shall lift up the ropes that constrained our youth, to bind on our children’s hands;

We shall call to the waters below the bridges to return and to replenish our lands;

We shall harness (Death’s own pale horses) and scholarly plough the sands.

We shall lie down in the eye of the sun for lack of a light on our way –

We shall rise up when the day is done and chirrup, “Behold, it is day!”

We shall abide till the battle is won ere we amble into the fray.

We shall peck out and discuss and dissect, and evert and extrude to our mind,

The flaccid tissues of long-dead issues offensive to God and mankind –

(Precisely like vultures over an ox that the army left behind).

We shall make walk preposterous ghosts of the glories we once created –

Immodestly smearing from muddled palettes amazing pigments mismated –

And our friend will weep when we ask them with boasts if our natural force be abated.

The Lamp of our Youth will be utterly out, but we shall subsist on the smell of it;

And whatever we do, we shall fold our hands and suck our gums and think well of it.

Yes, we shall be perfectly pleased with our work, and that is the Perfectest Hell of it!

This is our lot if we live so long and listen to those who love us –

That we are shunned by the people about and shamed by the Powers above us.

Wherefore be free of your harness betimes; but, being free be assured,

That he who hath not endured to the death, from his birth he hath never endured!

No Half Measures