Mistakes Were Made: A David Brooks Special Report

Mr. David Brooks of The New York Times has, by my estimation, spilled one million banal words since the implosion of the Bush Administration he so energetically and uncritically supported.  And yet, despite that wide and tepid tide of tortured tautologies. Mr. David Brook has not only kept himself almost completely mum on the subject of the Age of Dubya, but has gone so far as to --

   

 -- shamelessly lie in public about his own deep complicity during his wild Bush years.  

Well today, Mr. Brooks broke his silence and here is what he had to say about one of the darkest eras in modern American history:

The errors and scandals of the early 21st century (Iraq, the financial crisis, etc.) produced a crisis of legitimacy for this brand of liberal democratic capitalism.

That's it.  That's all.  Mistakes were made.  Let's move on.

Also, despite the fact that the column is entitled "What Biden Needs to Tell Us", Brooks spends 2/3rd's of his contractually obligated word allotment blatting on about William Petty, David Hume, Adam Smith and capitalism.

Ok.  Fine.  We get it.  Brooks needs to polish the knobs of the monied interests that underwrite his eternal employment at The New York Time.

And then, because it is a David Brooks column, there comes... 

Well, you know what comes next, right?

Because it's always what comes next.  It is the razor-in-the-apple for which David Brooks has been famous for decades.

It starts with this:

MAGA is the zero-sum concept in political form. What’s good for immigrants is bad for the American-born. What’s good for Black people is bad for whites. Trade deals are exploitation. Our NATO allies are out to screw us. Every day for Trump is an Us/Them dominance game.

But it doesn't end there does it?  Because it can't end there.  Because Mr. David Brooks is professionally, psychologically and emotionally incapable of ending it there.  If the Right is in the thrall of some destructive mind virus then, as sure as night follows day... (emphasis added)

Zero-sum thinking is surging on the left as well. A generation of college students has been raised on the dogma...

And there you go.  Paragraphs of meandering, high school book-report grade pedantry about The Glorious History of Capitalism, followed by the rankest, laziest Both Siderist claptrap imaginable.  

So, you may ask, what can Brooks possibly add to a column entitled "What Biden Needs to Tell Us" to elevate it from a merely a typically godawful David Brooks column to a perfectly godawful David Brooks column?  

What would the cherry-on-top be?

One cherry-on-top, coming up!

Personally, I’d ask Team Biden to take a look at Ronald Reagan’s 1980 campaign. 

Coooool.

OK, so Biden should begin his campaign near the site of an infamous civil rights triple lynching and in his remarks lean really hard on supremacy of state's rights?  

Or perhaps Biden should barnstorm the country talking about "welfare queens" and their mink coats and Cadillacs?  And those "young bucks" eating the T-bone steaks they bought with your hard-earned tax dollars, Mr. & Mrs. White America?

Or maybe Biden should put his arm around various infamous, grifting segregationist Bible-thumpers to show how tight he is with Jebus?

Over here on the Left, much has been made (and rightly so) that, despite having gone the bloodthirsty madness of the Bush years, the eight-year-long Republican racist primal scream of the Obama years, and the absolute collapse of any pretense of sanity or basic civility on the Right during the Trump years, political journalists have learned absolutely nothing.  

This is not true.

Hacks like Mr. David Brooks of The New York Times have, in fact, learned a very valuable lesson.  And that lesson is that, no matter how staggeringly wrong they have been about pretty much everything, decade after decade, they will never be held professionally accountable for any of it.  

Burn The Lifeboats