On the next episode of the Professional Left Podcast, we will be taking a deep dive into the long history of Republicans wildly overreacting. (Spoiler: It didn't start with Natalie Harp.) And I thought one of the examples we pulled from the archives might be of special interest today.
It's from a November 2005 column in The New York Times by the most ubiquitous Conservative writer in America, who is also America's leading finger-wagging chastiser on the subject of humility, comity and keeping a god-damn civil tongue in your head at all times no matter what the provocation.
At the time this column was published, Bush's Iraq debacle -- the war Bill Kristol said would be over in a matter of weeks and David Brooks declared won in April 2003 -- had dragged on longer than the entire U.S. involvement in World War I.
2 years, 7 months, and 19 days, and counting. And no WMDs had been found. No bioweapons that we had been told were days away from being loaded onto planes and dispersed. No hint of a nuclear program of any kind. Nothing, except an armed Iraqi resistance that was getting stronger and more lethal every day. An armed resistance we had created when Coalition Provisional Authority Order Number 2: "Dissolution of Entities" was issued on May 23, 2003, by L. Paul Bremer and which told the entire Iraqi army that they no longer had a job or a future under the U.S. occupation.
So in late 2005, Democratic Senator Harry Reid made the perfectly reasonable point that, now that it was undeniable that the intelligence used to justify the war had been wrong, Congress should investigate how the administration used – or misused – that intel in the run-up to the war.
And David Brooks Lost. His. Fucking. Mind.
From The Harry da Reid Code, by David Brooks, November 5, 2005, in The New York Times:
Harry Reid sits alone at his kitchen table at 4 a.m., writing important notes in crayon on the outside of envelopes. It's been four weeks since he launched his personal investigation into the Republican plot to manipulate intelligence to trick the American people into believing Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.
Reid had heard of the secret G.O.P. cabal bent on global empire, but he had no idea that he would find a conspiracy so immense.
Reid now knows that as far back as 1998, Karl Rove was beaming microwaves into Bill Clinton's fillings to get him to exaggerate the intelligence on Iraq. Reid now knows that in the late 1990's, Dick Cheney and other Republican officials used fluoridated water in the State Department and other government agencies to brainwash Clinton administration officials into exaggerating the threat posed by Saddam Hussein…
Harry Reid sits alone at his kitchen table at 4 a.m., writing important notes in crayon on the outside of envelopes. It has been four weeks since he began investigating this conspiracy and three weeks since he sealed his windows with aluminum foil to ward off the Illuminati…
Harry Reid sits alone at his kitchen table at 4 a.m. He knows now that seven centuries ago at a secret meeting of the Bilderberg Society-Trilateral Commission-American Enterprise Institute, the six High Lords of the Secret Order of the Neocons decided to implant alien life forms into potential Democratic officials that could be activated in case there was a need to manipulate intelligence on Iraq...
Harry Reid sits alone at his kitchen table at 4 a.m. Odd thoughts rush through his brain. He cannot trust the letter "r," so he must change his name to Hawwy Weed. Brian Lamb secretly rules the world by manipulating the serial numbers on milk cartons.
Reid realizes there is only one solution: "Must call a secret session of the Senate. Must expose global conspiracy to sap vital juices! Must expose Republican plot to manipulate intelligence!"
Harry Reid sits alone at his kitchen table at 4 a.m.
Scattered among these feeble chunks of... what? Humor? Satire? ... there is a steady refrain of "But Clinton! What about Clinton!" All of which was sad, and sick, and deeply pathetic.
But most importantly, it also reeked of shrill desperation. Because at this point even someone as ideologically blinkered as Brooks could see that the war he had so energetically championed was a disaster. And the anti-war Left he had so ferociously mocked and slandered were turning out to have been right all along.
But instead of manning up, doing the right thing and owning his colossal fuck up, Brooks opted to use his Times real estate to do the Republican thing: stage a ludicrously over-the-top attack on Harry Reid for daring to suggest that pre-war intel should be looked into.
And having been to this rodeo more than once, we OG bloggers know the yelping, freakout sound of a nerve being struck.
It sounds like The Harry da Reid Code, by David Brooks.
It also sounds like this:
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