Or, for that matter, any column of any kind on any subject dating back to good
old days of George Allen and Tom Delay.
Mr. David Brooks was raised in academic privilege, loitered at the
University of Chicago long enough to score a BA in history (which, based
on how routinely he molests and whitewashes the past in order to advance
his political agenda, should have been revoked decades ago), after which
he latched onto the wingnut welfare teat like a lamprey and has been
nursing at its ample bosom ever since.
Since his days misreading history at the Wall Street Journal, Brooks has
been America's most ubiquitous cheerleader for the myopically wealthy, the
cluelessly privileged and politically inbred, and has made his career out
of telling the rich and powerful the silky lies they desperately wish to
be true.
Yes, truly it can be said that in all this wide, bountiful,
fatally-conflicted nation—from the mountains to the prairies and the whole
rest of that song—there is no one who can speak with less
forged-in-the-crucible-of-hardship authority about what hard times have to
teach us than David Brooks.
I've been writing about David Brooks for over two decades now, and I
didn't do all that readin' and spill all those pixels because I find
anything meritorious about Mr. Brooks. Quite the opposite: I lost count of
the sheer tonnage of indefensible, toxic codswallop that sharts out of
this man's pen more than a decade ago.
Mr. David Brooks has made a very good living hauling water for the worst
political party in modern American history. He has done it by lying about
the history and direction of his Republican party. By pretending that any
outward evidence of the depravity of his Republican party is merely a
transient, surface nuisance. By deflecting any honest discussion of the
unique, toxic madness and malice of his Republican party by relentlessly
playing Both Siderist games.
Week after week, month after month, year after year, Mr. Brooks has plied
his deeply dishonest and very profitable craft. Along with the rest of the
conservative brain caste, he spent most of the 1990s and the early 2000s
railing against us vile liberals As long as it was popular to treat
liberals like fifth columnists, David Brooks was first in line for the
hippie bashing. But when it finally became impossible to ignore that the
Iraq War he had cheerled was a complete disaster, that the Bush
administration was staffed by morons, charlatans and zealots, and
that—surprise, surprise—the liberals had been right all along, what did
Brooks do?
Apologize for his journalistic malpractice? Heaven forefend!
No, he simply became the newest and loudest cheerleader of the "Both Sides
Do It" cult, claiming that the liberals were just as much to blame for the
current situation as the war criminals in the White House. Thus was
launched Brooks' second career as the chief evangelist of that poisonous
cult of privilege and pretense. There followed hundreds of sermons
about the Sensible Center wherein resided a whole colony of sensible
Republican candidates and noble Republican voters who spent their days
making America with their own two hands, and their evenings reading
"An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs" to their towheaded
children. Mythical creatures that have never existed and never will.
Now that Mr. David Brooks has successfully scammed the New York Times and
PBS and NPR and Yale and NBC and The Aspen Institute and Oprah into
underwriting his midlife crisis, various paeans are being written about
his heroic moral journey from unrepentant Beltway Republican hack to
unrepentant Beltway Both Siderist hack.
The Right's now openly insane, which means the Both Sides Did It lie must
be spun even harder and the Temple of Centrism even better attended.
That's the Brooks patter, and he's been running it for so long that it's
worn grooves in the public discourse. The only honorable way to alter the
course of the storm of Republicans' madness and violence bearing down on
us would be to invent a time machine and go back to when the madness began
to grow and metastasize and thoroughly and publicly discredit those elite
media influencers like Brooks who were swearing up, down and sideways that
there was nothing to worry about.
That George W. Bush was a military genius.
That the Iraq War was an unalloyed success.
That tax cuts fix everything.
That we would never have deficits again.
That the Tea Party wasn't racist.
That Obama was to blame for GOP intransigence.
That everything was fine: that the GOP had gotten over being weird and was
now back to being awesome.
That Liberals are crackpot alarmists for fretting over the trajectory of
the GOP.
That Both Sides are to blame.
That Bernie was just as bad as Trump.
That we needn't worry about Trump because it was definitely gonna be
Rubio.
That Hillary was just as bad as Trump.
That we needn't worry about Trump because the Wise Men of the GOP would
definitely keep him in line.
That the base of the GOP weren't racist meatheads drunk on Hate Radio and
Fox News rotgut.
At at no point on this long, ugly trek did the Sulzberger family decide
that David Brooks, their doddering, ideologically-incontinent housepet,
has finally shit on one too many of the family's hand-knotted Bokhara rugs
to be kept around any longer. At no point did they think it was
finally time to dispatch him to an Elite Pundit Farm upstate where he
could frolic and opine all day long in the warm sunshine with the ghosts
of fellow pundits like David Broder and William Safire?
Instead, Brooks finally packed up his medicine show and hopped the Acela
corridor train for a quick ride southwest to his new digs at
The Atlantic.
Because David Brooks is never going to change, and because he's already
been guest-writing at The Atlantic for years, we can safely assume
that they know exactly what they're buying.
During his tenure at the Times, Brooks job has been to provide
institutional cover for the GOP's descent into madness by insisting, over
and over again, that Both Sides are equally to blame for the catastrophe
which one side -- and only one side -- has deliberately engineered.
That's his job. That's his racket. He's been very good at it. And now
he'll be plying that same old snake under a new label.
Old whine in new skins, if you'll pardon the pun.
I Am The Liberal Media
