The U.S. government is offering military funeral honors for Ashli Babbitt, the rioter who was killed at 35 by an officer in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.
Babbitt was a U.S. Air Force veteran from California who was shot dead wearing a Trump campaign flag wrapped around her shoulders while attempting to climb through the broken window of a barricaded door leading to the Speaker’s Lobby inside the Capitol.
Offering military honors to one of the Capitol rioters is part of President Donald Trump’s attempts to rewrite that chapter after the 2020 election as a patriotic stand, given he still denies he lost that election. Babbitt has gained martyr status among Republicans, and the Trump administration agreed to pay just under $5 million to settle a wrongful-death lawsuit that her family filed over her shooting.
Pentagon Is Reinstalling Portrait of Confederate General at West Point Library
The Pentagon is putting back up a portrait of Gen. Robert E. Lee at the military academy, as the Trump administration seeks to restore honors for American figures who fought to preserve slavery.
The Pentagon is restoring a portrait of Gen. Robert E. Lee, which includes a slave guiding the Confederate general’s horse in the background, to the West Point library three years after a congressionally mandated commission ordered it removed, officials said.
The 20-foot-tall painting, which hung at the United States Military Academy for 70 years, was taken down in response to a 2020 law that stripped the names of Confederate leaders from military bases.
That legislation also created a commission to come up with new base names. In 2022, the commission ordered West Point to take down all displays that “commemorate or memorialize the Confederacy.” A few weeks later, the portrait of General Lee with his slave in the background was placed in storage.
It was not clear how West Point could return General Lee’s portrait to the library without violating the law, which emerged from the protests that followed George Floyd’s killing by Minneapolis police officers in 2020.
Dear Shabby, My Colleague Keeps Sublimating His Second Marriage Into Everything He Writes!
Dear Shabby,
Since this will be the second time I have written you in as many decades, I now feel we now know each other well enough to unburden myself to you about the same damn colleague I wrote to you last time in a letter I entitled "Dear Shabby, My Colleague Keeps Sublimating His Divorce Into Everything He Writes!"
This colleague of mine is still a Very Famous Column Writer for an important newspaper in New York City, and has since somehow secured a second Very Famous Column Writing job at a second important publication, this one in Washington D.C. He used to be contractually obligated to produce a column for the New York City publication twice a week, but now it seems his agreement with them is to delivering something "whenever he feels like it". However, when he drops a column, it is still what his millions of readers take to be either sage insights into the human condition or canny insider information about the political scene, with some stuff about economics or what's going on overseas mixed in to keep it fresh.
His problem? Even all these years later he still doesn't know anything useful about politics. Or economics. Or what's going on overseas. And so his "insights" usually start off being to nothing more than the reconstituted, water-cooler gossip of people who already think just like he does, and end up being horribly, horribly wrong.
About 20 years ago, after my colleague had made a regular featurette out of telling his readers how great everything was going in Iraq, he began to have less and less to say on the subject. As Iraq collapsed he got razzed a lot for what he had written, but he deals with all criticism the same way: he ignores it. Gradually he just stopped writing about Iraq and how terrific everything was there altogether: he never retracted any of his nutty "insights", but instead dealt with Iraq as if it had been sent to a puppy farm upstate where we couldn't see it anymore, but where it was probably playing happily with other countries.
As you might recall, to fill the hole in his lineup, my colleague started cranking out what I can only describe as "advice columns for carbon based life forms as written by a robot from Arcturus." As I said, he refused to walk back any of the truly awful things he had written, or even acknowledge the existence of the people who had been right all along, but suddenly his columns got very scoldy. Everyone everywhere should be a lot more humble because everybody was always equally right and wrong about everything all the time. Humans should be more reticent! Also less judgmental!
Also he took a really weird turn into telling humans who are poor that they should not be having so much sexytime. Because apparently the problems of the poor have nothing to do with the structural problems of a job market geared to wrecking the middle class and relentlessly slashing wages, benefits and pensions. Or from a handful of plutocrats swallowing up the world economy. Or from seeing the price of housing, education, basic medical care and everything else skyrocket out of their reach. Or from the policies driven by a merciless war being waged on the poor because Conservatives equate poverty with moral depravity.
Instead, my colleague went on and on about how the poors are screwed up because of all the wrong sexytime they are having. And their broken families. And their disordered communities. And so forth. My colleague, I should add, lives in a large mansion in a very exclusive neighborhood. He has vast spaces for entertaining. His main job pays him insane amounts of money to dispense "insights" that the decades have shown to be pretty uniformly terrible. His main job has gotten him many other jobs that pay him a lot more money to basically read aloud whatever he wrote last week. His jobs lets him travel the world as he wishes, gives him unlimited access to the most powerful people on Earth, and lets him take extended vacations or "book leave" whenever he pleases. And from this perspective, his advice to the poors is basically that their lives will get better when they start emulating the behavior of high net-worth strivers with their stable families in their well-ordered communities that my colleague interacts with every day.
Then as you will remember from my last letter, very my wealthy, well-ordered colleague got divorced.
Stealthily.
Like his famous "Now that the war is over" columns about Iraq, this subject was never mentioned (although recently it is rumored that his marriage advice to the Great Unwashed has been seen at an upstate puppy farm where it gambols happily in the sun with Tikrik and Mosul and Baghdad all day long.) Instead, my colleague quickly and quietly shifted his focus from telling his readers that the poors need to get their shit together, to telling his readers that life is hard and relationships are messy.
Well, since that time, my colleague as gotten re-married to a much younger person who was, while he was stealth-divorcing his first wife, his research assistant. As you know, during the decade between my last letter to you and this one, things have gotten pretty well "effed-up" (as the kids say) in our country. Fascism is on the march here. Science is being attacked on all fronts. Books are being banned. Armed goons in masks snatch people off the street, enforcing Trumpian orthodoxy like the Guidance Patrol of Law Enforcement Command of the Islamic Republic of Iran.
All of this is being done by one political party -- the Republican party, with which is my colleague recently parted company -- and opposed by the Democratic party. And my colleague has reacted to this frightening development in two ways.
And second, now that he has a much-younger second wife in tow, he has lapsed into that privileged, white, clueless, male, senior-citizen thing of making sweeping declarations about Human Nature That Everyone Should Listen To. Today he took it upon himself to lecture the great unwashed that they're Doing Love All Wrong!
These grandiose pronouncements were prompted by the same source that has inspired the deep thoughts of philosophers and public intellectuals for centuries: some random comments on Substack.
The Wrong Definition of Love
...And yet I’d say the Substack answers betray a common misunderstanding of how you become beloved. There was a lot of self in these answers and not much about the other person. There was a lot about being paid attention to, and not much about maybe serving and caring for another person, or even putting that person’s interests above your own.
These answers didn’t come from nowhere; they’re a perfect distillation of the cultural trends...
Yadda yadda yadda.
In such a culture people are naturally going to define love as the...
In other, less self-oriented cultures, and in other times, love was seen as...
Falling in love in this view is not a decision you make for your own benefit, but a submission, a poetic surrender...
In his 1822 book, “On Love,” Stendhal describes the process of “crystallization,” during which we idealize the people we love as if they were coated with shimmering crystals...
I’m not saying people actually lived in this altruistic way back then...
In this conception of love...
So my question once again, Shabby, is how do I get my colleague to once and for all Shut The Fuck Up about that which he clearly knows not? Or, alternatively, where can I get a job that pays a king's ransom for pulling arrant, nonsense out of my ass twice a week?
"Do you follow American politics? They hate Obama. Hate him. He's a black man. That's what it is: it's racist. This guy is no bleeding-heart liberal. He's a centrist." -- Ian McShane (once again.)
The Professional Left is brought to you by our wholly imaginary
"sponsors" and real listeners like you!
Here is some footage documenting the "negotiations".
So the next time you see Vice President Couchfucker running his lying mouth --
BREAKING: JD Vance lies that there was a negotiated end to the Second World War. With who? Hitler killed himself in the bunker. Mussolini was overthrown. Two atomic bombs were dropped on Japan. Germany and Japan were occupied by allied forces. Read a book. pic.twitter.com/ZDdZfuw5Lc
— Trump Lie Tracker (Commentary) (@MAGALieTracker) August 24, 2025
-- perhaps gently advise him, in a fatherly sort of way, that if he is very,
very lucky, the worst that will happen to him once the Trump administration is
history is being paraded though the streets of
Washington D.C. alongside the rest to the traitors, head shaved, wearing a sandwich board
with "I Collaborated" written in big, red letters, front and back.
How darkly appropriate that one of the best descriptions of the Trump
Administration came from Hunter Thompson long before there was a Trump
Administration.
“The Circus-Circus Mar-a-Pedo is what the whole hep world would be doing Saturday night if the Nazis had won the war. This is the sixth Reich...”
"Democratic friends, let’s try a thought experiment. Imagine you woke up
one morning and all your media sources were produced by Christian
nationalists. You sent your kids off to school and the teachers were
espousing some version of Christian nationalism. You turned on your sports
network and your late-night comedy, and everyone was preaching Christian
nationalism.
That’s a bit how it feels to be more conservative in the West today — to
feel drenched by a constant downpour of progressive sermonizing..." -- David Brook, August 21, 2025
And so begins yet another David Brooks sermon in
The New York Fucking Times about how the rise of the fascist Right it
is entirely the fault of you and me and all of our snooty, elitist friends.
From the same column:
Smothering progressivism produced a populist reaction that eventually
descended into a nihilist surge.
And from whence does Brooks derive this sweeping theory of American political devolution? From the same colum:
In 2018, I happened to watch the Super Bowl at a sports bar in West
Virginia. President Trump was about a year into his first term, and the
corporate advertising world was churning out ads with vaguely progressive
messages. I watched the guys in the bar...
A restaurant at Newark Airport has had the last laugh after New York
Times columnist David Brooks claimed to have been charged $78 for a burger
and fries - but failing to mention the alcoholic drinks that made up much
of his bill.
Earlier this week, Mr Brooks posted a picture of his meal at New
Jersey-based 1911 Smoke House Barbeque on X, formerly Twitter, with the
caption: “This meal just cost me $78 at Newark Airport. This is why
Americans think the economy is terrible.”
1911 Smoke House later clarified that “80 per cent” of Mr Brooks’ tab
came from multiple shots of whisky.
But, since Brooks opened the doors of "downpour", "drenched" and "smothering"
media, rather than using my mad kinesics skills to concoct agreeable theories
while sipping whisky at Floyd's Thirst Parlor and stealing furtive glances at
fellow patrons --
-- how about I just factually report on the state of the media here in the
Middle of Middle America. And seeing as how, over last several years,
the Sangamon County Republican Party has hired this Murderer's Row of
degenerates and liars to keynote their annual Lincoln Day Dinner and
fundraiser -- Tom Homan, Kelleyanne Conway, Charlie Kirk, Candace Owens, Jason
Chaffetz, Jeanine Pirro, Corey Lewandowski, Laura Ingraham and on and on
and on -- it shall not surprise you that the media which is actually drenching
and drowning Middle Murrica reflects these debased tastes.
If this is too much for you to digest in one sitting, go ahead and scroll on past. I won't be
offended, but I may use it as the basis for a 3,000 word, all-encompassing
theory about human nature.
This is the OutKick blurb at OutKick:
Clay Travis is the founder of the fastest growing national multimedia
platform, OutKick, that produces and distributes engaging content across
sports and pop culture to millions of fans across the country. OutKick
was created by Travis in 2011 and sold to the Fox Corporation in 2021.
One of the most electrifying and outspoken personalities in the
industry, Travis hosts OutKick The Show where he provides his unfiltered
opinion on the most compelling headlines throughout sports, culture, and
politics. He also makes regular appearances on FOX News Media as a
contributor providing analysis on a variety of subjects ranging from
sports news to the cultural landscape.
And here’s more about them.
He and Buck Sexton host The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show, a
three-hour weekday conservative talk show which debuted on June 21, 2021
as the replacement of The Rush Limbaugh Show on many radio
stations.
Ah! Ideological continuity! So important in keeping the
reprogrammable meatbags from getting all confused and cranky.
And sure enough, for decades, from 11AM - 2 PM every day, you could find
Rush Limbaugh or one of his lackeys on local radio station WMAY right here
in Springfield, Illinois. But Limbaugh is dead now. Dead and
buried in what I believe may have become the largest impromptu public urinal
in St. Louis, Missouri.
So now, where once you would find Limbaugh, you can listen to the Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show right here in Springfield, Illinois on WMAY. And on any of
hundreds of other radio stations across the country, because the Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show is part of a national syndication package, so that hundreds of
thousands of Republican base voters are all hearing the same message at the
same time.
As part of that syndication package, Before them on WMAY, from 9 AM to 11
AM, you’ll find Fox News' very own Brian Kilmeade.
After them, from 2 - 4 PM, comes The Dana Show. That's Dana Loesch. And after her, for three more hours, The Erick Erickson Show.
But wait! There's more!
Within the OutKick platform you'll find the OutKick Show with Clay
Travis. No surprise. But you'll also find 13 other shows. There are gambling tips. Sports news. Politics and
culture with Tomi Lahren!
Dan Dakich has a show called "Don't @ Me" and he is billed as "an American basketball sportscaster. He is a former player, assistant
coach, interim head coach for the Indiana University Hoosiers
American basketball player". But here he was on Twitter
yesterday. "NPR's Katherine Maher admits outlet failed to cover Hunter Biden
laptop"
Then there's the Ricky Cobb show. Here's that blurb: "Ricky Cobb show will offer fans that magical blend of insight and humor
into current sports topics along with his deep passion for sports, culture
and humor from the 70’s and 80’s." Recent topics were, let's see, "Tesla terrorists attempt to go mainstream,” and "Tim Walz Fans The Tesla
and Elon Hate", "DEI officially done at Disney, are there any masculine
Democrats?"
There's Gaines for Girls With Riley Gaines. From the
blurb: "Riley Gaines has emerged as one of the most powerful voices in the fight
to save women's sports and spaces, but the fight is far from over!"
Three episodes from last year: "She Was FAILED For Using 'Biological Woman", "Protecting the integrity
of women's sports with Tommy Tuberville" and "Josh Hawley Confronts NCAA About Trans Athletes In Women's Sports"
FOX59 Sports anchor/reporter Charly Arnolt now has her own show.
Recent episodes include "DOGE Superstar", "Have Any Woke Companies Actually Bounced Back?".
"The Woke Push To Keep Men In Women’s Sports". "Canadian Sports Fans
Continue To Boo The US National Anthem!", "Can Men In Women's Sports Have
Enough Impact To Flip Democrats"
The latest episode of Hot Mic w/ Hutton & Withrow is "No Woke
Basketball"
Fox News' Tyrus has his own place there. Recent episode
asks "Can Wrestling SAVE America From DIVISIVE Politics?!"
Then there is the Will Cain Show. That's Fox News' Will Cain.
Are you noticing the pattern here yet?
The lead sentence coming out of Will Cain's mouth on his show yesterday was
literally, "Why are women so woke?"
After that it was on to the "so called" war plans with lots of scowling and
air quotes around everything. Then he brought on some obscure visiting
professor named Gad Saad from Northwood University who blathered on about
two French philosophers who wrote books about how human reasoning didn't
evolve to find the truth, but just to win arguments. And that somehow
proves that Jeffrey Goldberg clearly wrote
his Atlantic article just to hurt Republicans.
Gad Saad:
"He's not a true journalist. He's not pursuing objective
truth. He simply wants his team to win an argument by making the
other team look bad.”
For the record, Northwood University is "a private university focused on business education". Its most popular undergraduate majors according to 2021 records
were things like Business Administration and Management, Marketing/Marketing
Management, Vehicle & Vehicle Parts & Accessories Marketing
Operations and Sport & Fitness Administration/Management, so I have no
idea what a visiting philosophy professor has to do there, except that
whatever he does leaves him with enough spare time show up on The Will Cain
Show when summoned.
Late breaking news from Gad Saad on Twitter -- 11:40 AM · Mar 27,
2025 "My appearance tonight on Jesse Watters is going to be rescheduled to
another date."
Oh. He's that guy!
And then we're off to, as promised and no kidding, Hegelianism. You
know, sweeping, big-word musings on what even is knowledge? How can
anyone really know anything? All of which amounted to nothing but a
job-lot of big smarty pants words from a Real Philosopher to reassure the
MAGA meatheads that they’re really the smart ones and the Signal scandal is really some kinda
Liberal plot against the Dear Leader.
For the record, today’s top essays at OutKick are
Some Environmentalists Could Give A Rip About The Environment by Tomi Lahren
Trump Pokes Fun At Reporter For Still Wearing A Mask by Ian
Miller
Yes, Red State Voters Helped Tank 'Snow White' Box Office by
Ian Miller
And do you know who advertises on OutKick? Everybody. In fact, I
might have missed the crucial 99th Lifetime teevee episode, about Gypsy Rose, Life After Lockup if I hadn't been tooling around over there. And this was Season
2, Episode 99: The Unseen Footage!!!
This is the universe in which MAGA Republicans live all day, every day
now. It’s safe there. Reassuring. And the bargain they’ve
made with their media is their eternal financial and electoral loyalty in
exchange for protecting them from ever feeling stupid or wrong. And
for that reason, those people are now permanently lost to reason and
unreachable, and it is a waste of time and energy to continue to try.
From Greg Sargent at The New Republic:
In Signalgate, Trumpworld is demonstrating exactly what's wrong with
authoritarian populism: Refusal to admit error, walling out of
constructive criticism and the cult-like defense of the leader at all
costs...
What most people don't realize is that, for decades, the greatest double
act in Conservative politics was Rush Limbaugh and David
Brooks.
On hundreds of radio stations across the country, Limbaugh and his imitators
spent all their time pumping out the racist, misogynist, Liberal-stomping
poison that Republican bigots and imbeciles craved, whipping them into a
frenzy, and then aiming at the ballot box.
Limbaugh was so effective at being the Republican party's National Ward Boss
Without Portfolio, that when Republicans took over both houses of congress in
1994, party leaders made a very public show of personally thanking him for the
victory. They threw him a parade. They made him an honorary member
of congress. The invested him with the title of "Majority Maker".
And there is a straight line -- plain and clear -- from that day to
this. From the rise of Limbaugh to the election of Donald Trump.
This is how Rush Limbaugh spent his precious time on Earth..
For his part, David Brooks spent his entire career serving the Republican
elite and credulous Americans of all stripes by reassuring his millions of
readers that men like Limbaugh didn't really exist or were, at best, marginal
political actors.
Brooks' job was to act as America's tour guide through a sanitized,
Disneyfied, Potemkin Republican party. A happy land where the
animatronic peasants spent their days rhapsodizing about the joys of supply
side economics, and spent their evenings out on the porch, reading Edmund
Burke's "Reflections on the Revolution In France" to the
animatronic young 'uns, while their animatronic son, a strapping lad of
twenty named Joey Tabula Rasa, was off with animatronic friends, earnestly
pondering the question of why antiwar protesters were such ill-mannered,
shouty, anti-American fools.
You think I'm kidding? Wrote a long thing about Joey Tabula
Rasa, Brooks' Magic Patriot Dream Kinder if you're interested. The original text has long since vanished
from history along with the rest of the now-defunct
Weekly Standard archives, but since I have outlasted the
Weekly Standard, selections from Rupert Murdoch's high-end Conservative
rag can still be found in my archives.
You're welcome.
The point of which is that Brooks told reassured his millions of
New York Times readers, and the millions who saw him on
Meet the Press nearly every week, and the hundreds who saw him on PBS
every Friday, and the dozens who heard him on NPR every week...that there was
no need for them to look behind the curtain. No need to visit the
political abattoir where the filthy work of revving up the Pig People to vote
to cut their own economic throats because Guns, God and Gays took
place.
All was well!
Everything was fine, running smoothly and in the hands of able men and women
who were steering a true course.
And every time the public caught a glimpse of what was
really going on behind the Republican electoral curtain and were
horrified by it, well, Brooks had a ready answer for that too.
If the Republican monster that got out of the lab and started to stink up
Brooks' fairy tales was Tom DeLay, then obviously the problem was
Both Sides! O tempora, o mores! From David Brooks in 2006:
...
There are two major parties on the ballot, but there are three major
parties in America. There is the Democratic Party, the Republican Party
and the McCain-Lieberman Party.
All were on display Tuesday night.
The Democratic Party was represented by its rising force — Ned Lamont
on a victory platform with the net roots exulting before him and Al
Sharpton smiling just behind.
The Republican Party was represented by its collapsing old guard —
scandal-tainted Tom DeLay trying to get his name removed from the
November ballot. And the McCain-Lieberman Party was represented by Joe
Lieberman himself, giving a concession speech that explained why
polarized primary voters shouldn’t be allowed to define the choices in
American politics.
The McCain-Lieberman Party begins with a rejection of the Sunni-Shiite
style of politics itself. It rejects those whose emotional attachment to
their party is so all-consuming it becomes a form of tribalism, and who
believe the only way to get American voters to respond is through
aggression and stridency.
The flamers in the established parties tell themselves that their
enemies are so vicious they have to be vicious too. They rationalize
their behavior by insisting that circumstances have forced them to
shelve their integrity for the good of the country. They imagine that
once they have achieved victory through pulverizing rhetoric they will
return to the moderate and nuanced sensibilities they think they still
possess.
But the experience of DeLay and the net-root DeLays in the Democratic
Party amply demonstrates that means determine ends. Hyper-partisans may
have started with subtle beliefs, but their beliefs led them to
partisanship and their partisanship led to malice and malice made them
extremist, and pretty soon they were no longer the same people...
If the Republican monster that broke containment and started to stink up
Brooks' fairy tales was the Fake Tea Party, not to worry. Brooks went on
Meet the Press, flashed his PhD in Knowing Racism Stuff, and right
there, in front of God and everybody, extrapolated from his single, jog-by
observation of a Fake Tea Party Rally and a Black family reunion going on near
each other that didn't result in a riot, that the Tea Baggers were the goddamn
salt of the goddamn Earth. The best kind of people! And not at all
racist!
If the Republican monster that got out of the lab and started to stink up
Brooks' fairy tales was Sarah Palin, not to worry. Just a tiny glitch in
the matrix that has been taken care of and everything was fine now.
The big Republican accomplishment is that they have detoxified their
brand. Four years ago they seemed scary and extreme to a lot of people.
They no longer seem that way. The wins in purple states like North
Carolina, Iowa and Colorado are clear indications that the party can at
least gain a hearing among swing voters. And if the G.O.P. presents a
reasonable candidate (and this year’s crop was very good), then
Republicans can win anywhere. I think we’ve left the Sarah Palin phase and
entered the Tom Cotton phase.
If you're doing the math at home, yes, this was just seven short months before
Trump oozed down the escalator, slipped right past David Brooks' animatronic Republican voters and into the hearts of the actual Republican base. And Trump did this relatively easily by speaking the the base in their native tongue: Limbaugh-ese. Named after the #1 Republican king-maker and power broker who Brooks had spent the previous 20 years pretending either did not exist, or was just a clown to whom no Serious Person needed to pay any attention.
And speaking of Il Douche...if the Republican monster that got out of the lab and
started to stink up Brooks' fairy tales was the possible nomination of Donald
Trump, not to worry, because
"the governing wing of the Republican Party"
would soon swing into action and save them from both Donald Trump and Ted Cruz
by rocketing Marco Rubio to power.
And when that failed to materialize, not to worry, because (and I'm betting
you all forgot about this particular very short con)... averitable
...League of Extraordinary Whig Gentlemen were ready to
spring into action! ("The Lincoln Caucus"):
Or they could choose the collective path.
This is the path that recognizes that the situation we’re in now is
more like a parliamentary process than a presidential process. Even
very small groups can have an amazing influence over big candidates
who are trying to build a majority coalition. Think of the way small
Israeli religious parties extract concessions from the much larger
Israeli parties.
So I’m suggesting some number of delegates organize themselves into a
caucus called the Lincoln Caucus. The Lincoln Caucus would not be an
explicitly anti-Trump caucus or an anti-Cruz caucus. It would just be
a caucus made up of delegates who are not happy with the choices
currently before them.
...
Earth's mightiest imaginary Conservative heroes who would remake the
GOP exactly as David Brooks wished it to be:
The first thing the Lincoln Caucus would do is plant a flag for a
different style of Republicanism. Members of the caucus would remind
the country that there still are Republicans who believe in prudent
globalism, reform conservative ideas to lift up the working class.
There are still Republicans who believe in certain standards of polite
behavior in public and pragmatic compromise.
And either save the party from ruin:
This process would bring the Trump and Cruz campaigns back toward
the Republican mainstream. It would create a road toward party unity
after one deal or another was reached. It might go some way toward
heading off a general election debacle.
It would also create a democratic path toward a Republican nominee
who is not Trump or Cruz...
Mostly, members of the Lincoln Caucus would stand up for the
legitimate rights of the party. In our republican system, it is
parties that choose nominees; not primary voters. Parties are lasting
institutions that manage coalitions, preserve historical commitments,
protect us from flash-in-the-pan demagogues and impose restraints on
the excessively ambitious. The Lincoln Caucus would embody these
legitimate institutional responsibilities.
Or, wait out the Trumpocalypse in David Brooks' Justice League World Headquarters and emerge from the rubble to lead the survivors towards a brighter, Whiggier tomorrow:
If the Republican ticket gets devastated in November, members of the Lincoln Caucus could say, “We stood for something different,” and they’d be in a good position to lead the rebuilding process.
And when Brooks had piled up so much failure on top of failure on top of still
more failure as to make a mountain of failure so high that its peak
reached beyond the Stratosphere, the Mesosphere, the Thermosphere, and the
Exosphere, Brooks coped by conjured up a new fairy tale. Maybe Trump winning was actually a good thing because it was definitely going to usher in a New Conservative Intellectual
Renaissance -- a Conservative Intellectual Renaissance so powerful and catchy
that it would sweep aside stodgy oldster political thinking and by next summer
all the rock and roll kids would be dancing to it in their raves and
discotheques and sock hops.
What’s bad for the gavel is good for the pen. The Republican Party is in
the midst of a cataclysmic transformation. But all the political turmoil
is creating a burst of intellectual creativity on the right...
And who was going to lead this Imaginary Conservative Renaissance Which Was
Definitely Just Around The Corner? A bunch of toddlers you have never
heard of, and...(emphasis added)
...Other conservatives are rising to defend that order, including National Review’s Jonah Goldberg, who later this month comes out with his epic and debate-shifting book,
“Suicide of the West.”
Yes, the field marshal of Mr. Brooks' New Conservative revolution was going to
be the same shitbag who wrote "Liberal Fascism".
Because as history has shown again and again, Mr. David Brooks of
The New York Times still retains one fundamental characteristic common
to all Conservatives, from Brooks to Donald Trump: revulsion at the idea
of admitting that they are wrong which is wired into them at the metabolic
level.
In Brooks' case, only after events have very publicly pulverized one of his
marquee opinions will he allow that maybe he needs to go have a lil' think on
the matter. Then he dashes out to the "country" for a minute, and returns with his initial idiocy transformed into Fresh!New!Idiocy!
But of course, any Fresh!New!Idiocy! must be built upon the bones of the
Stale!Old!Idiocy because, as I might have mentioned, all Conservatives -- from
Tucker Carlson to Tom Nichols, and from Charlie Kirk to Charlie Sykes -- share
a common horror at the idea that not only have they been wrong all along, but
that the Left has been right about the Right all along.
And any hint
that such a heresy is treated as a monstrous aggression which
cannot be allowed to stand.
Which is why, whatever treason, depravity and madness the Republican party gets up to, in the end, it must have been our fault all along.
Which is why, while David Brooks may not be the single most ubiquitous and toxic force in modern
American political history, he is fucking well up on that
podium.
