Professional Left Podcast Episode 1001: 119 Billion Kilometers and Counting

“My characters hope for better lives.”  -- Octavia Butler

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Professional Left Podcast Episode 1000: For Your Consideration

“It usually takes me more than three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech”  -- Mark Twain

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PBS Steel Cage Death Match...

...are words no sensible person would ever hammer together into a sentence.  But you good people get a sneak peek at the reason for that sentence, which we will be covering in greater length on the 1000th episode of the Professional Left Podcast on Thursday (weather permitting.) 

The reason that sentence makes no sense is because anyone who has watched PBS panels for more than a minute can identify their unique set of cultural expectations.  Avoid profanity.  No muttering asides about what a dumbfuck so-and-so is.  No reality teevee 'confessionals" after the panel where a participant can really cut loose.  Always be collegial, even when your "colleague" is lying their ass off.  

And above all, no shouting.  Business must be conducted in the proper tone -- interactions kept within the 50 to 60 decibel "quiet conversation" range.  Maybe jump it up to 65 when propping up someone's lame joke with some PBS-brand jolly laughter.  

But however hard they work to sand down any differences, then pack those differences in the cotton batting of PBS-speak, there are moments more and more frequently when it's clear that the Left side of the panel would very much like to call the Right side of the panel out for being a lying sumbitch. 

So this banal exchange is about as close as you're going to get to PBS News Hour panelists rasslin'.

From The PBS News Hour, June 12...

This is the exchange on PBS Friday between Mr. David Brooks and Mr. Jonathan Capehart, with emphasis added:

David Brooks:  ... The Trump thing is just weird. He's just -- he appoints Bill Pulte, who's clearly not even close, within a Pacific Ocean, of being qualified for this job. And then he turns around, and to make the permanent acting, not acting, but the permanent director of DNI, Jay Clayton, who's totally like superstar level by Trump's standards.

So how does the same guy pick two people, one with such radically different qualifications? The one thing I should add is that I don't like what the Democrats are doing here. I understand you don't like Bill Pulte. I understand you think he should not have been appointed. And that, you're absolutely 100 percent correct.

But the FISA program works well. We are now -- as Speaker Johnson made the point, we're now -- we got the World Cup here. We got the Iranian thing going on. We need all the intelligence I can get. And that FISA program supplies, I'm told, half the president's daily intelligence brief.

That's a lot of information and valuable information. It's a very well-working program. And the Democrats are not repeal -- or not renewing it sort of in my view out of spite, but they're making us less safe.  

The moderator then turns to Jonathan Capehart, who asks an obvious question

Jonathan Capehart:   How this became the Democrats' fault is curious to me.

One -- a couple of things to keep in mind. One, even though the law has expired, it was reauthorized by a FISA court in March of 2026', this past March, which goes through March of 27. So Congress has time to come back and reauthorize it, do whatever they need to do, because it's not just Democrats who have concerns about the law. It's Republicans as well.

So I just don't think it's right to say it's all the Democrats' fault, especially when they're not even in the majority in either house.  

After which the moderator, Geoff Bennett, immediately changes the subject, which is what the moderator always does whenever there is the slightest danger of David Brooks being made a fool of by someone who came armed with facts.  

So, rather than pursuing the question of, hey, why the hell are you blaming Democrats when they don’t control anything, we get, "In the time that remains, David, do your Sunday night plans involve being at the White House for a UFC match, by chance?"

Ha ha ha.  Potential unpleasantness averted.  Collegiality restored.  Audience soothed.    

Trivial, right?  Hardly worth mentioning, right?  And I wouldn’t have mentioned it were it not for the fact that it is one more example of an unholy ritual performed over and over again on that set, involving the same people, operating according to the same assumptions.

For example, you will undoubtedly remember that, one day after one of Trump’s ICE goons murdered Rene Good in cold blood on camera, the same Messer's. Brooks and Capehart were invited to share their opinions about that murder.

And Brooks did his thing like a man dispatched from Centrist Thought HQ with a very important mission: whatever the question is, the answer must always be “both sides are basically the same kind of confused, noble, tragic souls squinting at reality through fogged-up moral lenses.”

And in this case, the prompt is not subtle. It’s a video of a woman being shot in Minnesota. A real-world, immediate, ugly, concrete thing. The sort of thing that, historically speaking, usually calls for at least a directional opinion.

Instead, Brooks doesn’t just bend over backward – he gave it the full Cirque du Soleil routine of intellectual contortion, folding himself across multiple dimensions just to avoid saying, plainly, what he thinks of what people just saw.

And you can almost hear the gears turning: how do I not take a position, but still sound like I am wisely refusing to take a position?

So he doesn’t say “I’m not taking a side.” No. That would be too simple. Too honest. Instead, he goes searching through the attic of American memory and drags down a dusty old artifact: a 1951 football game film.   A filmed college football game where both teams watched it afterward and each concluded the refs had screwed them differently. Which, apparently, is now the master key to understanding modern political violence.

And the argument emerges in its full Brooksian foulness: people interpret reality through bias, everyone sees what they want to see, therefore everything is politics, therefore no interpretation is more grounded than any other, therefore the wise posture is… eternal suspended judgment.

It’s the same fucking column he’s been writing for 24 years. Different props, same stage play. Swap in Iraq, swap in Trump, swap in a shooting in Minnesota—doesn’t matter. The conclusion is always hovering in a nonexistent middle ground.  

Meanwhile, sitting across from him was Jonathan Capehart, doing that very modern cable-news thing where you are professionally required to witness something grotesque and surreal and respond with PBS impassivity.

You can see the “are you hearing this shit?” energy radiating off him. The body language of someone who is one sentence away from standing up and walking off set, but is restrained by the invisible PBS leash that says: we will discuss your feelings, but only in approved tonal ranges.

And he tries to steer it back toward something resembling the actual subject. Because the question was not “what does 1951 college football teach us about epistemology.” The question was: what do you think about this shooting?

Brooks, however, has already made track for Centerville.  He’s back in his seminar on the Sociology of Perception mode, concluding that all humans are basically trapped in interpretive fog banks and therefore—surprise—we should be very cautious about concluding anything at all.

Which is how you end up in that very familiar elite media cul-de-sac where:

Something happens in the real world

It is immediately translated into a meditation on perception

The meditation conveniently avoids any judgment about the thing that happened

And the absence of judgment is reframed as wisdom

And the segment lands where it always lands: in that posture of cultivated detachment that looks, from the outside, less like intellectual humility and more like refusal to face reality. 

You will also remember these same people on this same stage back in August of last year.  Brooks "Both Sidesed" Trump ordering Texas to gerrymander him five new congressional seats out of thin air, and Gavin Newsom fighting back with the only weapon he has.  

He also bitched that "no one is marching in the streets" over this shit because apparently from the Acela corridor quiet car he can't see the millions who have been out in the streets in all kinds of weather for all kinds of marches.  Or maybe he's just a legacy media troll who shoulda been given the hook 20 years ago.

You see, it’s not any one of these examples – and there are dozens more on PBS alone.  Hundreds more from Brooks over the years.  And hundreds of thousands more across all legacy media platforms over the decades.  

It is the collective weight of all of them.  The relentless repetition of variations of this one lie that has incepted that lie as an axiomatic truth in the subconscious of millions and millions of our fellow citizens.  

That's when you get the 10,000th iteration of garbage like this.  From Wake Up To Politics:

Could There Be a Third Party for Moderates?

It turns out, Americans agree on an awful lot.

Burn The Lifeboats

The Atlantic Lied To You

The 7,000 words of meandering TL;DR Both Siderism that The Atlantic paid David Brooks to write is actually just three David Brooks New York Times, "The Extremes on Both Sides" columns in a trench coat.

Once again Brooks has divided the human universe into "traditionalists" and "progressives", who are both a little bit right and both equally wrong.  Example:

...to contend successfully with the traditionalists’ effects on our politics and culture, we also need to recognize that elements of their worldview are correct. But which parts are correct, and which are completely off the rails?

And, as always, Brooks offers up a Third Way out of the artificial and reductive binary human universe he has invented: a sorta forward-leaning revival of tradition within modernity.

It's really nothing more than that, bloated up to 7,000 words.

Some scientists have theorized that the reason David Brooks has been unwilling to write anything other than variations on "Both Sides Do It" for the last quarter of a century is that he was traumatized by this terrible season three episode of Star Trek TOS at a tender age -- 

-- and that, in order to temporarily exorcise that trauma, he enacts and externalizes it every time he sits down to write.  

Others, who are less charitable, think that Mr. Brooks figured out early on that the American political, academic and corporate elite will never tire of having their favorite cliche Beltway fairy tale endlessly repackaged and repeated back to them.  And that dedicating his professional life to doing that one thing was the key to winning the devotion of those elites, and a a license to print money.

 

Burn The Lifeboats

And Then, When No One Was Watching, Came This Remarkable Exchange

While everyone else (including me) was watching the Artemis II crew's bull's-eye splashdown, safely and successfully ending their historic mission, over in the pocket universe of PBS three relics of a bygone media age sat around a table asking, "What the fuck happened to our profession?"

 Geoff Bennett:

And, Jonathan, 61 percent of Americans, including 30 percent of Republicans, now say that President Trump has become erratic with age. That's according to a recent Reuters-Ipsos poll.

The press corps -- I guess we should hold up a mirror to ourselves. The press corps spent two years making President Biden's mental fitness, his acuity the story. Why isn't that same scrutiny now being applied to President Trump broadly?

Jonathan Capehart:

Yes. Yes, exactly.

That has been my question since -- excuse me -- since January 20 of last year. We, the press, spent a lot of time talking about President Biden and his age because he looked old. He moved slowly. He wasn't as vigorous and agile, supposedly, as the guy he pushed out of office and then the guy who was running against him.

And even little slips of the tongue were used to show, see, aha, he's not all there. He's losing his mind.

How does that compare to what we're going through right now? I wish people who have written books -- people who have gone on air talking about President Biden nonstop, where are they now? Where are those books now that we have a president who has given ample evidence, ample evidence that something is not right?

Where are the people who are standing up and saying, you know what, something needs to be done? And that goes back to some -- you were talking about the founders. They were prepared for something like this. What they weren't prepared for was the Article I branch just ceding all authority.

What they weren't prepared for were people from the president's own party willing to either turn a blind eye or enable him to run roughshod over the Constitution. Even when you have got him out there threatening annihilation of a civilization, even when he's started a war for no reason and the enemy is in a stronger position now than it was before he started this war of his own choosing?

At some point, Republicans writ large and those on Capitol Hill have to start standing up for the Article I prerogatives, but also start standing up for the country. I don't know how much longer we as a nation can withstand this. And I know the world is beyond done with us, but I think they're also frightened of us.

David Brooks:

I wouldn't say that we in the mainstream media have been exactly pro-Trump Cheering section. I mean, our business model is bashing Trump. We know we can get clicks and ratings if we bash Trump enough. So we do it over and over and over and again, without having anything interesting to say half the time.

And, by the way, if we did do everything we could, it wouldn't -- it wouldn't make a difference. The people who need to be persuaded are not persuaded by us. We have been doing this since 2015. And so I'm not totally persuaded it would make a huge difference if we challenged his age and mental acuity, because we have been doing it morally for 10 years.

So, to summarize, in this creaky, ancient ritual, as the moderator, Bennet, is constrained to never state an opinion about anything.  If a meteor smacked into the studio during taping, his contractually obligated response would be, "Some people say that a meteor has just crashed through our ceiling.  What, if any, are the political implications?"  

The other participants, one supposedly "Right" and the other putatively "Left" then engage in a civil exchange in which David Brooks says something absurd or ridiculous or false on its face, and the other party is required by the rules of this kabuki to never raise their voice or call into question Mr. Brooks' honesty or integrity.   

Thus the illusion of a free press operating in an open marketplace of ideas is maintained for the eleven people who still watch this routinized diorama.

However, on any given Friday there are theoretically an unlimited number of questions that could be posed by the moderator.  And usually those questions are designed to be very...beige. Tepid.  Bland, poorly seasoned potato salad at the barbecue, served up so as not to raise the blood pressure of the eleven senior citizens for whom this is Friday evening must-see teevee.  But this time the question was about the media itself.  Specifically -- and swaddled in carefully neutral tones -- about how the media has catastrophically failed us all.  

To be clear, according to the arcane rules under which this ritual operates, Mr. Capehart could not come right out and say, "Fuck you Jake Tapper."  But he might as well have.  Also taking pains to specify that the Republican party is the problem is always appreciated.

Of course, finishing with "At some point, Republicans writ large and those on Capitol Hill have to start standing up for..." yadda yadda is just sheer wish-casting nonsense.  The GOP Capehart dreams of is long dead and its zombie corpse is trying to drag the rest of us into the grave with it.

But the real prize here is the bitter, post-facto nihilism of David Brooks.  

As Judd Legum amply documents here...

Manufacturing a political crisis
...

But while Hur's views about Biden's memory were worth mentioning, the media instead treated Hur's amateur medical judgments as a political crisis for Biden and an existential threat to his reelection campaign. But the actual threat to Biden's political prospects is the deluge of negative media coverage based on Hur's conjecture. A Popular Information analysis found that just three major papers — the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal — collectively published 81 articles about Hur's assessment of Biden's memory in the four days following the release of Hur's report. Incidents that raised questions about former President Trump's mental state received far less coverage by the same outlets.

Overall, The New York Times published 30 stories about Biden's alleged memory issues between February 7 and February 10. Over those four days, the story was covered by 24 reporters (some of whom filed multiple stories), four opinion columnists, and the New York Times Editorial Board.

Hur's report legally clearing Biden was described in the New York Times as "a political disaster," "a political nightmare," "a new political crisis," and "a political mess." The paper said the report inflicted "searing political damage," placed "Mr. Biden’s advanced age… back at the center of America’s political conversation," and constituted "a gift" to Republicans. And that's just what was included in purportedly objective "news" reports. After Hur's report, New York Times opinion columnists with no medical credentials said Biden showed "signs of senescence" and suggested he was sliding "into dementia." Another said Hur's report proved "Biden should not be running for re-election" and blamed Biden's mental state for "the emboldenment of America’s rivals." The New York Times Editorial Board described the report ominously as "a dark moment for Mr. Biden’s presidency."

Only one of those stories mentioned a key fact: Hur is completely unqualified to render a judgment on Biden's mental capacity.

...and Margaret Sullivan documents here...

The media's circular logic and destructive obsession with Biden's age

Yes, it's fast becoming the 2024 version of the media's obsession with Hillary's emails

The New York Times was, of course, just asking questions.

Why, oh why, do Joe Biden’s age, memory failures and gaffes seem to hurt him so much more than Donald Trump’s age, memory failures and gaffes hurt him?

These questions were being pondered in the most influential real estate in all of media: a front-page news article, above the fold, on Sunday. (Even in this digital age, that print front page, especially on Sunday, packs a punch.)

The sub-headline summarized the issue: “Biden Is Hurt by Flubs More Than Trump Is.”

And the article stated: “While Mr. Biden, 81, has been dogged by doubts and concerns about his advancing years from voters, Mr. Trump, who is 77, has not felt the same blowback.”

“Dogged by,” you say? Who, exactly, is doing the dogging?

Maybe the Times and other major media outlets ought to look in the mirror.

CNN, meanwhile, was running this chyron: “Is Biden’s Age Now a Bigger Problem Than Trump’s Indictments?” A panel gave this question every due consideration, and then some.

And then there was the rundown of Times opinion offerings — one piece after another, all in a neat row, about Biden’s age and memory.

...The New York Times led the pack of "Biden is old" legacy media jackals trying to kneecap the 2024 Biden campaign, at a time when Mr. Brooks was the apex op-ed writer at that publication.

Also Margaret Sullivan's comparison was spot-on: "Biden is old" did become the 2024 version of the media's obsession with Hillary's emails.

And, as long-time readers may recall, Mr. Brooks was also the apex op-ed writer at The New York Times as it led the pack of "But her emails" legacy media jackals trying to kneecap the 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign.  First, when it looked like Bernie Sanders might win the Democratic nomination, Brooks cranked out 700 words of drivel "Both Sidesing" Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump.  And when Hillary Clinton won the Democratic nomination, Brooks immediately pivoted, cranking out 700 words of drivel "Both Sidesing" Hillary and Trump (see "David Brooks: Both Siderism Is a Farce that Gives Us Meaning").

And this was not a one-off.   After the Bush regime collapsed and all of Brooks' Neocon National Greatness dreams died with it, Brooks spent the rest of his career literally doing nothing but vomiting out one column of Both Sides garbage after another on the op-ed page of The New York Times.

And now that the mask has dropped and the beating heart of Brooks' former party has shown itself to be the fascist monster Liberals warned that it was?  

Now that it is unequivocally clear that the media's "Both Sides" fetish is what helped keep MAGA bigots and imbeciles on-side, and lowered the bar far enough for America's feckless, clueless "Undecides" and "Independents" to vote to put the worst person in the world back in the White House?

After all that, where does Mr. Brooks land?

First, he renders his profession down to what clowns like Brooks have made of it: the crass pursuit of "clicks and ratings".

Second, and most pathetically of all, he reduces his entire, toxic career to a giant shrug emoji.  Claiming as his alibi for his poisonous career choices that none of it made any difference.  That even if clowns like Brooks had actually tried harder, it wouldn't have matter.

And, by the way, if we did do everything we could, it wouldn't -- it wouldn't make a difference. The people who need to be persuaded are not persuaded by us. 

This is a lie so immense that it's genuinely hard to quantify.  

Sure, the MAGA zombies are unpersuadable, but that's because they're wired that way.  Their impregnable ignorance?  Their impervious bigotry.  Son, those were features, not bugs.  These MAGA zombies were drawn into the party precisely because they found a welcome home there.  Their ignorance was flattered.  Their intolerance was praised as patriotism.  They became the GOP's reliably reprogrammable meatbags, in a process that unfolded over decades right in front of David Brooks -- America's most ubiquitous public "intellectual" -- who went right on pretending that everything was fine and/or that Both Sides were equally awful.  

But as for the "Both Sides Do It" media cult that Brooks piloted?  Take it from someone who has been documenting its deleterious effects on our politics for 21 years, that has been wildly successful.  

We may never know how many millions of wobbly Republicans who were having doubts about the GOP were persuaded to stay on Team Evil because they believed the Both Sides lie.  And we may never know how many additional millions of those feckless, clueless "Undecide" and "Independent" voters -- people who actually watch things like PBS and Meet the Press and read publications like The New York Times and believe what they see and read -- cast their ballot for the worst people in the world or pissed their vote away on doomed third-party candidates because scum like Brooks spent a professional lifetime telling them that it didn't matter because speech codes at Cornell University were somehow as bad and dangerous as an armed insurrection waged against the United States government.   

But we can say with confidence that the Both Sides lie has been incredibly persuasive.  That it has helped determine the outcome of critical elections.  And that it has done real and permanent damage to this country.

And for his sins, Mr. David Brooks has been lured away from the Times by The Atlantic, where he will spend his declining years cranking out the same drivel as always, but instead of being paid a princely sum to perform his little dance twice a week,  The Atlantic appears to be happy paying him a princely sum to do his thing once every few months.

Funny old world.

I Am The Liberal Media

Shut Up and Go Away

Most of you are no doubt familiar with Tom Friedman's infamous "Suck on this" moment on the now-defunct Charlie Rose Show in May of 2003.  

But but don't sleep on Rose leading Friedman off by confidently asserting, "Now that the war is over...":

At the time, this was the received wisdom of the Beltway Sages.  For example, here is David Brooks writing for Bill Kristol's Weekly Standard in 2003, practically endzone dancing with delight because now that Bush had been proven unequivocally right about everything, boy howdy were those dirty hippies gonna finally get what's coming to them.

The Collapse of the Dream Palaces 

Mass destruction of mistaken ideas. 

APR 28, 2003

... Now that the war in Iraq is over, we'll find out how many people around the world are capable of facing unpleasant facts. For the events of recent months confirm that millions of human beings are living in dream palaces, to use Fouad Ajami's phrase. They are living with versions of reality that simply do not comport with the way things are. They circulate and recirculate conspiracy theories, myths, and allegations with little regard for whether or not these fantasies are true. And the events of the past month have exposed them as the falsehoods they are... 

Finally, there is the dream palace of the American Bush haters. In this dream palace, there is so much contempt for Bush that none is left over for Saddam or for tyranny. Whatever the question, the answer is that Bush and his cronies are evil. What to do about Iraq? Bush is evil. What to do about the economy? Bush is venal. What to do about North Korea? Bush is a hypocrite.

In this dream palace, Bush, Cheney, and a junta of corporate oligarchs stole the presidential election, then declared war on Iraq to seize its oil and hand out the spoils to Halliburton and Bechtel. In this dream palace, the warmongering Likudniks in the administration sit around dreaming of conquests in Syria, Iran, and beyond. In this dream palace, the boy genius Karl Rove hatches schemes to use the Confederate flag issue to win more elections, John Ashcroft wages holy war on American liberties, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and his cabal of neoconservatives long for global empire. In this dream palace, every story of Republican villainy is believed, and all the windows are shuttered with hate.

My third guess is that the Bush haters will grow more vociferous as their numbers shrink. Even progress in Iraq will not dampen their anger, because as many people have noted, hatred of Bush and his corporate cronies is all that is left of their leftism. And this hatred is tribal, not ideological. And so they will still have their rallies, their alternative weeklies, and their Gore Vidal polemics. They will still have a huge influence over the Democratic party, perhaps even determining its next presidential nominee. But they will seem increasingly unattractive to most moderate and even many normally Democratic voters who never really adopted outrage as their dominant public emotion. 

In other words, there will be no magic "Aha!" moment that brings the dream palaces down. Even if Saddam's remains are found, even if weapons of mass destruction are displayed, even if Iraq starts to move along a winding, muddled path toward normalcy, no day will come when the enemies of this endeavor turn around and say, "We were wrong. Bush was right." They will just extend their forebodings into a more distant future. Nevertheless, the frame of the debate will shift. The war's opponents will lose self-confidence and vitality. And they will backtrack. They will claim that they always accepted certain realities, which, in fact, they rejected only months ago.

The magic of this piece of persiflage -- and all such super-patriot Salacious B. Crumb caterwauling...

...by all your favorite Neocon pundits back in the day -- is not merely that it got everything wrong, but that it got everything perfectly backwards.  

It's the GOP base/Tea Party/MAGA meatheads that grew more vociferous.  Even President Obama trying to clean up the ruin they left in their wake, and asking nothing more than everyone help out and meet in the middle did not dampen their anger, because as many people have noted, hatred of the Left (and all the usual fascist scapegoats) is all that is left of Right. 

And this hatred is tribal, not ideological. And so they will still have their MAGA rallies, their podcasts, their Hate Radio and their Fox News garbage. They will still have a huge influence over the Republican party, perhaps even determining its next presidential nominee. But they will seem increasingly unattractive to sane, normal humans who never really adopted outrage as their dominant public emotion. 

And there was never any  magic "Aha!" moment that brought their Neocon dream palaces down.  None of them ever missed a meal.  Most of the got promotions and book deals. No matter how far Democrats extend themselves and offer compromise after compromise to repair the damage the GOP has done to this country, no day will come when Republican politicians, pundits and the base of the party turn around and say, "We were wrong. The Left was right." They will just extend their forebodings into a more distant future. 

Nevertheless, the frame of the debate will shift. The Right's lies and conspiracy theories will get progressively stupider, as the ghouls and grifters who spread them get progressively richer.  And they will backtrack, and reverse themselves again and again. 

They will claim that they always accepted certain realities, which, in fact...

...they rejected...

...only days before...

2011 video of Trump is going viral after Iran attack:

"Our president will start a war with Iran because he has no ability to negotiate. He's weak and he's ineffective."pic.twitter.com/QR9v3h0hdo

— Joe Rogan Podcast News (@joeroganhq) February 28, 2026

No Half Measures

Professional Left Podcast Episode 970: Lifeboats And How To Burn Them

"The Nazi regime is devoid of all theme and principle except appetite and racial domination."  --Winston Churchill, June 22, 1941.

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The Gospel According to Saint David

Sitting in a dark room, blindfolded, using only my fingertips while wearing goatskin insulated electrician's gloves, I can still find the "But the Democrats...",  "But the Liberals...",  "But the speech codes at Swarthmore..." razor in the apple of every Brooks column critiquing Trump/Republicans. 

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

The New York Times To Consciously Uncouple From David Brooks

But they will continue to co-parent the Both Sides Do It monster they spawned.

From The Atlantic (with emphasis added):

The Atlantic hires David Brooks as a staff writer
New home for his writing, and to launch a video podcast

The Atlantic is announcing that David Brooks, who for years has contributed memorable Atlantic cover stories and essays on political and societal issues, is joining the magazine as a staff writer beginning next month. The Atlantic will be the home for all of David’s writing, and he will also host a new weekly video podcast that will launch later this spring. David worked as an opinion columnist at The New York Times for 22 years.

In a note to staff, The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, writes: “David’s work––his columns, his stories for us, and his many books––have made him known and acclaimed around the world. He is, among other things, America’s best pop sociologist, someone with a reporter’s curiosity and a writer’s grace. He is an unparalleled diagnostician of the faults and weaknesses of governments, institutions, and social structures, as our readers know from such stories as...

Yadda, Yadda, Yadda. 

I, for one, cannot wait for the avalanche of saccharine legacy media encomiums. 

It's rumored that David Broder himself will rise from the grave to give a toast at Brook's farewell gala.  

Then there's this:

Never doubt that there is a Club kids.

And never doubt that none of us will ever be members.

I Am The Liberal Media

David Brooks: Insipid, Ridiculous, Toxic and Eternal.

Do you like cilantro?  

I don't like cilantro.  I'm one of those people who are genetically wired to register "soap" when I taste cilantro.   Yes, I know.  I suffer terribly.  

But some people love it.  They add it to everything.  Whatever the dish it -- fish, pizza, mashed potatoes, oatmeal, Aunt Hattie's 90th birthday cake -- in goes the cilantro.  They can't get enough of that soapy ass devil's weed.  

And some of them assume that, if it tastes foul to you, well, you probably just had one bad experience and you know what, it probably wasn't even cilantro's fault!  Or perhaps you just don't understand cilantro, man.  Like on a deep, spiritual level.  

Either way, the solution is to keep trying it until you see the light.  

Or maybe the problem is that you're slow; maybe they haven't explained the glories of cilantro simply enough or a sufficient number of times for you to get it yet.  

Yeah.  Maybe repetition is the key.  Maybe the problem isn't that they've used too much cilantro, but too little.  Maybe adding it to fish and pizza and mashed potatoes and oatmeal and Aunt Hattie's 90th birthday cake wasn't enough to persuade you of its subtle majesty.   Maybe they need to throw every other spice away.  Put it in coffee.  In fried chicken.  In Coke.  

If only there were some way to make it universal...  

If we could all live, united, in a great Cilantroverse...

If you would just relax.  

Sleep. 

Let the pods do their work.

Then you would awake in a world where you will finally understand the glories of cilantro.

Nope.  Still tastes nasty.  

And thus we arrive, at last, at the January 9, 2026 New York Times column by Mr. David Brooks.  Which is, by my count, 1,507th column since he began his tenure at the at the Times in which he has ham-fistedly shoved his Both Siderist cilantro down his reader's throats...if that cilantro were ideological hemlock. 

Date, time, subject -- none of that matters.  This is literally the only thing Brooks writes about.  Or, more accurately, this is the only thing the Sulzberger family pays him to write about  The only thing The Atlantic pays him to write about.  The only thing PBS and NPR book him on to talk about.  

Two days ago, federal ICE goons carried out the cold-blooded, state-sanctioned murder of a woman named Renee Nicole Good on the streets of Minneapolis, Minnesota.  Since many citizens were filming this from several different angles, the facts are not in doubt: it was murder, pure and simple.

And before the body was cold, the Trump administration lies were flying thick and fast.   

DHS posted their lies on social media.  They posted that she was a violent rioter who weaponized her vehicle.  That was a lie.  That she attempted to run over law enforcement officers in an attempt to kill them—an act of domestic terrorism.  That was a lie.  That the ICE officer fired defensive shots save his own life and that of his fellow officers. That was a lie. That multiple ICE officers were hurt.  That was a lie.  

And finally, who does the fascist regime blame for their public execution of an innocent American citizen to blame for all of this?  "Sanctuary politicians" who fuel and encourage rampant assaults on our law enforcement.  

All of it is a lie. 

And then of course, Trump himself began lying about it, calling her a "professional agitator", driving the car in very disorderly, obstructing way who then "violently, willfully, and viciously" ran over the ICE Officer. It's hard to believe that he's even alive!  But he's now recovering in the hospital. 

And who is to blame?  It’s the Radical Left!

All lies.  Every bit of it.

On Fox News, Jesse Watters highlighted that Renee Nicole Good, the woman killed by ICE, had "pronouns in her bio".  Fox News as usual is stunted whenever a victim of these kind of incidents is a white person.  They lose much of their vocabulary. 

And as this terrifying moment in American history was unfolding in real time, what did Mr. Brooks choose to write about?   

Take a wild fucking guess.  

The problem is that the populists on left and right [in the work of fiction Brooks is referencing] are disgusted by the social order and values Rustin embodies, and they tear it down...

That order and those restraints are now being destroyed. People on both left and right decided that the old neoliberal order was a hypocritical pose elites had adopted to mask their own lust for domination...

Brooks then blats on for several paragraphs about “The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness.” 

The children of darkness have advantages in their struggle against the children of light. They know what they want and don’t have to worry about nuance. It’s easier to destroy a social order than to build one. They capitalize on an elemental human reality: Humans fear death and their own insignificance. They compensate for their fears of insignificance by asserting their pride, by seeking power and control, if only vicariously through some strongman.

And who exactly are the Children of Darkness?

The left progressives and the right populists who seek to tear down the neoliberal order are being shortsighted — idiotic, frankly.

Every example of malice, intolerance, ideological arson and open fascism Brooks cites -- every single one -- is drawn from the Right.  And yet because Brooks is so utterly hollow -- a bespectacled wraith so in love with his dead and discredited ideology that, for 22 years, he has used his New York Times column to prop up its corpse and wave its arms around --  all he can think to write about at this game-changing moment in American history is what a rough time Awesome Moderates are having because of the Extremes on Both Sides.   

Because, as I noted a few paragraphs back, that is literally all Brooks ever writes about.  

This is from me, back in 2010 ("How To Write a David Brooks Column"), telling any "Young Writer out there exactly how you too can learn to write a New York Times Opinion Page Editorial just like America's Last Reasonable Conservative, David Brooks!"

In just 10 Easy Steps you'll be punditting like a pro!

1) Pick a subject. Any subject. From Tasseled Loafers to Torture, it literally does not matter.

2) Quote extensively from one person or group on the subject. It's OK to just more-or-less copy and paste in big hunks of what whatever-you-happen-to-be-reading-at-the-moment to flesh out your 800-word column. Here at the Times we call that "research"!

3) Quote from some other person or group on the same subject who appears to hold a different opinion. If no actual opposition exists, just put on your Magic Green Jacket and invent an opposing opinion.

4) Although such is not the case with today's subject, as often as possible, try to impute these fictional distinctions to the different hemispheres of the political Universe. So no matter how bigoted, reckless or just bugfuck crazy the Right behaves, you just go right ahead and blandly assert with no supporting evidence whatsoever that the Left is equally and oppositely bad in exactly the same qualities and quantities. Here at the Times we call that "seriousness"!

5) Discover in your final paragraph or two that -- amazingly! -- the precise midpoint between those two completely artificial positions on an imaginary spectrum just happens to be exactly the Right and Reasonable answer!

Oh boy!

6) Rinse and repeat. No matter what the subject, no matter how false or bizarre the equivalence, just rinse and repeat. Twice a week.

7) Every week.

8) Year.

9) After year.

10) After year.

Long ago this stopped being a "style", and started being a fetish, Mr. Brooks

And now?  15 years later?  Living under a lawless, murderous, fascist regime spawned and midwifed into existence by David Brooks' Republican party and David Brooks' conservative movement?

He's still at it.

Every week.

Year.

After year.

After year.

I Am The Liberal Media

I Have Detailed Files: Another David Brooks Adventure.

"As much as we lament the horror of what's happened over the last year, it's much more horrible than I anticipated, for people like me, we have to ask ourselves, what do we do to bring this about?" says David Brooks. https://to.pbs.org/3L9sXu2

[image or embed]

— PBS News (@pbsnews.org) December 26, 2025 at 9:30 PM

40 years too late Brooks is suddenly interested in asking, "What did people like me do to bring this about?"  

And since the dawn of the Liberal blogosphere, blogger like me have spilled millions of pixels answering this question in exhaustive detail.

Here's a short answer:

Which is why Liberal bloggers are still media pariahs, and we always will be, while Never Trumpers -- who are willing to spin comforting fairy tales and alibis for revered legacy media hacks like Brooks -- have quickly become successful and profitable legacy media darlings.  

I Am Liberal Media

Professional Left Podcast Episode 956: 2025 In Review, Part 3 (of 3)

"All the pieces matter." --  Detective Lester Freamon, The Wire

• 
  

In Certain Corners of The New York Times...

...it's always 2005.

A sheltering bower, protected from the real world by the Sulzberger family's firm belief that the nation is crying out for the opinions of these two bootless relics.

Burn The Lifeboats

Just When I Thought I Was Out...

...They Pull Me Back In.

As much as I'd like to write more about this -- so much more! -- now that the Liberal critique of politics and the media has been written out of history, I guess my civic duty is to sit patiently and wait for The Bulwark to tell me what I should think of the most recent musings of Mr. David Brooks.

While we wait, perhaps you might enjoy this post from The Before Time in which I posit a future brawl among academic historians over whether or not such a creature as a "David Brooks" could ever have actually existed:  In Search of Historic Bobo.

Or this from even further back in the Before Time in which Mr. David Brooks attempts to file a police report:  The Beast that Shouted Love at the Heart of the Congress with His Head Up His Ass While Sucking His Own Balls

Burn The Lifeboats

David Brooks Loves Murrica So Much More Than You Do

It would be a trivial matter to chalk up David Brooks' latest crime against journalism as yet another bottom-of-the-barrel scraping from one of the most "legacy" of the legacy media's professional opinion-havers who lost what little hold he had on the plot 40 years ago and has been drifting further and further from the gravitational field of actual reality ever since.

And perhaps this was the project all along.  Brooks as Sulzberger family sociological experiment like those conducted on the International Space Station on Antarctic moss or freeze-dried mouse sperm or E. coli.  to see what effect microgravity, extreme temperatures, the hard radiation of the vacuum of space might have on normally Earthbound biological life.  

In this case, the experiment began almost by accident, with the House of Sulzberger  buying Patriotism Insurance during the high cotton days of the Dubya administration by hiring not one but two of the Iraq War's biggest cheerleaders from the Weekly Standard stable of neocon vipers: David Brooks and Bill Kristol. Then, as the Dubya administration began to collapse, they decided to hang onto Brooks (and sack Kristol) because, A) sacking both of their peak-Iraq-War diversity hires at the same time would make them look even more craven than they already looked, and, B) as the legacy media mantra abruptly shifted from "Liberals are America-hating, terrorist-loving dupes" to "Both Sides Do It" Brooks was able to show the Sulzberger family his real value by his willingness to  transform himself almost overnight from the acid-penned scourge of the Murrica-hating Left to America's most zealous evangelist of Both Siderism.  

But then, having set this experiment in motion, the House of Sulzberger just sorta filed Brooks away and moved on to other things, leaving the David Brooks Project to overrun the Petri dish where it had originally been cultivated.

This environment of permissive neglect led Brooks to (pardon the metaphor shift) achieve an opinion-having escape velocity from the Real World's gravity-well of facts, history and consequences where the rest of us live.   Now Brooks exists almost entirely in a state of ontological free fall, responsive only to the microgravitational influence of the political, cultural and financial elites who are desperate to believe in the fairy tale world Brooks has invented for them.  A world where hippy-punching is still considered great sport, and the *real* Republican party -- the Party of Reagan -- is still out there somewhere waiting for this temporary MAGA aberration to subside.  

A world where the Times can't be bothered to proofread Brooks and edit for glaring typos:

Typos 3 through 5: a great man liked St. Augustine, the occasionally recklessness, and “great replacement: are bad David Brooks typos for a great man like St. Augustine, the occasional recklessness or occasionally the recklessness, and “great replacement.” cc @jfidelino_nyt pic.twitter.com/7H3CfF1r5y

— Typos of the New York Times (@nyttypos) November 28, 2025

However, even as he floats safely high above the treacherous shoals of history and razor-sharp mountains of facts, the rise of Trump as irrefutable proof that Brooks has been wrong about the Right all along, has made Brooks' Both Siderist scam exponentially tougher than it was back when I wrote this during the Before Time:

Longtime readers know of my crazy theory that Mr. David Brooks of the New York Times does not write editorial columns twice a week per se, but is instead engaged in a massive, long-range project to assemble an entire, fictional alternate history of Modern Conservationism, which is being created right before our eyes by the slow, steady accretion of one godawful Whig Fan Fiction column at a time.

I make mention of it every now and then --

To David Brooks' ongoing, long-range project of radically revising modern history by removing all the Republican treasony bits, you may now add this little gem of falsification which was partially buried under his woozy praise for Hillary Clinton's "muscular" ideas about foreign policy...

-- not because I am under any illusion that I can do anything to stop it --

These stories are not about the world as it actually exists, but the world as Mr. Brooks wishes it to be.  And since he is not a very good fiction writer, there are many, many points where the gears of the real world and his fake Whig World grind and howl, forcing Mr. Brooks to apply gallons of fictive lubricant to keep the keening noise of the real world ripping Whig World off its hinges from drowning out the tepid drone of his writing.

When Mr. Brooks needs an imaginary moral high ground of Centrism on which to stand, he conjures an imaginary army of Dirty Fucking Hippies on the Left that exactly counterpoises the very real mob of Pig People on the Right. 

When he wants to redress what he believes to be the immorality of the deficit, he wishes away the entire, debt-drunk Bush Era and instead pounds away at naughty people having sexy sex time in ways Mr. Brooks does not approve of and invents Whig FanFic "grand bargain" and "austerity" sub-genres wherein he expounds on his rustic theories about money and cutting social programs.  After which he regularly has his ass absolutely sawed off and served up on the fine china by people like Dean Baker and Paul Krugman and myriad others who actually know what they're talking about.

...

-- but simply because it is sickening to see such a brazen slow-motion theft and mutilation of history --

University of Chicago history baccalaureate David "Even David Brooks" Brooks has written a genuinely remarkable and revealing column about the rise and fall of American Conservatism.

What makes it remarkable and revealing it is not its scholarly depth or historical breadth or scathing, confessional honesty, but rather that it is a work of almost pure fiction being passed off as fact in America's Newspaper of Record...

Protected as he is by the permissive neglect of his employers and the desperation of the elites for whom he performs, the lies Brooks has to spin to protect his readers from the crushing reality snarling right outside their front door have become increasingly ludicrous and fragile in the Age of Trump.  The gossamer-thin fantasies  and still require constant maintenance.  Which explains Friday's column which began with this declaration:

Members of the two parties have different sorts of pride in their country.

Followed by this truly jaw-dropping bit about the Republican party during the Obama administration, which, well, the word "lie" hardly covers it.  It is the complete negation of the reality which every one of us saw with our own eyes, and heard with our own ears.  

Republican pride is unconditional. Democrats like Barack Obama and Joe Biden can get elected to the presidency, and it has almost no effect on the pride Republicans feel for America. 

From the day of his inauguration until the day he left office, the Republican party and Conservative media spent all of their energies openly rooting for Obama to fail and pulling every lever they could lay their hands on to disrupt and sabotage everything Obama the Centrist tried to do.  For example, from The Guardian, February 2, 2009:

When Barack Obama became president there were celebrations around the world. Car horns were honked in Mexico City, thousands gathered to watch the inauguration on big screens in Liverpool and Leeds, feasts were held in Kenya. Yet the festive spirit failed to permeate one small corner of Manhattan, home to the right-leaning cable channel Fox News. While the city's streets were filled with the sound of fireworks and champagne corks popping, the mood in its studios was almost sombre. This is the conversation that took place on air between the two Titans of conservative broadcasting, Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity:

Hannity: "So do you want [Obama] to succeed?"

Limbaugh: "I'm so glad you asked me this question . . . No! I want him to fail."

A few days earlier, speaking on his own talk radio show, broadcast from his home in Palm Beach, Florida, Limbaugh had put his feelings even more pithily. Responding to a newspaper that asked him to express in 400 words his hope for the Obama presidency, he replied: "I don't need 400 words, I need four: I hope he fails"...

On the Right, the Obama years were an eight-year racist primal scream followed by nominating and electing the King of the Birthers because Barack the Communist Kenyan Usurper has stolen their country.

But their country is not our country.  

Their country -- the one in which they have such pride -- surrendered to our country at Appomattox Courthouse on April 9, 1865.   They have never gotten over it, and since the 1960s, they have been busy, busy, busy turning the Party of Lincoln in the Party of Jefferson Davis and in doing so, paving the way for the rise of a monster like Trump.  

From  Brother Charlie Pierce, September 25, 2012:

Our Mr. Brooks Picks His Own Private History

Up there on the left, that's Harry Dent, Sr. He was a conservative political strategist of the 1960's and 1970's. He worked for, among other people, the famous wandering and miscegenating penis, Strom Thurmond, and for Richard M. Nixon, who, back then, was not yet history's yard waste. While working for the latter, Dent devised what has become known as the "Southern strategy," by which he attached the Republican Party to the rising white counter-assault on the gains of the civil-rights movement, and to modern American conservatism, which already had done so, largely through the efforts of William F. Buckley and the National Review crowd. Dent begat Lee Atwater, who begat Karl Rove. In today's column in The New York Times, in which he traces the current paradox of modern American conservatism, David Brooks mysteriously overlooks all the hard work Harry Dent and his acolytes did in making sure that conservatism could count on the backing of the supporters of American apartheid.)...

Our country is the one that believes that resurrecting an overtly fascist version of the Confederacy decked out in 21st Century glad rags is a terrible idea.  Which leads us to Brooks' second, sweeping declaration:

Democratic pride is more conditional. It dropped a bit during George W. Bush’s first term, then began to gradually decline during the Great Awokening around 2014 and really collapsed during each of President Trump’s two terms. 

Textbook Brooksian fatuous argle-bargle coupled with some gratuitous hippy punching, and the Alert Reader will notice how Brooks skips over George W. Bush's catastrophic second term which bore out every critique the Left had about the Right all along, and exposed men like Brooks as the willfully blind, partisan hacks that they are.   

Then comes Brooks' reminder to his elite clientele about how much more patriotic he and they and Republicans are than us dirty hippies:

I don’t side much with the party of MAGA these days, but my patriotism is more like the Republican kind — unconditional. ...

At this point I'm guesstimating that Brooks has killed about half the bottle of top shelf scotch I assume he was nursing to give him the Dutch courage needed to grind his way through this codswallop.  

Then, killing the rest of the bottle, Brooks decided to go all-in, and lash Abraham Lincoln to Donald Trump and Elon Musk with the binding of love of country

When you love America for its raw energy, you are loving it for a force that also produces crassness, materialism and, from time to time, immaturity. That is to say, the same cultural winds that propel the noble aspirations of an Abraham Lincoln, also propel the gaudy display of a Donald Trump and the occasionally recklessness of an Elon Musk.

Reducing the monstrous shadow Trump has thrown across American democracy to the word "gaudy", and reducing Musk's berserker, chain-saw gutting of the American government to "occasionally recklessness" is wild, but praising Lincoln's "noble aspirations" while criticizing Democratic pride as "conditional" absolutely takes the prize, and is symptomatic of a fetish shared by a number of Conservative opinion-havers: praising Lincoln as a Great Uniter with noble aspirations while carefully avoiding any mention of the actual Lincoln.  From me, five years ago:

What's appalling is that Very Serious Beltway Pundits like David Brooks have no love for the actual Lincoln. The guy who is buried two miles from my front door. Instead, they love their imaginary Lincoln just as they love their imaginary Reagan.

Their imaginary Lincoln is a Lincoln without Shiloh or Cold Harbor. A Lincoln without the Wilderness or Vicksburg or the Shenandoah Valley.

Their Lincoln is two-dimensional caricature of the actual Lincoln. A gentle redeemer and uniter, and not the man who went through just about every general in the Union Army until he found one that would do what needed to be done: crush the Confederacy completely, regardless of the cost. One that would bomb their cities, burn their crops, slaughter their armies and starve their citizens until, at last, their will to make a traitor's war against the United States was broken and they finally gave up.

There is no place in Mr. Brooks' gauzy cartoon version of American history for a Lincoln who recognized a mortal threat to the nation coming from a despicable confederacy of its own citizens, and who ruthlessly used every bloody means at his disposal to utterly destroy that threat. No place in his idylls for a Lincoln who offered reunion and reconstruct to the South only after they had been beaten to their knees and forced to accept surrender or face extinction.

And if this all sounds weirdly familiar, well it should. I penned something similar when Mr. Brooks reached for that ol' reliable jug of Imaginary Lincoln three years ago ("David Brooks: Controlling The Future By Butchering The Past"):

That's right.  To serve his political agenda, Mr. Brooks has very deliberately omitted the entire context for one of the greatest speeches in American history:  the fact that there were two sides to the Civil War -- one which was dedicate to destroying the nation in order to preserve the institution of slavery, and another -- led by Abraham Lincoln -- which was determined not to let that happen.

And as to Mr. Brooks' claim that "Slavery, Lincoln says, was not a Southern institution, it was an American institution, weaving through our common history for 250 years."?   Well for fuck's sake, David, just read the very next god damn paragraph of the speech you are god damn quoting:

One-eighth of the whole population were colored slaves, not distributed generally over the Union, but localized in the southern part of it. These slaves constituted a peculiar and powerful interest. All knew that this interest was somehow the cause of the war. To strengthen, perpetuate, and extend this interest was the object for which the insurgents would rend the Union even by war, while the Government claimed no right to do more than to restrict the territorial enlargement of it.

In Mr. Brooks' Both Siderist version of America history, Lincoln is transformed into a disembodied specter who somehow just floats above all of this, hand-in-hand with Mr. David Brooks, as together they survey the sad and petty squabbles of the wretched Extremes on Both Sides, both in 1865 and 2017...

Among America's elite pundits you see this detaching of reality from the fairy tale they are selling everywhere.  This absurd proposition that "America" is somehow unrelated to the attitudes and actions of the actual Americans who make up the country.  That "MAGA" and "Republicans" are two different things. In this case we find Lincoln's "noble aspirations" completely divorced from the bloody and brutal war which was the price of realizing some of those noble aspirations: the wholesale destruction of American cities and putting hundreds of thousands of Americans into their graves.  

And the dilemma which faced Lincoln is a pretty fair glass-half-empty analog of where Democratic pride in our country stands right now:  the sobering realization that, to save the country we love, will require the recognition that millions of our fellow Americans have become enemies of democracy.  That their version of "love of country" is founded on rage, racism and paranoia, which has all been relentlessly fueled by Conservative media.  And that to save our democracy from our carefully cultivated, home-grown demons, severe measures may have to be taken to pry their poisonous claws away from Lady Liberty's throat.

Having come this far, it will not surprise you that Brooks winds his brief excursion through a modern American political history which never existed, by lighting votives and reciting a praiseful paean at the tomb of St. Reagan, pretending that MAGA is some kind of exotic parasitic disorder which has only recently infected his Republican party and will one day soon be shrugged off, and, of course, as little more gratuitous hippy-punching.

Some Democrats like Gov. Gavin Newsom of California seem to think they can win the White House by behaving more like Trump, by thinking more like Trump, by adopting that dark American carnage vibe. This strikes me as political lunacy.

This from the same guy who, in 2014, crowed that the Republican party had definitely cleaned up its act and was definitely on its way to a bright future and who, in 2016, confidently predicted that the Republican nominee for president was gonna be Rubio!

You, dear reader, could be forgiven for wondering -- loudly -- how the fuck this clown with a nearly perfect track record of being consistently wrong about the one subject the Sulzberger family pays him a king's ransom to know something about...how this buffoon keeps his job at the Times.  

And that would be an excellent question, if the Sulzberger family were paying Brooks for his savvy, insider political expertise.  But they're not.  The Sulzberger family pays David Brooks float far above our mundane world of fact and history and consequence and spin golden, gossamer lies to ease the fears and reinforce the parochial political follies and fantasies of the wealthy patrons who desperately want to buy what Brooks is selling.  

I Am The Liberal Media