Professional Left Podcast #254

“Bite off more than you can chew and then chew like hell.”

-- Peter Brock

Links:

• Other sinister vegetables here and here.

Da' money goes here:

Stupid Shit Andrew Sullivan Says, Ctd. - Extended Play

"Like David Brooks, I feel whip-sawed a lot of the time."

-- Andrew Sullivan

Mysteriously, nowhere in his post does Mr. Sullivan get to the real meat of Our Mr. Brooks' assay:

...
I’m not going to pass my own comprehensive judgment on this here. I’ll just say that my conversations reaffirm my conviction that Obama is a pragmatic liberal who cares about fiscal sustainability, who has been willing to compromise for its sake, but who has not offered anything close to a sufficient program to avoid a debt crisis.


But we have a campaign in front of us. If the president is truly committed to a strategy for progressive fiscal stability, as Bill Clinton was, he’ll make that the center of his campaign. He’ll earn a mandate. He’ll win over independents who want fiscal discipline but worry about the way Republicans get there.
...

Perhaps bookmarking a dictionary on the page where the word "mandate" is found and then heaving it directly into at Our Mr. Brooks' moon-face would startle him into remembering that Barack Obama has already won just such an election with just such a mandate.

This was followed by a complete, public, psychotic break on the part of Our Mr. Brooks' Republican Party, during which all of the incoherent, bigoted rage and seething paranoia about which the Dirty Hippies had ringing the alarum bells for 40 years came boiling to the surface.

This roaring outflow of unalloyed, berserk, conspiracy mongering obstructionism surprised no one in the known Universe....except for skeevy Centrism peddlers like Our Mr. Brooks who (after a brief flirtation with a GOP re-branding scheme canned "the Tea Party") did what such cowards always does: demand a swift and immediate capitulation to the wingnut mob in the name of almighty Centrism.

Standing in an empty bar, surrounded by Imaginary Centrists, talking to an Imaginary Reasonable Conservative Bartender who echos back to Bobo his every fraudulent fantasy, David Brooks reveals that he has finally decided to abandon reality altogether, crawl back into Ronald Reagan’s leathery, cowboy man-uterus and seal the entrance behind him. Snippets lifted from "The Government War" in the NYT:

"In these columns I try to give voice to a philosophy you might call progressive conservatism. " ...

"This general philosophy puts me to the left of where the Republican Party is now, and to the right of the Democratic Party. It puts me in that silly spot on the political map, the center, or a step to the right of it." ...

"One of the odd features of the Democratic Party is its inability to learn what politics is about. It’s not about winning arguments. It’s about deciding which arguments you are going to have. In the first year of the Obama administration, the Democrats, either wittingly or unwittingly, decided to put the big government-versus-small government debate at the center of American life.

"Just as America was leaving the culture war and the war war, the Democrats thrust it back into the government war, only this time nastier and with higher stakes." ...

"This produced the Tea Party Movement — a characteristically raw but authentically American revolt led by members of the yeoman enterprising class." ...

"The Democrats have become the government party and the Republicans are the small government party. The stale, old debate is back with a fury."

When compromise predictably failed (because the GOP program was never about governance but about destroying that damned n*gger in their White House), Our Mr. Brooks once again did what did what such Centrist cowards always do: demanded more compromise.  And more.  And then more.  And still more.  And always, always, always it is the Left (which by now is where the Center-Right was 30 years ago) that must give in to the Pig People, however ludicrous and destructive their demands may be.

And when the Obama Administration finally got it at least part-way through their heads that compromise was never going to work and stopped playing that game, Our Mr. Brooks once again responded with complete, abject, sniveling Centrist predictability by throwing a public tantrum over how big a sucker he had been for every believing that Barack Obama was a Serious Person (from "The Man Who Mistook His President for a Hat"):

Do you really want to hurt me
Do you really want to make me cry
Precious kisses, words that burn me
Lovers never ask you why

So Our Mr. Brooks is "a sap"

Yes, I’m a sap. I believed Obama when he said he wanted to move beyond the stale ideological debates that have paralyzed this country. I always believe that Obama is on the verge of breaking out of the conventional categories and embracing one of the many bipartisan reform packages that are floating around.

...
So the White House has moved away from the Reasonable Man approach or the centrist Clinton approach.

It has gone back, as an appreciative Ezra Klein of The Washington Post conceded, to politics as usual. The president is sounding like the Al Gore for President campaign, but without the earth tones. Tax increases for the rich! Protect entitlements! People versus the powerful!
...

because he wanted President Obama to stay in Centrist Neverland, playing Very Serious Moderate Pirate games with him and Tinkerbell

...

After you double-check with the good people at Merriam-Webster to make sure no one secretly changed the definition of "whipsawed" to "public fraud who is routinely beaten to atoms by his betters every time he opens his mouth to say anything about history, politics or math" take a moment to let the perfection of Mr. Sullivan's little, suck-up Centrist koan sink in.

Open Thread