Bobo Loves The Smell of Napalm

in the morning

It smells like...Medicare. (I have temporarily run out of adjectives to describe for the 1,000th time what a truly pernicious cultural phenomenon David Brooks has become, but thanks to blogenfreude we learn that the NYT had to cut comments on Bobo's odious column off after 25 when it became clear that the general reading public had an ample surplus of harsh language for Our Mr. Brooks and was not afraid to use it.)


It has almost ceased to matter what the perceived problem-of-the-day actually is, what really caused it and what all the options really are, because in the Bizarro World where we now live 24/7, we all know the rules:

1. Behind the tiny, transparent figleaf of fixing the problem, he Right breaks out its All-Occasion, Randite Playbook and begins radically tampering with something really, really important. While screaming "FREEDOM!". At 120 decibels.

2. Liberals warn them -- repeatedly and loudly -- that they are about to badly clusterfuck one of our body politics' vital organs, possibly irreparably.

3. Liberals are told to shut the fuck up. Liberals say a naughty word. Liberals are never seen on teevee again because, y'know, how rude! Liberal warnings go unheard and unheeded because, yee-HAW, we're gonna put a boot in someone's ass!

4. Time passes.

5. The terrible clusterfucking the Liberals warned would happen comes to pass. The Right is found at the crime scene, squatting over the corpse, murder weapon in hand, while wearing a tee-shirt that says "I Killed Dis Here Guy and all I Got Was Dis Lousy Tee Shirt" which is covered in fresh blood.

6. Our elite media carefully scrutinizes the evidence and determines that both the Right and Left are obviously equally to blame.

7. While Liberals are rendered temporarily, Billy-Budd stunned into a b--b--but stammer over this latest travesty, the Right slips out the back way, showers off, picks up pair of clean jackboots, a tri-corner hat and a "Don't Tread on Me" flag from their friends at Koch Industries, and returns the same way they came in swearing they had nothing to to with the corpse that is now starting to reek on the floor.

8. Having been spared by the righteous judgment they so richly deserve, the Right begins to scream that Big Gummint Liberal Socialists are somehow the real culprit here, and anyway somebody really ought to get rid of that reeking corpse.

9. On the pretext of getting rid of yon reeking corpse, the Right breaks out its All-Occasion Randite Playbook and begins radically tampering with something really, really important.

While screaming "FREEDOM!"

At 120 decibels.

How does this keep happening?

It keep happening because the Reasonable Center keeps being frog-marched ever further into the depths of Crazy Town as demonstrated by the following from awful, awful "Weekly Standard":

Rush Limbaugh on Ryan's Budget: 'It is Substantively Superb and Politically Brilliant'
11:46 AM, Apr 5, 2011 • By MARK HEMINGWAY

It seems to me that when Paul Ryan can get both David Brooks and Rush Limbaugh enthused, he's really on to something...

Of course, this latest upgraded iteration of Basic Wingnut Truth is currently contained in the "Weekly Standard" Bad Idea Contagion testing facility, but it won't stay there for long.

Because it never does.

And unless the Left fights back -- as one and hard -- sooner that you'd believe, these will become the parameters of acceptable public debate, set in unalterable Elite Media cement: Limbaugh defining the Right, Bobo defining the Left, leaving Paul Ryan's "Logan's Run" budget

as the Middle, and leaving the public to choose between being hit on the head with a hammer...or being hit on the head with an anvil.

Because no matter what the problem is, for the Right it is always one more opportunity to invade the wrong country, or slather the wealthy with more tax cuts, or spank the living shit out of poor, the weak and the dispossessed with an axe.

Which their enablers in the Mainstream Media will then obligingly gift-wrap in economic, cultural or religious scripture and call it Sober and Serious.


Pull Newt's finger and help Fight the Crazy...

"A man thinks that by mouthing hard words

he understands hard things." -- Herman Melville

Sometime just before Thursday supper here in the cold, cold city, having just watched Day Two of the Taxes Chainsaw Massacre, I chanced to Tweet this to the big, wide world:

Somewhere, David Brooks has written "those peevish, irrational Liberals" for the 100th time. 100 more and tomorrow's NYT column is done!

Six hours after I tweeted that, this is what David Brooks actually ended up pulling out of his ass:

Ted Kennedy was a network liberal, willing to stray from his preferences in negotiation with George W. Bush or John McCain. Most House Democrats, by contrast, are cluster liberals. They come from safe seats, have a poor feel for the wider electorate and work in an institution where politics is a war of all against all.

Barack Obama ran for president as a network liberal, and entranced a Facebook nation. But in office, Obama, like George W. Bush before him, narrowed his networks. To get things done quickly, he governed like a cluster liberal, relying on partisan leaders.

The results were predictable: insularity, alienation and defeat. So now we are headed toward divided government.
...

Having read far, far too many of David Fucking Brooks' dishonest little op-ed owl pellets over the years, I can tell you that this is arguably the most prodigiously dishonest thing he has written since back in the days when he was masturbating himself blind with excitement over George W. Bush's Excellent Iraqi Adventure. (Same kinds of lies he told about Iraq , too -- a world full of cartoon villains fighting Reasonable Heroes for fictional motives in imaginary versions of real places that David Brooks clearly knows nothing about.)

And this -- from the same column -- is arguably the second most dishonest:

The big story of the week is that Obama is returning to first principles, re-establishing himself as a network liberal. This isn’t a move to the center or triangulation. It’s not the Clinton model or the Truman model or any of the other stale categories people are trying to impose on him.
...

Cluster liberals in the House and the commentariat are angry. They have no strategy for how Obama could have better played his weak hand — with a coming Republican majority, an expiring tax law and several Democratic senators from red states insisting on extending all the cuts. They just sense the waning of their moment and are howling in protest.

They believe nonliberals are blackmailers or hostage-takers or the concentrated repositories of human evil, so, of course, they see coalition-building as collaboration. They are also convinced that Democrats should never start a negotiation because they will always end up losing in the end. (Perhaps psychologists can explain the interesting combination: intellectual self-confidence alongside a political inferiority complex).

In other words, as predicted, "those peevish, irrational Liberals" padded out with enough venom and pseudo-intellectual verbal droppings to meet his 800-word contractual obligation to the New York Times.

Not a whisper about the rapacious content of Republican positions.

Nary a peep about he malevolent and premeditated Republican behavior that led us to this place, for example, or the long and barbaric history of Republican lies, betrayals and failures that created this moment's context.

No sense whatsoever of an actual reality wherein (from the Constant Weader):

A super-majority of Americans want tax cuts for the middle class. A majority in the House & a majority in the Senate voted for tax cuts for the middle class but no tax cuts on income above $250K (for a married couple). That is the policy the President campaigned on.

In a rational world, President Obama Claus would be signing the middle-class tax cut extension this week in front of a White House Christmas tree with his funny elves Pelosi & Harry beaming at his side.
...

Because none of that is relevant to Bobo (and his dozens of loyal, wealthy readers.) Because from the safety of his well-appointed sniper's nest at the very pinnacle of American Journalism, David Brooks has never really had to given a shit about the real-world consequences of any of the mendacity he peddles.

Why should he?

After all, for America's most ubiquitous, pie-faced Conservative used car salesman, there has never been a single consequence or a moment's blow-back for being the leading spokesman for a depraved and grotesquely failed ideology.

Quite the contrary: whoring for evil men and vile causes has been very, very good for David Brooks.

As his hero George W. Bush pissed the United States treasury into the sands of Iraq, Bobo never missed a meal. As the Reagan Revolution that made his career possible finally destroyed the American economy, Bobo never missed a payday. And during all the years he cheered for sending other people's children off to die in his reckless, foreign adventures, Bobo never had to get his gated suburban marshmallow ass any closer to actual Persian peril than ordering extra sides of hummus at Applebee's.

And, if tomorrow it was announced that America was now formally a feudal corporate state run under martial law by Goldman Sachs...or the easternmost vassal province of the Greater Chinese Co-Prosperity Sphere, Inc. ...Bobo would be right there, Johnny-on-the-spot, rolling out the welcome mat for our new overlords, tucking himself into their collective ass-cracks and penning bland columns in the New York Times explaining to the serfs of the late, great United States why -- if they would just stop struggling, give up a little bit more and bow just a little bit lower -- their new peonage really is the best of all possible worlds.

Because for David Brooks, it is.


UPDATE: Again, a few words and a link to this piece were posted in the Mr. Brooks' comment section. Again they have disappeared into the pellucid digital ether.

The Last Democrat

The first rule of American politics is that presidents get elected by promising to keep the American people safe from one peril or another, real or imagined.

The converse of that rule is that no American president ever got elected by promising to keep the American people safe from themselves. Carter tried and lost. Mondale tried and got stomped. Others tried and were crushed before they got out of the gate.

It doesn't work, which is unfortunate because, sadly, the problem with America these days is mostly...us Americans.

Half of us can't be bothered to pay the slightest attention to what our country is doing or why, and more or less half of the rest get our ideas of right and wrong piped directly into our heads from Rupert Murdoch or Glenn Beck or "Focus on the Family" or all of the above.

This situation is not sustainable: as I wrote elsewhere (stealing shamelessly from our 16th President), our nation cannot endure permanently half-Fox and half-free.

And so we must face our real problem: that America is currently too fucking stupid, spoiled and hateful to make good, long-term decisions.

And so we make bad decisions, like deciding to get our Reality from bald-faced liars and lunatics because they tell us what we want to hear; or deciding to scream "Commie!" at people who try to tell us the truth because the truth is not what we want to hear.

The problem that blew a hole in health care reform and the Obama Agenda this year wasn't "death panels": it was that there are millions of Americans who are stupid enough to believe that wingnut fictions like "death panels" are real.

The problem with President Barack Obama is not that he is a socialist or a communist or a secret radical or a Muslim or Kenyan Usurper: it is that there are millions of Americans who are racist enough to swallow this bilge and ask for seconds.

The problem with Fox and Hate Radio and Regnery Press and all the think tanks and all the websites is not that they churn out utterly toxic lies 24 hours a day: it is that there are millions of Americans who are too weak and too cowardly to stop listening to their Siren's song

And the problem with America is not that we have these vast numbers of stupid, frightened and racist people scattered in our midst: the problem with America is that -- at great expense -- they have all been methodically gathered into the same political party, and they are pointed like a gun at our heads.

And now, a parable...

Some number of years ago, I worked as a technology honcho in a college department where the curriculum depended heavily on the very expensive hardware and software that was being "rode hard" 14 hours a day staying in perfect working order all of the time, from the first day of the semester to the last. It was hard work, and there were some tricks and trade-offs involved, but for the most part my most serious problems boiled down to a handful of students who felt they should be able to abuse the equipment however they pleased, and a handful of teachers who told them this expectation was their absolute right.

They were creative geniuses after all! And they paid tuition!

Keeping up with escapades of this reckless minority began soaking up huge amounts of my staff's time. Like dealing with Fox News viewers, I tried reason, but they didn't have much use for that. Like trying to get Harry Reid to grow a fucking spine, I tried imposing some discipline, but only with much excruciating persuasion could I get our weak-willed administration to stand up for anything that might make tuition-paying students unhappy.

And so, as I developed ulcers trying to do an impossible job because of the clowns to the left of me and jokers to the right, I quietly started Operation Shrug (only named by me as such years later.)

For the fourth semester in a row, you fucked up and burned through a semester's worth of expensive supplies in a week?

Shrug.

A teacher decided to have a midnight class kegger and bong-a-thon in the server farm and now the hard drives are all sticky with pizza and PBR?

Shrug.

For the second semester in a row -- without telling anyone -- you took cash in advance to book some Adult Ed class into a room without the right equipment, during a time when the department in closed? And you want to make that my problem?

Shrug.

Yell all you want, complain all the way up the chain of command and...shrug. If someone else wants to come in a undo all this fuckuppery -- while at the same time making sure everything else runs smoothly -- bring them on.

If not...then I guess that equipment is going to stay broken for awhile. And I guess those Adult Ed patsies you conned out of the cost of your trip to Majorca are gonna get their money back.

I wasn't doing it to be cruel, or because I was lazy. I did it because my staff and I were being held hostage to our work ethic and our sense of responsibility. Because rather than focusing on the real fucking problem -- the dickish minority who believed it was their right to foul the nest every night -- our weak and feckless administration chose instead to bring more and more pressure to bear on those of us who were cleaning up their nightly midden piles.

Because having tried everything else, it was all I had left.

And when I took this wisdom with me to other jobs, to my delight I found that it works pretty well everywhere: when pricks with power insist on smashing something precious to bits, rather than trying to mitigate the pain and clean up their mess, sometimes it is a fine thing to let the ruins lay there and rot for a good long time.

Let the stink fill the halls. Let its absence become an acute pain.

You wanted it broken? Fine. Now its broken. Now what?

The problem with America is not Barack Obama or Mitch McConnell or Rush Limbaugh.

The problem with America is the American Right. The problem is not in the White House or in Congress: it is in the cubicle next to you at work and in the pew behind you at church. It is picking up its kids at school as you pick up yours. It is looking for the sale-paper coffee filters one aisle over from you.

These are the people who went to the polls on November 2nd and voted to effectively stick a knife through the heart of the Obama Agenda, and turn the fate of America back over to the same scumbags who wrecked it in the first place. These, our fellow Americans, are the stupid people. The frightened people. The racist people. And if Barack Obama spent the next 20 years walking from one end of America to another and back again with a copy of "Lies (And the Lying Liars Who Tell Them)" under one arm, and a print-out of AmericaDad's "An Open Letter to Conservatives", using all of the rhetorical skills at his command and spending as much time with each person as necessary, I am firmly convinced that at the end of his two-decade sojourn the very best he could hope for would be to have persuaded maybe 20-30 individual Conservatives that he might very wall not be a Communist at all.

Not that he shouldn't be trying every day to do just that. Not that I am not hugely disappointed in this President's Fabian Strategy of American politics:

The Fabian Strategy derives it’s name from the Roman general Quintus Fabius Maximus. He ran away Lemon, rather than engage in battle, he would retreat and retreat until the enemy grew fatigued and eventually made a mistake. Though I abhor it as a military strategy, it is the basis for all my, uh, personal relationships.

-- Jack Donoghy, "30 Rock"

But I must acknowledge that if a person came through the Clinton years and the Bush years with their Fox News Conservatism intact, they are by definition beyond the reach of reason and impervious to fact.

Which means that convention political warfare is useless.

I have not one clue what the President was thinking after the November 2nd "shellacking", but I know what I would be thinking.

I would be thinking that, just like in 2004, a dickish minority on the Right who believe it is their God-given right to foul the nest over and over again and never pay for their foolishness had once again rallied themselves, not to help fix our nation's problems, but to make those problems much, much worse.

That the Number One problem facing America is not high debt or high unemployment, but what to do about those millions of Americans who are stupid, frightened and racist enough to use their collective political power to petulantly smash something fragile and precious to bits.

And rather than trying to mitigate the pain and clean up their mess, it is quite possible that I would coldly and rationally remember that sometimes it is a fine thing to let the ruins lay there and rot for a good long time.

Let the stink fill the nation.

Let its absence become an acute pain.

You wanted the country broken?

Fine.

Now its broken.

Now what?