This One's For Me

 "If you wait by the Twitter long enough, the remains of your enemies' careers will float by." -- Sun Tzu, slightly updated

FYI, this post will add nothing to the David Brooks discourse that has been firing off all over Twitter for the last couple of days.  This post will not posit any new theories on the subject of "How does David Brooks still have a job?" or the more existential question of "Why does David Brooks exist?" or the very common "Who the hell is David Brooks?".

None of that here today.

Instead, as America's leading Brooksologist, all this post is intended to do is add one more humiliating example of Brooks' privileged myopia to my already vast archives.  An item that, when I need it five days or five months or five years from now, will be there, at my fingertips: filed under "The day that Brooks shit the bed so hard and so publicly"...

...that everyone from me...

Whether it's overpaying for booze and a garbage burger and fries at airports or terrorizing innocent bumpkins with hard-to-pronounce sandwiches, David Brooks' new career as the NYT's Food Critic for the Economically Anxious is off to a rocky start. https://t.co/aJfUhs5bUy

— Driftglass, Guardian of Inconvenient History (@Mr_Electrico) September 21, 2023

...to David Simon...

...to DougJBalloon parking six in a row like this over the left field fence...

Whiskey River, Take My Mind

Red-headed stranger David Brooks is on the road again at the Newark Airport, but the price of scotch has his blue eyes crying in the rain. Mamas, don't let your babies grow up to be pundits.

by Maureen Dowd

— New York Times Pitchbot (@DougJBalloon) September 21, 2023

...to the restaurant where the bed-shitting too place... 

Now the airport restaurant itself is dunking on David Brooks. pic.twitter.com/MYCyoVYbnj

— Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona) September 21, 2023

...felt moved to step up and take a swing at this clueless, moon-faced pinata.

Burn The Lifeboats

Stay Off My Corner, Mona Charen

So last week Mona Charen decided it would be fun to critique a David Brooks column.   

Without consulting me, or availing herself of my 18.5 years of experience in the field.

And after her column started with this promise -- 

Trump Supporters Are Responsible for Their Choices
On David Brooks’s attempt to get inside the MAGA mind.

-- I found out why.

You were aware that our new "allies", really despise us, right?  Remember Winston Churchill's definition of a fanatic? Someone  "who can't change his mind and won't change the subject”?  It's like that.

Hardcore Cons like Charen have spent their entire adult lives professionally despising us.   The subject line of everything they wrote and every speech they gave was basically "Dirty hippie libertines are responsible for every bad thing in the world". 

Which made their grudging, seething, forced-march out ot the Party of St. Reagan especially galling.  Turns out, the crazy was coming from inside the house all along.

It also initially made their involuntary career change pretty awkward.  They had to stop typing "Dirty hippie libertines are responsible for every bad thing in the world" and start typing "Donald Trump and virtually every Republican I have ever known and respected turned out of be either fascists or really, really cool with accommodating fascist and dirty hippie libertines are still responsible for almost every bad thing in the world, also too". 

And while you can practically hear the lays of enamel being sheared off their molars every time they are required to talk about the state of their recently-former party, you can also feel their palpable sense of relief whenever the opportunity to get back behind that old, familiar Weekly Standard-era mule, and plow a few more furrows in their beloved "Dirty hippie libertines..." south 40.

Charen engages with Brooks as if they're two old gossip mongers at the backyard fence, spreading third-hand rumors that clearly comfort them about what those awful "progressives" are up to.

Here's a sample. 

 

BROOKS, STILL SEEKING to describe the worldview of Trump-supporting populists, does have a fair point when he takes progressives to task for wielding what used to be called politically correct language as a weapon. They keep changing the names of things to demonstrate their bona fides. Brooks notes that elites know all the correct terminology, while “members of the less-educated classes have to walk on eggshells because they never know when we’ve changed the usage rules so that something that was sayable five years ago now gets you fired.” A recent example of this language switching is driving me crazy. Have you noticed that progressives now say “unhoused” instead of homeless? If there is any earthly reason for the change, I cannot detect it. It’s virtue signaling. I doubt if using the old term would get you fired, but it’s a thrown elbow by the cognoscenti.

By my count the "latinx" thing has come up about three million times on Charen's Bulwark podcast.  Really bugs the fuck out of her -- a resentment which she IMAX's all over "members of the less-educated classes."  But if Brooks knows five actual "members of the less-educated classes" to whom this actually happened, I'll eat my hat.  If Charen knows three such creatures, I'll eat my shoes for dessert.  

And as I have noted elsewhere, how is it that using "latinx" instead of "hispanic" is such a wild hair up these mope's collective asses, but using "low-information voter" instead of the more accurate "redneck moron" doesn't' bother then at all?

Charen does pick some medium-sized nits over the sweep of Brooks' claims and the weakness of any data he purports to have to back up any of those claims, but still thinks the whole masturbatory idea of the "elites" like you and me being responsible for the rise of Trump to be a useful exercise

Brooks writes that most people in elite circles think of themselves as the forces of “progress and enlightenment” while viewing Trump fans as “reactionary bigots and authoritarians.” Perhaps to play Devil’s advocate, Brooks offers an alternative view. I think it’s a useful exercise even if some of Brooks’s arguments got my back up! 

 

In this alternative view, the “anti-Trumpers,” he writes, are actually the bad guys who, through selfishness and arrogance, made Trump inevitable. Brooks employs “we” when discussing anti-Trumpers, though the origin of his critique stretches back to what at the time were called “limousine liberals.”

Charen even sneaks in a quote by the Right's favorite amatuer phrenologist, Charles Murry, because these people cannot help themselves.

.
There is, of course, zero mentions of the vast and staggeringly well-funded Conservative media machine which has spent +30 years honing Republican voter rage, racism and paranoia to the point where it can  split atoms or overthrow governments.  Nor is there any mention that both Charen and Brooks spent their entire professional lives serving that machine and breezily lying to the general public about the white supremacist madness that was roiling just below the surface of their Party of Personal Responsibility.

And in the end, Charen returns to the safe harbor of the Biggest Lie of All.  The one that shelters and sustains her and Brooks and hundreds of other professional Havers of Terrible Opinions.

See if you can spot it!

It is wrong to lay all of the resentments and grievances of non-elites at the feet of progressive elites, but Brooks seems to be doing so to prod those on the left to reflect a bit more on their own role in our polarized culture. Both sides would profit from that. Contempt is a two-way street. Manhattanites may disdain conservatives in “flyover country,” but the good ol’ boys of Arkansas aren’t exactly overflowing with admiration and appreciation for liberals, either. 

And once again, just like *that*, the entire Obama administration and its eight-year exercise in trying to do all the things Charen and Brooks swear progressives never do just...vanishes.  

Why Does David Brooks Still Have A Fucking Job?

David Brooks' Secret Plan To Save The Republican Party

Preface:  All you really need to know about Mr. David Brooks of The New York Times is that, for more than a quarter of a century, he has been Conservatism's Scheherazade. The spinner of 1,001 tales to please his employers and the cosseted elite who read his fairy tales and sigh with delight.  Except, instead of 1001 different stories, Mr. Brooks has just recycled the same, 2-3 hackneyed claptrap yarns 1,001 times.  

And one of the monotonously repeated bald retreads on which his career has been rolling along for a generation is the Myth of the Conservative/Republican Renaissance about which I have already written more than I care to think about over the past 16 years.  From "David Brooks: ...And a Doughy Pantload Shall Lead Them":

And of course, Mr. Brooks perennial insistence that an Imaginary Conservative Renaissance (which will wipe every tear from yadda yadda yadda) Is Just Around The Corner.  And I do mean "perennial" in the literal sense --

lasting or existing for a long or apparently infinite time; enduring or continually recurring.

--because Mr. Brooks has been confidently predicting an Imaginary Conservative Renaissance Which Is Just Around The Corner about once every five or six months for at least the last 19 years.

Every now and then, Mr. Brooks likes freshen up his monotonous repetitions of bullshit by framing them as response to An Imaginary Baffled Young Person Who I Have Invented For The Occasion.  His most infamous straw man was young Joey Tabula Rasa, who Mr. Brooks conjured up to defend his relentless cheerleading of the Iraq War, kick the shit out of the stupid, antiwar Left, and generally reinforce his (as one wag described it) "...reputation for Deep Insights into the very soul of the inhabitants of the land of the free -- his nearly-superhuman understanding of the "heart has reasons that reason cannot know" business of the American people, which he vouchsafes to his Beltway colleagues every week in the reverential tone of a Yang chief incanting the E Plebnista to his tribe."

End Preface

In this week's episode of that long-running dramedy, Mr. Brooks pens a...

Letter to a Young Republican

Who...

In college ... realized he wanted to make a difference in this world by serving in government. His opinions leaned right, so the Republican Party became the vehicle for that service. He’s spent 10 years working his way up the Washington policy ladder.

But...

...is dismayed by what the Republican Party has become. He’s disgusted by the whole political game

Today Mr. Brooks had some advice for this young man which I will summarize for you TL:DR readers, after which I will disassemble Mr. Brooks' column paragraph by paragraph for those of you who are fans of such vivisections.

First, the abridged version.  

Ahem.

According to Mr. Brooks, all the GOP has to do to save itself -- by some means which  Mr. Brooks never quite gets around to explaining -- is become something which bears no relationship whatsoever to the Republican Party as it exists and is, in every measurable way, completely alien and actively hostile to what it it now.  

What Mr. Brooks described in his column is not an "If my aunt had balls, she'd be my uncle." situation but rather an "If my aunt had thick, cleat-covered aluminum wheels with titanium spokes, a robotic arm for rock-coring, ran on plutonium-238 oxide and has a BAE RAD750 radiation-hardened single board computer, she'd be a Mars rover" miracle which rivals the transubstantiation at The Last Supper. 

Mr. Brooks dresses his disquisition up as a "letter to a young Republican" thus proving once again that, in his entire life, David Brooks has never met an actual Republican, young or otherwise, in the wild.

TL;DR readers, please feel free to stop reading now and visit the Gift Shoppe on the way out, because I tell you truly this is an completely accurate precis of what The New York Times has paid David Brooks to write this week, and which I'm sure you will hear him repeat at one of the other media venues wher e he is paid to spout his opinions..

For fans of a longer post, let's begin with the calendar.

According to Mr. Brooks, his young friend joined the Republican Party and has "spent 10 years working his way up the Washington policy ladder".  This means, as a graduate of an elite college (where else would he have met Mr. Brooks?) he joined the GOP in 2011 or thereabouts.  Which, at that time, was the party of Birtherism and Death Panels in a full-blown racist freakout over The Commie Kenyan Usurper.  It was the party of obstruction, sabotage and sedition.  The Teabagger party in which monsters like Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity and Conservative media colossi like Hate Radio and Fox News had long since stopped being novelty acts and were now unequivocally the blood and sinew and heart and soul of the Party of Personal Responsibility.  

It was party about which even extremely measured, moderate, Washington D.C. think tankers Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein were writing this in The Washington Post:

Let’s just say it: The Republicans are the problem.

In other words, Mr. Brooks' young friend, college-educated and with eyes wide open, joined a fully mature American Fascist Party which had already spent decades building a base out of paranoid, anti-science bigots and imbeciles, already lied us into the wrong war and then fucked that war up, already crash the American economy, countenanced torture as official United States policy and were clearly careening at high speed down the dark road that would soon seen Donald Trump in the White House.

So right off the bat, fuck Mr. Brooks' young friend in the ear with a fucking steam hammer.  

And with that out of the way...

Dear Young Republican,

I get it. I’ve been increasingly dismayed and disgusted by the Republican Party since the moment Sarah Palin first stepped onto the national stage...

Bullshit.  Sarah Palin "stepped onto the national stage" in 2008.  Here is what Mr. David Brook was saying about his Republican Party in November of 2014:

The big Republican accomplishment is that they have detoxified their brand. Four years ago they seemed scary and extreme to a lot of people. They no longer seem that way. The wins in purple states like North Carolina, Iowa and Colorado are clear indications that the party can at least gain a hearing among swing voters. And if the G.O.P. presents a reasonable candidate (and this year’s crop was very good), then Republicans can win anywhere. I think we’ve left the Sarah Palin phase and entered the Tom Cotton phase. 

Like all Conservatives, to prop up the myth of his sagacity and maintain his viability in the mainstream media in the here-and-now Mr. Brooks must constantly lies about and retcon his own past.  

Mr. Brooks continues:

But we do face a political crisis in this country, and the Republican Party is the epicenter of that crisis. Destiny has placed you, all of you young Republicans, at the crucial spot in the line.

First part, true.  Second part, ridiculous.  "Destiny" has shit all to do with the manufacture of the next generation of Tucker Carlsons and Ben Shapiros.  

The Democrats have become the party of the educated metropolitan class. There will always be a lot of Americans who do not share the interests or values of that class and they tend to vote Republican.

The Democrats are a huge, contentious coalition which, broadly speaking, is in favor of clean air, clean water, good jobs at livable wages, good schools, affordable health care, racial justice and people not slaughtering each other with guns.   Republicans, on the other hand. have very spent the past +40 years methodically building a white supremacist party powered by the fury and ignorance of reprogrammable racist meatbags who would rather die in darkness screaming in incoherent rage at The Enlightenment than admit they fucked up very badly.  

The party is politically viable, but it is intellectually and morally bankrupt. Under Trump it became an apocalyptic personality cult. 

Trump did not create the Republican Party.   The Republican Party manifested Trump as the avatar of its depraved desires.

But you should know, as I’m sure you do, that there are many Republicans who want to change their party and make it a vehicle for conservative ideas.

And all nine of those "many Republicans" are in heavy rotation on MSNBC seven days a week.  On the other hand,  having steeped in the madness and sadism of  Donald Trump for four years, 11 million  more Republicans went to the polls to vote for him in 2020 than showed up for him in 2016.  So maybe, just maybe, David Brooks has no fucking idea what he's talking about.

These people are energized as never before and feel their whole lives have been preparation for the coming moral, intellectual and political struggle. This is a struggle to create a Republican Party that is democratic and not authoritarian, patriotic and not nationalistic, conservative and not reactionary, benevolent and not belligerent, intellectually self-confident and not apocalyptic and dishonest.

 David Brooks is now describing the Democratic Party. 

The conservative movement left an opening for Trump because it didn’t understand what was on the mind of actual voters.

Translation:  Men like David "It's Going To Be Rubio!" Brooks, who built entire careers purporting to know the secret heart of real Americans, never had the slightest fucking clue what they were talking about.  

But you know who did know what was going on with the GOP?  Who was right about the Right all along?   Those "educated metropolitan" Liberals who actually live out here in the real world.

 Fancy that.

The party has the potential to be something truly good for America: a multiracial working- class coalition, a party that serves the interest of all those who don’t fit in with the definition of the good life that is promulgated by the meritocracy.

 Once again, David Brooks is describing the Democratic Party. 

It’s to be a champion for those who didn’t complete college, don’t want to leave their hometown for the big city, do have a set of traditional values centered around their faith.

It always cracks me up when David Brooks swipes Josh Hawley's copy of "Rube Talk For Dummies" and goes into his Crepes of Wrath -- 

-- "I'm just simple, country pundit, unfamiliar with your Big City ways..." routine.

As Senator Ben Sasse put it...

Bwahahahaha!  I know just where Senator Ben Sasse can put it.

Will this work? Is the Republican Party salvageable? Nobody knows. 

Oh! Oh! I know!  Call on me!

Right now Republicans are rallying around Trump because they believe Democrats and the media are going after him. 

No, Republicans are rallying around Trump because they are the same mob of reprogrammable racist meatbags they have always been.

 It’s pie in the sky to ask rank-and-file Republicans to denounce the man they’ve clung to.

Breaking:  Fascists love their Dear Leader.

Suppose new leaders, issues and movements arose? 

And suppose my aunt were a Mars rover?

 It’s not my struggle, and maybe it’s not your struggle. But it is certainly a noble way for the right people to spend their lives.

Since before you were born, young Republican, Conservatives like me have been doing immeasurable harm to this country by lying to our huge audiences of credulous elites about the real condition and trajectory of the Republican Party.  Conservatives like me made an excellent living by telling America to ignore the growing threat from the Right (and to ignore the crackpot alarmists on the Left who were trying to warn us about the terrible direction the GOP was headed) even as that threat metastasized to the point where it has very nearly killed the country.

And for my sins I was richly rewarded with a job-for-life at America's newspaper of record along various other influential media gigs and the he approbation of my peers. 

In other words, I am now set for life several times over, so I wish you the best of luck, young Republican, picking up the tab for hellacious mess which Conservatives like me have left behind.  

Behold, a Tip Jar!

This Column is a Trick -- Part II

Just like last time. see if you can spot it.  Without Googling.  I'm serious.  I will pull this blog over.

From David Brooks in The New York Times, November 4, 2017:

The Values-Vote Myth

Every election year, we in the commentariat come up with a story line to explain the result, and the story line has to have two features. First, it has to be completely wrong. Second, it has to reassure liberals that they are morally superior to the people who just defeated them.

In past years, the story line has involved Angry White Males, or Willie Horton-bashing racists. This year, the official story is that throngs of homophobic, Red America values-voters surged to the polls to put Donald Trump over the top.

This theory certainly flatters liberals, and it is certainly wrong...

...
It's ridiculous to say, as some liberals have this week, that we are perpetually refighting the Scopes trial, with the metro forces of enlightenment and reason arrayed against the retro forces of dogma and reaction.

In the first place, there is an immense diversity of opinion within regions, towns and families. Second, the values divide is a complex layering of conflicting views about faith, leadership, individualism, American exceptionalism, suburbia, Wal-Mart, decorum, economic opportunity, natural law, manliness, bourgeois virtues and a zillion other issues.

But the same insularity that caused many liberals to lose touch with the rest of the country now causes them to simplify, misunderstand and condescend to the people who voted for Trump. If you want to understand why Democrats keep losing elections, just listen to some coastal and university town liberals talk about how conformist and intolerant people in Red America are. It makes you wonder: why is it that people who are completely closed-minded talk endlessly about how open-minded they are?

What we are seeing is a diverse but stable Republican coalition gradually eclipsing a diverse and stable Democratic coalition. Social issues are important, but they don't come close to telling the whole story. Some of the liberal reaction reminds me of a phrase I came across recently: The rage of the drowning man.

Did you spot it?

Yes, it is from The New York Times.

And, yes, it is from Mr. David Brooks

And, yes, it is from November 4.

But it's from November 4, 2004.

A little over 13 years ago.

And the subject of the article is not Donald J. Trump, but George W. Bush.  And literally all I did in the excerpts I reprinted was swap one name --

The Values-Vote Myth

Every election year, we in the commentariat come up with a story line to explain the result, and the story line has to have two features. First, it has to be completely wrong. Second, it has to reassure liberals that they are morally superior to the people who just defeated them.

In past years, the story line has involved Angry White Males, or Willie Horton-bashing racists. This year, the official story is that throngs of homophobic, Red America values-voters surged to the polls to put George Bush over the top.

This theory certainly flatters liberals, and it is certainly wrong...

-- for the other.  

My point being, Mr. David Brooks has made an entire career out of being America's Most Ubiquitous Conservative Public Intellectual.  Made himself rich off of his reputation as the guy who can speak on NPR and PBS and Meet the Press and from the high pulpit of The New York Times' editorial page with sweeping, unimpeachable, ex cathedra authority about the true nature and trajectory of his Republican Party.

And yet, in all that time, it is brutally obvious that Mr. Brooks has never once summoned the nerve or the initiative to actually look and see what sort of people actually make up the rank and file of his Republican Party.  Never once dared to open the access panel of the Pretty Hate Machine that has made him a very rich man to check out how that machine really works and who it really serves.

In 2003, Jason Blair was cashiered from The New York Times for fabricating or plagiarizing details in a half dozen stories he had written for the Times.  And rightly so.  So given that well-established New York Times standard, what do you suppose the penalty would be for someone who fabricated an entire Imaginary Republican Party out of thin air,  populated it with a menagerie of non-existent voters and leaders, and imbued it with a fictional past, a fake present, and wholly preposterous future?  Someone who has -- despite overwhelming and ongoing evidence to the contrary -- continued to write in-depth about his entirely Imaginary Republican Party as if it were the Pure Quill, twice a week, nearly every week, for the past thirteen years?

If you guessed that the penalty for such a monstrous crime against journalism would be a job-for-life at the same corporation that fired Blair and the respect and deference of his professional colleagues, you would be correct.

Funny old world.

Behold, a Tip Jar!

Where Yesterday Has Been Exiled, Memory Is Rebellion

"Grow gills." 

-- Jonah Goldberg's advice to the people of New Orleans,  August 29, 2005

Ten years ago, much of our Conservative Alternate Reality Media very publicly shit the bed during the man-made catastrophe that destroyed New Orleans, killed +1,800 people and sent hundreds of thousands of American citizens into exile.

As the disaster unfolded, some of what was being said was captured for posterity at sites like The Cunning Realist, one example of which was Lucienne Goldberg's shitbag telling the losers of New Orleans to "grow gills":

On Monday, August 29, NRO's Jonah Goldberg advises people in New Orleans to "grow gills" (each post header below links back to the original):

ATTN: SUPERDOME RESIDENTS

I think it's time to face facts. That place is going to be a Mad Max/thunderdome Waterworld/Lord of the Flies horror show within the next few hours. My advice is to prepare yourself now. Hoard weapons, grow gills and learn to communicate with serpents. While you're working on that, find the biggest guy you can and when he's not expecting it beat him senseless. Gather young fighters around you and tell the womenfolk you will feed and protect any female who agrees to participate without question in your plans to repopulate the earth with a race of gilled-supermen. It's never too soon to be prepared.

The indefatigable Media Matters also documented some of the atrocities:

Ann Coulter just called out MoveOn on Hannity & Colmes:

MoveOn.com is down protesting outside the White House. How about putting together some evacuee bags? How about actually helping out? Speaking of that, I think I’d like to hear a breakdown at the end of this, how much churches are contributing versus… MoveOn.com?

Last Thursday, as tens of thousands of families found themselves newly homeless, MoveOn launched an emergency national housing drive called HurricaneHousing.org. In just one week, over 235,000 beds have been offered to Katrina victims through the site. 

ThinkProgress to Ann Coulter: How about you stop embarrassing yourself on live national television?

This was a rare moment in American political culture because, as the late Steve Gilliard noted at the time, the Bush Administration's complete abdication of its most fundamental domestic civic responsibilities in the face of such a disaster momentarily scrambled the Right's lock-step support of the worst President in American history:

...
At every turn, the right has stepped up to the plate like John Cole and Cunning Realist, or revealed their race hatred, like the folks at the Corner. I mean, people like John Derbyshire have dug up their 1964 nigger hatred guide. I wonder if they pipe in Johnny Rebel and Skrewdriver as they work?

I think it reveals something else, that the divide on the right which is coming is going to be about how they see America. Joe Scarborough has long been a whipping boy for the left, but he actually stood up and tried to help people. The Manchester Union Leader, so right that it should be printed in German, ripped into Bush for his failures. I think a lot of these people see Americans in trouble and want to help them. They certainly act that way.
...

Hell, for several days after it became clear how monumentally the Bush Administration had fucked this up, even David Brooks' reaction was so...appropriate...that I officially retracted 4% of what I have written about him in the past and promised that, yes, if he were on fire, I now would whiz on him to put it out.

Mr. Gilliard got a lot right on his News Blog, but sadly, ten years later, what my friend and blog-father got wrong stands out in more and more painful relief every day.  Ever the hard-nosed skeptic, Steve Gilliard nonetheless believed that catching the racist Right out so far on the wrong side of history might change things:

...

A couple of days ago I was reading a Bob Sommersby post chiding Atrios for calling the Corner folks racist. I had to admit that I don't read Bob much, and with that post, he simply entered irrelevancy. He went on about people being helped in "red states" and blogs recreating the yippies. It was weird, as if he had been living in a cave the last week. I know he has his hobby horses, but after that, I can't imagine anyone taking him seriously anymore.

Why?

Because I have never seen such racism in my life on or offline.

I posted the crap posted by the racists at the Corner, and frankly I'm stunned.

I'm also deliriously happy.

Why, because, they are shown to be the extremists that they are. When I call Jonah a racist, I will forever have his gills post to prove my point.

...

The Southern Strategy has been exposed for what it was, a fraud to con whites into hating blacks while benefitting the rich. Oddly enough, Bush's crony state has failed white Mississippi as badly as black New Orleans. Many conservatives have demanded both accountability and effective responses.

But there are others, like the folks at the Corner, who need to prove how good it is to be white.

You have to see Mark Williams on Headline News. Not only did the Dem react in horror, Karyn Bryant, who is biracial, was equally stunned and angry. OxyBoy Rush called NO Mayor Nagin Nayger

But what is so stunning is how out of tune they are.

They don't get it.

Sometimes the world changes before your eyes. December 7th was such a day, November 22nd was one, so was July 4th. Those days didn't just change America, they changed the way we saw the world.

The right blogosphere, used to defending Bush, is caught on the wrong side here and not only do they don't know it, they keep digging deeper. Ann Coulter says something so dumb, so obviously disprovable, it's like she doesn't get that the rules have changed. Her petty attacks are wildly inappropriate, and more importantly, just not relevant. Everyone from the Southern Baptist Convention to MTV are helping to raise money and feed people. The only people not doing anything are the righties. They're too busy pointing fingers at poor, helpless people who might have picked up a case of water so they didn't die in 90+ degree streets with no shade.

If the GOP is the daddy party, it's a crooked deadbeat dad telling the judge that partial payment is fine, even if the kids are on the street.

Americans don't like open racism, even the TV reporters recoiled after seeing how people used their footage to demonize the poor.

This is the most serious domestic crisis since Pearl Harbor, and these folks are acting like it's still Ok to be Bund members. They don't get that everything changed after Bush failed to help the Katrina survivors.

The right bloggers are treating this as politics.

A lot of people, left and right, realize the implications here, and Bush is being hammered because of this. If there had been a terrorist attack on a chemical plant or if an LNG tanker, FEMA's inaction would have killed thousands of people from untreated trauma injuries. This is no longer about politics, but survival.

To be frank, all 9/11 did was change the scale of our response to terrorism. It didn't even really change Manhattan. The dead linger in my memory, but except for the few blocks in Manhattan, life went on. Three thousand families were changed. Here, hundreds of thousands of families are going to be changed forever. A lot of sadness, but the subways never stopped running.

But New Orleans is gone. I mean, a unique way of life is gone. It doesn't get much more serious than this. And the right bloggers are making jokes and arguing about buses.

...

But Gilly was wrong.

Ten years later, and the Conservatives who were momentarily driven from their doctrinaire spider holes by Katrina have long since gone back the profitable business of pimping Conservative claptrap, blaming Both Sides and lying about American history.

Ten years later, if you ask the average Republican base voter what happened during Katrina, you will hear a lot about "buses", "Liberal", "government dependence" and more or less everything else that Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh shat into their skulls ten years ago. As far as they're concerned, this is settled history, just as the assassination of Vince Foster, death panels and a "stand down" plot by the Obama Administration to murder American foreign service officers in Benghaaaaazi is settled history.

Ten years later, and Jonah Goldberg is still doing just fine, thank you very much, and Ann Coulter is still treated as an honored guest on Fox News, and a trusted adviser by the leading candidate for the Republican presidential nomination.

Ten years later, "Heckuva Job, Brownie" is being give the full rehab treatment, and Dubya can visit New Orleans to give a speech and is not drive from the stage by a tsunami of rotten eggs and tomatoes.

Ten years later, the MSNBC you used to know is all but dead, the Liberal blogosphere is a ghost of what it once was, and Steve Gilliard's words crumble quietly to digital dust in the untended grave of The News Blog.

Ten years later and, irony of ironies, it may turn out to be that fighting every day just to remember our yesterdays as they really happened -- just to conserve the past against an implacable onslaught of revisionist propaganda -- is most important duty we dirty Liberals have.

The Authority Cows

Sometimes we who are not invited to C-Span panels on the "Future of the New York Times" with Dean Baquet and Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr. wonder why in the world certain Very Bad Writers continue to enjoy the bounty and favor and institutional protection that comes with a job-for-life on the the New York Times op-ed page.

And then, sometimes in the middle of answering a discussion about "branding" (summary: Doesn't the NYT risk writers building their own brand while in the climate-controlled, fertilizer-rich Times' greenhouse and then taking their brand and moving on to better things once they're big enough to make it on their own?) they answer that question (audio only and not embeddable so I'm not sure who is saying what -- jump to the 1:16 mark):

Well and it also works both ways.

Mmm-mmm

It is when a Tom Friedman writes a best-selling book it lends authority to his columns on the New York Times editorial page.

Or David Brooks!

Great.  Right.  First...number one on best-seller list.

Dean Baquet and Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr. never wonder why certain Very Bad Writers continue to enjoy the bounty and favor and institutional protection of their newspaper, because very formation of such a question would be incomprehensible to them.  To them, Brooks and Friedman are "authority cows", who consistently generate a positive flow of credibility into the Times in the same way a "cash cow" consistently generates profit.

Cocooned by money and privilege and a wholly self-referential system which tells them how righteous they are, our media overlords simply do not live in the same world as the rest of us.

And they never will.

Now That The War in Iraq Is No Longer Over

If your knowledge of Mr. David Brooks is limited to following his multi-continent "Morality Now!" book and speaking tour and retweeting that one column over and over and over again --

The Moral Bucket List http://t.co/sltmc2h6Vu

— David Brooks (@nytdavidbrooks) April 11, 2015

-- you may not realize that he has a secret identity!

Hard to believe, I know, but it's totally true!

When he not delighting audiences around the world with his lecture on the importance of honestly, personal integrity, and good character he can usually to be found back hard at work at his real job: indefatigably cranking out yet another "Both Sides Do It" column to add to the gargantuan pile of Both Siderist bullshit he has already generated by extruding ideologically identical columns, week after week.

Month after month.

Year after year after year.

As relentless as the tides, with only an occasional break for long vacations or to sneak off in the middle of caviling The Poors on the Teddible Teddible Dangers of broken families to get quietly divorced or to finishing up a book on the importance of honestly, personal integrity, and good character or whatever.

As Liberal misfits have been documenting ad nauseum since the dawn of blogging, the "Both Sides Do It" fairy tale is by far the most popular, lucrative and useful lie the mainstream media tells.  A veritable cottage industry, generating one variation after another of the same Big Lie you will hear everyone from presidents and captains of industry to your Crazy Uncle Liberty repeating catechistically every time reality veers terrifyingly close to exposing the fact that the Dirty Hippies have been right all along.   And for his work as an early and assiduous adopter of this Big Lie, Mr. David Brooks has been feted and rewarded beyond the dreams of Avarice.

But to remain strong and vital, the Big Both Siderist Lie must constantly be refreshed with the bullshit of repetition, and this is where Mr. Brooks really excels, because as sure as the sun does rise in the East, if you pick virtually any David Brooks column out of the pile on virtually any subject, you will always find the Both Siderist razor in the apple (from me, in 2014):

...

And since we know that since the post-Bush David Brooks is biologically and contractually incapable of writing any column expressing any opinion on any subject without a big, steaming load of Both Siderism right in the middle, you will be unsurprised to find this razor in the apple (emphasis added):

The weakness with any democratic foreign policy is the problem of motivation. How do you get the electorate to support the constant burden of defending the liberal system?

It was barely possible when we were facing an obviously menacing foe like the Soviet Union. But it’s harder when the system is being gouged by a hundred sub-threshold threats. The Republicans seem to have given up global agreements that form the fabric of that system, while Democrats are slashing the defense budget that undergirds it.

And so, knowing this, you have no business being surprised that in the dead-bang middle of Mr. David Brooks' column on Iraq today in the New York Times you will find this (emphasis added):

This attempt to impose top-down solutions, combined with President Obama’s too-fast withdrawal from Iraq, has contributed to the fertile conditions for the rise of ISIS.

And this, whatever-the-fuck it is:

Central politicians love centralization. But this is the wrong recipe for an exploding Middle East.

And having demonstrated my thesis that Mr. Brooks is a Both Siderist doody-head hiding inside a briar patch of "morality" words, I am tempted to move along to other things, but I feel I must tarry a moment longer to make one more point.

Because if your knowledge of Mr. David Brooks is limited to shaking your head in impotent rage that he has gotten rich and powerful repeating the same, ridiculous Both Siderist bullshit over and over again in one column after another you may not realize that he has yet another secret identity!

Hard to believe, I know, but it's totally true!

You see, the reason Mr. Brooks was an early and assiduous adopter of the Big Both Siderist Lie is because the previous Big Lie on which Mr. Brooks staked his fortune -- the Big Lie that Liberals Are To Blame For Everything -- ran outta gas right around the time the Bush Administration which Mr. Brooks had so ferociously supported started to implode.

So of course he and his fellow travelers in the mainstream media needed to manufacture a gargantuan pile of Both Siderist bullshit most riki-tik.  How else to bury the equally gargantuan pile of Liberals are Terrorist-Loving Dupes and Monsters bullshit on which they had all built their careers?

Here is Mr. Brooks from 2003, making an excellent living by calling you and your friends muddle-headed, hate-crazed idiots who will probably spend the rest of your stupid lives swaddling yourselves in one convenient delusion after another rather than admit the simple fact that you were wrong, wrong, wrong!

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.

This is the same man who now makes an even more fabulous living and commands the respect of leading civic, political, media and religious leaders by relentlessly preaching the snake-oil of Both Siderism and lecturing other people on the importance of morality, modesty, honesty, integrity and good character.  

A fact on which I shall dwell bemusedly as I make my way though the wasteland of the want ads in my local paper once again.

The Speech Code of David Brooks, Ctd.

We join America's Leading Admonisher Without Portfolio in the 30th year of his perpetual midlife crisis, once again turning his astigmatic, cyclopean attention to the moral order of the universe and, once again, finding that out of all the sin joints in all the towns in all the world, what the dirty hippies are up to on America's college campuses, once again, rises above all other issues as a target of his opprobrium.

The Campus Crusaders 

Well-intentioned moral fervor on campuses today often slides into a dangerous type of zealotry.

Since I have already written on the subject and since I am very lazy, I will indulge myself with a brief visit to the bygone days of January, 2015 for an excerpt from when I was so much younger and more naive:

Let's start with sheer moral loutishness of breezing past the actual events in France so that Mr. Brooks can settle down to equating a mass shooting in the offices of Charlie Hebdo with Evil Liberal Speech Codes at some American colleges.  Because, just like his lower-rent Conservative cousins working the rougher trade over at Fox News, for Mr. Brooks no act of depravity is truly presentable until he has dipped it in the Dirty Hippie sauce.

The journalists at Charlie Hebdo are now rightly being celebrated as martyrs on behalf of freedom of expression, but let’s face it: If they had tried to publish their satirical newspaper on any American university campus over the last two decades it wouldn’t have lasted 30 seconds. Student and faculty groups would have accused them of hate speech. The administration would have cut financing and shut them down.

Public reaction to the attack in Paris has revealed that there are a lot of people who are quick to lionize those who offend the views of Islamist terrorists in France but who are a lot less tolerant toward those who offend their own views at home.

Hey, speaking of speech codes...apparently having been inexplicably reprieved for life from the laws of cause and effect in the labor market, Mr. Brooks has grown deeply confused about how marketplaces work...

And by the way, speaking of speech codes...what makes this an especially idiotic false equivalence is...

Since we're on the subject of speech codes...this is an awfully high horse to be riding, Mr. Brooks, for someone who actively hides from his own commentors and has his houseboy sift his email to make sure he doesn't accidentally see someone saying something mean about him.  

And while on the topic of speech codes...one last thing.  I would be more than happy to debate   speech codes (which, were I were Emperor of the Seven Galaxies, I would abolish, which is why there should never be an Emperor of the Seven Galaxies) with Mr. Brooks anywhere, any time...on one condition.  Rather starting a debate what kind of limitations which some institutions may put on free expression with some restrictive decisions that may occur every once in a great while and affect an audience of a few hundred -- 

Americans may laud Charlie Hebdo for being brave enough to publish cartoons ridiculing the Prophet Muhammad, but, if Ayaan Hirsi Ali is invited to campus, there are often calls to deny her a podium.

-- let us instead begin where we should begin -- with a massive, public venue with an audience of millions every week where the hosts consistently and methodically banish entire topics of vital public interest -- from climate change to the ongoing seditious lunacy of the Party of Bigots and Imbeciles -- because broaching them may hurt the delicate fee-fees of the worst people in America:

Chuck Todd: We all sit there, because we all know, the first time we bark is the last time that they do the show. You say something, and sometimes it is last time they will ever come on your show. There is that balance.

But we're never, ever going to discuss that speech code, are we?  Because rigid, across-the-board adherence to that speech code is the only reason people like Mr. Brooks has a job that doesn't involve grimly welcoming bulk mayonnaise and ammunition shoppers to WalMart.

And speaking of David Brooks' work history...

And this is where we leave a younger and less worldly-wise driftglass and return to the modern era just long enough to note the pure, existential hilarity of David Brooks -- a powerful, incredibly privileged grown ass man who adamantly refuses to speak honestly about his own, well-documented history of being horribly wrong about almost everything and who confines himself to venues where no one would be rude enough to press him with any hard questions about his own sketchy moral decisions and his own ethically bankrupt writing -- lectures college students on their moral duty to "not hide from what you fear"  to "[face] hard facts" and to otherwise be the diametric opposite of David Brooks in every way:

...

There will always be moral fervor on campus. Right now that moral fervor is structured by those who seek the innocent purity of the vulnerable victim. Another and more mature moral fervor would be structured by the classic ideal of the worldly philosopher, by the desire to confront not hide from what you fear, but to engage the complexity of the world, and to know that sometimes the way to wisdom involves hurt feelings, tolerating difference and facing hard truths.

The Great Project Continues, Ctd.

And like that, he's gone.

David Brooks has a new book for sale.

You can buy it everywhere.

It's a best-seller, which he is promoting on the kind of book tour almost no author on Earth gets anymore; the kind of worldwide publicity blitz which Media, Inc. would normally reserve for a new book of the Bible.

And because David Brooks is a Very Serious Person who has written an Important Book, eventually The New Yorker would have to write a book review.

I don't care about Mr. Brooks' new books and on most days I don't give The New Yorker a second thought, but here (I sez to myself) is an interesting opportunity to watch how Mr. Brooks' Great Project is progressing.  Because in order for Ms. Rebecca Mead to write anything like an honest review of Mr. Brooks' book using the following thesis --

"David Brooks’s Search for Meaning"

-- she would immediately have to confront the vast and fetid swamp of Mr. Brooks' entire public record of being horribly, hypocritically wrong about virtually everything, and his relentless flogging of the snake oil of "Both Siderism" for the last decade as a conversational abortifacient (Guaranteed  99% successful in preventing people like David Brooks from being held accountable for being horribly, hypocritically wrong about virtually everything!)

So how would Ms. Rebecca Mead navigate these tricky waters?

Like so:

Brooks, who established a reputation for sometimes glib but often insightful cultural commentary with “Bobos in Paradise,” his 2000 best-seller, has more recently specialized in applying the latest in brain science and social psychology to larger questions of morality on the Op-Ed pages of the Times.

That is all any reader of Ms. Rebecca Mead's review will learn about Mr. Brooks qualifications to speak on the subject of character and morality.

Then we are off to the races:

It would be a hard-hearted critic who dismisses another writer’s sincere attempt at midlife self-examination, or his efforts at moral and ethical improvement. (That being said, Brooks does so, snarking at Elizabeth Gilbert’s best-selling memoir, “Eat, Pray, Love.” “I am the only man ever to finish this book,” he writes, thereby insulting the author and more than ten million readers in one fell swoop.) There is something affecting in the diligence with which Brooks seeks a cure for his self-diagnosed shallowness by plumbing the depths of others, each of whom—while achieving greater fame and sometimes even greater fortune than that accrued by a successful newspaper columnist—did the hard work of scouring his own soul.

And so, in broad daylight and with the eager assistance of Media, Inc., the real David Brooks is hustled into an unmarked tomb along with the entire, sickening history of Modern Conservatism, never to be visited again except by angry, unemployed bloggers who no one listens to anyway,

And like that, he's gone.