The New York Times spends a tidy sum every year on the maintenance and upkeep of a great, gassy, incredibly fragile Republican dirigible called David Brooks. Mr. Brooks' job at the Times is to glide ponderously above the messy fears and traumas of actual humans being roasted on the spit the Republican policies and dispersing blame for those policies onto "Both Sides". They pay him to be "detached" --
But the detached writer wants to be a few steps away from the partisans. She is progressive but not Democratic, conservative but not Republican. She fears the team mentality will blinker her views. She wants to remain mentally independent because she sees politics as a competition between partial truths, and she wants the liberty to find the proper balance between them, issue by issue.-- as he hectors the hoi polloi on the importance of being humble and never taking any side of any issue.
So when Mr. Brooks abruptly brought his mighty Dirigible of Detachment in for an emergency landing during the middle of his year-end vacation in order to dash off an unscheduled Sunday New York Times column about !Monsters! and !Murder!...well something damn-near apocalyptic must have happened. And not just "poor people" apocalyptic like Republicans throwing children into cages, or Republicans putting the hammer to health care for millions of Americans, or Republicans trying to deregulate the Earth into an uninhabitable hellscape, or even Republicans nominating and electing a treasonous, racist lunatic.
No this would have to be really apocalyptic. "Acela Corridor" apocalyptic. "Capitalism hanging its ass over David Brooks' privacy fence and taking a shit in his pool" apocalyptic.
And it was.
Who Killed The Weekly Standard?Suddenly, one of capitalism's staunchest defenders and greatest beneficiaries of unearned privilege and undeserved wealth didn't like actual capitalists very much at all.
I’ve only been around Phil Anschutz a few times. My impressions on those occasions was that he was a run-of-the-mill arrogant billionaire. He was used to people courting him and he addressed them condescendingly from the lofty height of his own wealth.Suddenly, Mr. Let's Not Judge had some very definite opinions about the sincerity of other people's Christianity:
I’ve never met Ryan McKibben, who runs part of Anschutz’s media group. But stories about him have circulated around Washington over the years. The stories suggest that he is an ordinary corporate bureaucrat — with all the petty vanities and the lack of interest in ideas that go with the type.
And Anschutz, being a professing Christian, decided to close the magazine at the height of the Christmas season, and so cause maximum pain to his former employees and their families.
Suddenly it wasn't the "creative destruction" wrought by rational actors making whatever decision they choose to with the company they own because capitalism is glorious but mess (which has been the generic sympathy card which tens of millions of Americans have been handed by men like David Brooks over the years as heroes of the free market hollowed out the American middle class.)
When the loot-and-scoot vultures finally came for David Brooks' wingnut welfare whelping box, suddenly it was straight-up murder, I tells ya! Murder most foul!
I have a strong suspicion that it is precisely because so many of The Weekly Standard's eulogists have apparently never held a real job in the real world, that the fact that TWS consistently lost money seems so weirdly irrelevant to their indignation. A trivial matter, really. Somebody else's problem (from Commentary magazine):
The corporate culture Mr. Brooks describes at the magazine Rupert Murdoch's money propped up sounds delightful for those we were inside the tent pissing out.
It probably was. I wouldn't know. I never wrote for The Weekly Standard.
I was, however, frequently written about by The Weekly Standard.
Not me personally, of course. Because while I have it on excellent authority that several professional Conservative havers-of-opinions (and more than a few professional Liberal havers-of-opinions) are quite aware of my work, as a Liberal blogger sans respectable byline, I officially do not exist. But boy-howdy did Mr. David Brooks have some very firm opinions about Liberals just like me back in his TWS days, especially once the magazine had lashed itself to the administration of George W. Bush.
Back in those days, I was a "brainless, self-destructive" member of "The New Stupid Party" because I was concerned that massive Bush tax cuts would piss away the budget surplus which the Clinton Administration has finally accumulated after digging us out of the massive deficits which Mr. Brooks' party had created.
Because, according to Mr. Brooks, obviously the only problem with the Bush tax cuts is that the were too small!
I was just a stupid Pelosi Democrat who was wandering stupidly around stupid Paul Krugman-land.
Which were followed by columns on the Greatness of George Bush.
Which were interspersed with columns mocking stupid Liberals like me for not recognizing the Greatness of George Bush.
Over the years, when things were slow and TWS needed something to fill up the column inches, Mr. Brooks could always be relied on to toss red meat to the peanut gallery with some faux anthropological analysis of the ridiculous habits and folkways of those stupid Liberals.
Those intolerant Liberals.
And although he and his Beltway colleagues have been extremely successful getting almost everyone to pretend it never happened, there are still quite a few of us who remember that, on the subject of the Iraq War, Mr. Brooks really let his inner Breitbart all the way out.
Because like so many Conservatives, Mr. Brooks' most giddy obsession during those critical years was speculating on the exact size and velocity of the Hell the Dirty Hippies were going to catch -- and how warped and pathetic their vicious, mindless denial would be -- now that they had been proven wrong!-wrong!-wrong! Because (in case you weren't there or don't remember), during this period Conservatives like Mr. Brooks genuinely believed that the Conservative Millennium was at hand -- that in the Bush Presidency and the Iraq War they had at last found their Movement's Holy Grail: a final, irrefutable, public, slam-dunk vindication of their Grand Unifying Theory that Dirty Hippies really are awful people who really do hate America, and who really are responsible for every bad thing that has ever happened and deserving of every horrible thing that Conservatives like Mr. Brooks had ever said about them.
And as I have already written about extensively elsewhere, the nakedly opportunistic Mr. Brooks used his position at The Weekly Standard to grab that grail with both hands and gleefully beat the shit out of the Dirty Hippies with it. In fact, he rode his Weekly Standard hippie punching and Bush hyping all the way to a job-for-life at The New York Times.
But hey, that's all ancient history now, right? And certainly not a history which either the Conservative Brain Caste or the Beltway media have any interest in revising. A history of a Conservative movement which created the very monster that consumed it. A history recounted now only among the reprobates and no-accounts, late at night, 'round our Liberal hobo fires.
For everyone else, history will record that it was a fun place to work. The greatest magazine that ever was, where witty badinage flowed like cheap beer in the CPAC hospitality suite, and the benefits package was nonpareil. Hell, the Savior of Conservatism himself has declared Mr. Brooks' column to be a virtual Voight-Kampff test of goodthinkfulness. Perhaps a little "thank you" for Mr. Brooks blurbing Mr. Goldberg's shitty book (“Epic and debate-shifting.”) so extravagantly..
In fact a year from now, I'll be very surprised if there is not some grand square in Baghdad that is named after Bill Kristol, David Brooks and The Weekly Standard.
When the loot-and-scoot vultures finally came for David Brooks' wingnut welfare whelping box, suddenly it was straight-up murder, I tells ya! Murder most foul!
This week, Anschutz and McKibben murdered The Weekly Standard, the conservative opinion magazine that Anschutz owned. They didn’t merely close it because it was losing money. They seemed to have murdered it out of greed and vengeance.Linger on this sentence for a moment. "They didn’t merely close it because it was losing money."
I have a strong suspicion that it is precisely because so many of The Weekly Standard's eulogists have apparently never held a real job in the real world, that the fact that TWS consistently lost money seems so weirdly irrelevant to their indignation. A trivial matter, really. Somebody else's problem (from Commentary magazine):
To be sure, it has never made money. Magazines like it never make money. But its circulation has always been extraordinarily healthy in opinion-journal terms. And within the giant corporations run by the wealthy men who started the Standard and then bought it—Rupert Murdoch and then Anschutz—its annual losses were a rounding error, akin to the budget for the catering on one of their blockbuster movie productions...This is a direct glimpse into the wingnut welfare mindset that we poor peasants outside of Prince Prospero's castle very rarely get. The arrogance of Conservative men (and they are mostly men) who came to believe that it was in the natural order of things that wealth and privilege and influence should flow to them -- a natural order for which someone else should pick up the tab in perpetuity.
The corporate culture Mr. Brooks describes at the magazine Rupert Murdoch's money propped up sounds delightful for those we were inside the tent pissing out.
It probably was. I wouldn't know. I never wrote for The Weekly Standard.
I was, however, frequently written about by The Weekly Standard.
Not me personally, of course. Because while I have it on excellent authority that several professional Conservative havers-of-opinions (and more than a few professional Liberal havers-of-opinions) are quite aware of my work, as a Liberal blogger sans respectable byline, I officially do not exist. But boy-howdy did Mr. David Brooks have some very firm opinions about Liberals just like me back in his TWS days, especially once the magazine had lashed itself to the administration of George W. Bush.
Back in those days, I was a "brainless, self-destructive" member of "The New Stupid Party" because I was concerned that massive Bush tax cuts would piss away the budget surplus which the Clinton Administration has finally accumulated after digging us out of the massive deficits which Mr. Brooks' party had created.
Because, according to Mr. Brooks, obviously the only problem with the Bush tax cuts is that the were too small!
I was just a stupid Pelosi Democrat who was wandering stupidly around stupid Paul Krugman-land.
The Pelosi Democrats Are they going to become the stupid party?
ARE THE DEMOCRATS about to go insane? Are they about to decide that the reason they lost the 2002 election is that they didn't say what they really believe? Are they about to go into Paul Krugman-land, lambasting tax cuts, savaging Bush as a tool of the corporate bosses? Are they about to go off on a jag that will ensure them permanent minority status in every state from North Carolina to Arizona?Along with all Liberals and "the media" I was clearly "deranged":
What on earth has gotten into the liberals and the media? Perhaps affected by some sort of post-Palm Beach stress disorder, reporters and activists on the left have depicted George W. Bush as the leader of some sort of arch-conservative jihad. They've portrayed his tax plan as dangerously radical, some of his nominees as Confederacy-loving loons, and his voucher plan as a menace to the future of public education. To put it bluntly, this is all deranged. You get the impression that the left has actually started believing its own direct-mail fund-raising letters...I was a dolt who refused to acknowledge that the GOP was not intolerant:
Pabulum with a Purpose
Beneath the much-mocked superficiality of the Philadelphia convention is a serious effort to transform the GOP
AUG 14, 2000
The GOP is not intolerant...I was a simpleton who refused to see that Bush and McCain had teamed up to invent an awesome new GOP!
ONE NATION CONSERVATISM
How George W. Bush and John McCain -- without quite realizing it -- are creating a new Republican philosophy
SEP 13, 1999
...together, Bush's Compassionate Conservatism and McCain's New Patriotic Challenge are steps toward a fresh vision for the Republican party. Indeed, if you meld the core messages of the two campaigns, you get a coherent governing philosophy for the post-Clinton age.That was gonna be, well, awesome!
Competent Conservatives, Reactionary Liberals
JAN 15, 2001
We seem to be entering a period of competent conservatism and reactionary liberalism. George W. Bush has put together a cabinet long on management experience and practical skills. But liberal commentators and activists, their imaginations aflame, seem to be caught in a time warp, back in the days when Norman Lear still had hair.Yes, during his tenure as Managing Editor at The Weekly Standard, Mr. Brooks penned many bold columns on the Greatness of George Bush.
Which were followed by columns on the Greatness of George Bush.
Which were interspersed with columns mocking stupid Liberals like me for not recognizing the Greatness of George Bush.
Over the years, when things were slow and TWS needed something to fill up the column inches, Mr. Brooks could always be relied on to toss red meat to the peanut gallery with some faux anthropological analysis of the ridiculous habits and folkways of those stupid Liberals.
Those intolerant Liberals.
And although he and his Beltway colleagues have been extremely successful getting almost everyone to pretend it never happened, there are still quite a few of us who remember that, on the subject of the Iraq War, Mr. Brooks really let his inner Breitbart all the way out.
Because like so many Conservatives, Mr. Brooks' most giddy obsession during those critical years was speculating on the exact size and velocity of the Hell the Dirty Hippies were going to catch -- and how warped and pathetic their vicious, mindless denial would be -- now that they had been proven wrong!-wrong!-wrong! Because (in case you weren't there or don't remember), during this period Conservatives like Mr. Brooks genuinely believed that the Conservative Millennium was at hand -- that in the Bush Presidency and the Iraq War they had at last found their Movement's Holy Grail: a final, irrefutable, public, slam-dunk vindication of their Grand Unifying Theory that Dirty Hippies really are awful people who really do hate America, and who really are responsible for every bad thing that has ever happened and deserving of every horrible thing that Conservatives like Mr. Brooks had ever said about them.
And as I have already written about extensively elsewhere, the nakedly opportunistic Mr. Brooks used his position at The Weekly Standard to grab that grail with both hands and gleefully beat the shit out of the Dirty Hippies with it. In fact, he rode his Weekly Standard hippie punching and Bush hyping all the way to a job-for-life at The New York Times.
But hey, that's all ancient history now, right? And certainly not a history which either the Conservative Brain Caste or the Beltway media have any interest in revising. A history of a Conservative movement which created the very monster that consumed it. A history recounted now only among the reprobates and no-accounts, late at night, 'round our Liberal hobo fires.
For everyone else, history will record that it was a fun place to work. The greatest magazine that ever was, where witty badinage flowed like cheap beer in the CPAC hospitality suite, and the benefits package was nonpareil. Hell, the Savior of Conservatism himself has declared Mr. Brooks' column to be a virtual Voight-Kampff test of goodthinkfulness. Perhaps a little "thank you" for Mr. Brooks blurbing Mr. Goldberg's shitty book (“Epic and debate-shifting.”) so extravagantly..
The negative responses to this column will be like the results of an allergy test. The more intense the response, the greater the evidence of ignorance, idiocy, venality, political pettiness or intellectual corruption. https://t.co/uPhEu4VeoL— Jonah Goldberg (@JonahNRO) December 16, 2018
In fact a year from now, I'll be very surprised if there is not some grand square in Baghdad that is named after Bill Kristol, David Brooks and The Weekly Standard.
Behold, a Tip Jar!
