Death of the Anti-Gonzo

The Washington Post's write-up is as good as any:

David Broder, 81, dies; set 'gold standard' for political journalism

By Adam Bernstein
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, March 10, 2011; 12:39 AM

David S. Broder, 81, a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The Washington Post and one of the most respected writers on national politics for four decades, died Wednesday at Capital Hospice in Arlington of complications from diabetes.

Mr. Broder was often called the dean of the Washington press corps - a nickname he earned in his late 30s in part for the clarity of his political analysis and the influence he wielded as a perceptive thinker on political trends in his books, articles and television appearances.
...

Mr. Broder had a "relentlessly centrist" philosophy about politics, the political commentator Hendrik Hertzberg wrote in the New Yorker magazine. Mr. Broder brooked little tolerance toward what he termed, in describing the action of 1960s militant antiwar activists, "confrontation politics, with its constant threat of violence and repression."
...

While there were many, many things David Broder loved -- centrism, politics, bi-partisanship, equidistanthood, divarication, bisect-uality, decussation -- one thing he really hated was hippies.

Those those damn, dirty, disrespectful fucking hippies.

He especially hated those fucking imaginary hippies: they were the sawdust and breadcrumb filler he kept heaping into his increasingly inedible journalistic meatloaf; the thumb he pressed down ever harder on the scales of his funny little rambles about America during his declining years (which encompassed all of the 21st Century and a big chunk of the end of the 20th) to artificially "balance out" the clear and horrifying fact that Party of Lincoln and Eisenhower that he had known as a barefoot lad growing up in the swampland of Chicago Heights was devolving into a billionaire-industrialist-funded mob of fundies, racists, imbeciles and sociopaths.

In fact, this fetish became so obsessive that, in the end, it became the great, tragic irony of David Broder's professional life. Because at last he simply could not bear to part with his fantasies about what he wished America to be and face the brutal realities of what America was actually becoming, David Broder -- this "Dean of the Washington press corps" -- totally missed out on covering the greatest story of his time; the utter collapse of the American news media and the mutation of the GOP from a political party into a dangerously fascistic cesspit of oligarchs, lunatics and rubes.

It was a story which his background and years of hard work had almost uniquely prepared him to cover, and one that was literally staring him in the face for much of the last 20 years.

And he completely fucking blew it.

But more than anything else, he super-duper-especially hated it when those dang, dirty, disrespectful, imaginary hippies moved into that nice White House at the center his little town and fucked everything up with. From Taylor Marsh:

...David Broder represented commentary that is the worst of insider Washington D.C. thinking and an elitism, a leading member of Sally Quinn’s clan, which meant he was an original member of the Clinton hater club and helped churn the anti-Clinton fervor with gusto.
Sally Quinn’s infamous “In Washington, That Letdown Feeling” captured the insider feelings about the Pres. Clinton after the Lewinsky affair broke:

“He came in here and he trashed the place,” says Washington Post columnist David Broder, “and it’s not his place.”
[...] “The judgment is harsher in Washington,” says The Post’s Broder. “We don’t like being lied to.”

Nothing annoyed the Washington elite more than the hicks from the sticks, Bill and Hillary Clinton. After Ronald Reagan, the Arkansans were see as interlopers. To understand Washington that’s where you have to begin.
Broder turned Pres. Clinton’s moral failings inside out and made it all about them, the D.C. community who considered Washington a small town.
...

If Hunter Thompson's coverage of politics in 1972 was (according to George McGovern's 1972 campaign manager, Frank Mankiewicz) "the least factual, but the most accurate" of all the correspondents, the award for being "the most factual, but the least accurate" correspondent of his generation must go to David Broder.

The eponymous Father of High Broderism (from the Urban Dictionary)

The worship of bipartisanship for its own sake, combined with a fake "pox on both their houses" attitude. The main goal is the establishment of a permanent ruling class of Washington insiders, our betters who know better. It is their rough agenda which is sold as "centrism" even when it has no actual relationship with the political center in a meaningful way. The establishment of an aristocratic class in America.

and its staunchest Fidei Defensor (from Rick Perlstein)

...
Richard Nixon ran the most secretive presidential campaign in national history—even making reporters sit in rooms far from the crowds and watch his events on closed-circuit TV. George McGovern made Nixon's secretiveness a major focus of his campaign—begging Nixon every day to debate him. And yet somehow Broder recollects a situation of equivalence. I think it shows how his mind works—and why our political press corps is so badly broken.

David Broder sired and suckled an entire generation of well-heeled, well-connected, establishmentarian insider merchants of Beltway Common Wisdom who have made a massively profitable cottage industry out of displacing honest reportage in favor of passing around empty "process" stories, vapid D.C. gossip tricked out in somber political rhetoric and the status and style updates of Very Serious People like Tennessee Williams' proverbial "dirty postcard".

And the glue that holds the whole ugly, toxic scam together is the relentless, reflexive, completely-dishonest buffering of any and all Republican crimes, treasons, hypocrisies and obscenities...of any kind...in any context...in any venue...on any given day of the week...with the Broderite mantra of "...but the Liberals": a habit so ingrained b y now in the Villager Hive Mind that the Center-Right Shill Factory known as Politico could not help but go out of its way to take a gratuitous swipe at the dirty fucking hippies in the middle of their eulogy to Mr. Broder (emphasis mine):

Broder, who grew up in Chicago and was a graduate of the University of Chicago, revered the political process and admired those he saw as rational voices focused on achieving results. That sometimes opened him up to criticism from ideologues on the left, who saw him as the epitome of conventional, inside-the-Beltway wisdom. But he also earned respect from prominent politicians on both sides of the aisle, many of whom released statements soon after news of his death was announced Wednesday.

Sorry, Politico, but however much of a legend his hard, on-the-ground, sandal-leather reporting on what the Average Roman thought about the first Punic War ("Hiero II of Syracuse shoulda listened to his general onna ground!") may be, David Broder's lasting legacy is ultimately a tragic one.

For against the tide of imaginary of dirty hippies who were forever plotting to mess up his lawn, and in the name of an idolatrous worship of the God of Fake Objectivity, the Dean of the Washington press corps' most enduring contribution to his profession has been as the Patient Zero of a lethal strain of syphilitic Villager Centrism which may be more responsible than any other single factor in all-but wiping out anything resembling honest national political journalism in America.

And that is the definition of tragedy.

UPDATE: Welcome Vanity Fair readers and many thanks to the matchless James "The Enforcer" Wolcott for pointing you in my direction.

NPR Resigns

While details of this latest (and ultimately fatal) scandal are still being pieced together, the basic information is no longer in dispute:

1. During Chicago NPR affiliate WBEZ's Spring pledge drive, Mrs. Osceola Langdon -- an 84-year-old retired public school teacher and frequent public radio volunteer -- was staffing a phone bank. "I'm on the Social Security, and cain't rilly afford to give these kids much money, so it feels good to take the bus over once in awhile and hep out," Mrs. Langdon told this reporter.

2. During pledge break in Chicago's popular but mysteriously-named "848" program (which does not start at 8:48), Mrs. Langdon was overheard agreeing with a caller who referred to Republicans as "meanies" and Tea Partiers as "shockingly ignorant". "I tole her I taught history at Hugo Gernsback middle school for 38 years, and that if any one a' mah little ones had come in talkin' such fanciful nonsense, they woulda been stayin' after and cleanin' mah chalk boards for a week," Mrs. Langdon confirmed to this reporter.

3. The scandalous assertions were promptly reported to Fox News, which interrupted its ongoing coverage of who John Bolton thinks we should invade today with a "Special Alert". Sources at Fox also confirm that they are preparing a seven-part series -- "America's Fifth Columnists: Osceola Langdon, NPR and the call that Shocked a Nation!!" -- for broadcast later this month.

4. After initial and ultimately futile attempts to contain the damage by claiming that these were just "the comments of one nice old lady" that also "happened to be 100% true", the outgoing and final president of NPR issued this apology to "all Conservatives, Republicans, Centrists, Tea Party members, Corporatists, Whigs, Fascists, Copperheads, Tories, Fetal Liberationists, Randites, Neo-Nazis, Libertarians, Birchers and Dominionists throughout all time and space and across all 26 dimensions":

after which entire staff of NPR at both its national and local affiliates ritually disemboweled themselves, neatly wrapped their entrails in festive Public Radio tote bags and, with the last of their strength, scrawled "We're sooooo sorry!" on the tote bag's handy gift cards in their own blood before presenting them humbly to Andrew Brietbart and then expiring.

Meanwhile...

...in Centrist Heaven, the late David Broder was heard wondering aloud if NPR had really done enough to show its contrition.

Meanwhile...

...Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity and all the rest of the

detestable tools in the Hate Media toolbox continue getting rich making models of the Devil's Tower out of their own poo on the air.

Meanwhile...

...Establishmentarian clowns like David Gregory

continue their really, really great careers unaffected by anything at all.

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All of which boil down to the same thing: to stay out of court you have to ritually interview 3-4 candidates who --

1. Look great on paper but,
2. Who have no chance whatsoever of being hired before you give the job to the ringer;

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Well Release My Kraken

and call me Hickey.

Guess who has a "blog"?

March 6, 2011, 5:30 pm
Hello
By DAVID BROOKS

...
On this blog I’m hoping to cover the sorts of intellectual, cultural and scientific findings and changes that I can’t really get into my columns or my conversations with fellow my columnist Gail Collins.
...

So, OK, if I understand the concept correctly, the world as we know it is so hungry for Brooksenalia that it cried out for a little Bobo-book-sales-boosting penis pump blog designed to copy-and-paste "Huffington" all the edgy, science-y stuff that Bobo for some reason cannot flog at any of the other outlet malls that carry his line of designer, Centrist togs and stand it in marked and separately-marketable contrast to, say, whatever bland Centrist and/or apologist and/or revisionist and/or synthascience pudding the New York Times is letting Mr. Brooks parkour around its pages in the guise of a twice-weekly column:

The New Humanism
By DAVID BROOKS
Published: March 7, 2011

...
When you synthesize this research, you get different perspectives on everything from business to family to politics. You pay less attention to how people analyze the world but more to how they perceive and organize it in their minds.
...

Or not.

Either way, I'm sure we can all look forward to scads of exciting "New thread!"s and "Rock on"s from Mr. Brooks' what-should-have-been-at best-a-Twitter-account-called-"Shit Malcolm Gladwell Says" blog for years and years to come.

Methuselah's Forgetful Children

Like truffles, on Teh Internets the laughs are free if you know where to find them.

While averting my gaze from the horror of the gaping cultural head-wound that was David Gregory interviewing Michele Bachmann, my eyes fell upon this...

Latent Magic

06 Mar 2011 10:40 am

Mark Changizi predicts that future humans will find amazing powers not from AI or genetic engineering, but from simple evolution - something he calls nature-harnessing...

Which would be even more amazing if science fiction hadn't been kicking the same idea around for the last 70 years. From Wiki:

"Methuselah's Children is a science fiction novel by Robert A. Heinlein, originally serialized in Astounding Science Fiction in the July, August, and September 1941 issues. It was expanded into a full-length novel in 1958....
...

The Howard Families derive from Ira Howard, who became rich in the California Gold Rush, but died young and childless. Fearing death, he left his money for the prolongation of human life, and the trustees of his will carried out his wishes by financially encouraging those with long-lived grandparents to marry and have children. While the Families (who, by the 22nd Century, have a life expectancy of 150 years) have kept their existence secret, with the enlightened human society established under The Covenant, they decide to reveal themselves.

Society refuses to believe the Howard Families simply 'chose their ancestors wisely', instead insisting they have developed a method to extend life, and the Families are persecuted and interned. Though the beleaguered Administrator of the planet, Slayton Ford, is convinced the Families are telling the truth, he is helpless to control an increasingly irrational public and their efforts to force the Howard Families to reveal their "secret" or face execution.
...

I must say, one of my greatest sources of free internet laughs occurs almost weekly when some (often otherwise well-read) writer whose understanding of science fiction begins with "Blade Runner" or "Terminator" gets tweaked (and massively linked, re-linked and mentally masticated by his peers) about an idea that was showing its age 30 or 40 or 50 years ago when Asimov or Pohl or Kornbluth or PK Dick was cranking out whole novels on the subject.

Being one of the last remembers of the details and literature of a past that has all but vanished down the American Idol Hole has its rewards...

..one of which is remembering that the remembrance of lost things past has been the theme of about a third of everything Ray Bradbury has ever written, including "The Chicago Abyss":

Ray Bradbury's "The Chicago Abyss" is a tale of an old man who remembers too much. In the rubble of some bombed out urban center, the people physically abuse the old man when he shares his memories of such things as Baby Ruth candy bars, music, restaurants, and television. A small group protects and cares for the old guy, hiding him from the ever-searching police.

Of course, the reason for the loathing and fear of this gentleman was that he held a frame of reference that degraded the present.

I'm sure there's a lesson in there somewhere.

Those Who Do Not Remember History

Will have long and profitable careers as Neoconservative war pimps.

On the eve of the release of his terrible, terrible book (PZ Myers's lovely review gives the game away, thus saving you from rushing out to your local municipal airport to buy a copy) --

...I learned to loathe Harold and Erica, the two upscale avatars of upper-middle-class values that Brooks marches through life in the story. And then I began to resent the omniscient narrator who narrates this exercise in unthinking consumption and privilege that is, supposedly, the ideal of happiness; it's like watching a creepy middle-aged man fuss over his Barbie and Ken dolls, posing them in their expensive accessories and cars and houses and occasionally wiggling them in simulated carnal relations (have no worries, though: Like Barbie and Ken, no genitals appear anywhere in the book), while periodically pausing to tell his audience how cool it all is, and what is going on inside his dolls' soft plastic heads.

-- David Brooks almost tripped over his own dick by accidentally reminding everyone that he is almost always horribly wrong about everything.

Especially things that involve sending other people's children off to die for one of his pet Neocon foreign adventures.

Fortunately for his future book sales, his genuinely jaw-dropping gaffe happened on an obscure foreign program from an exotic and distant land called "PBS" where 10 of the 11 people watching were doing so because the tepid drone of Jim Lehrer's voice puts their newborns to sleep better than the vibrations from either their washing machine or their idling car.

In my case, however, it was enough to halt me mid-stride -- flamingo-like -- bowl of pasta in one hand and say "Did David Fucking Brooks really just say what I think he said?" aloud to an empty room:

MARK SHIELDS: I think [Libya is] going to play out, Jim, absent a visible, factual evidence of a tragedy of great human dimensions there, I think there will be no entry on the part of the United States militarily.

I mean, Secretary Gates again delivered the sobering news for the administration and to the administration critics, which was a no-fly zone is an act of war. You know, you don't simply say -- it's not like a no-passing zone. We don't put up orange cones. I mean, you have to go in and take out the anti-aircraft capability of the other country.

So, I think that's -- that course, which was being trumpeted and heard rather loudly, became muted. But -- and there's no way we're going to act unilaterally. I think the experiences the United States has had in Iraq and Afghanistan in this first decade of the 21st century have given great cause -- caution and hesitation to the idea of a surgical strike anywhere.

JIM LEHRER: How do you see it?

DAVID BROOKS: Well, the experience has given us great caution.

On the other hand, you have got the following logistics sort of playing out. We have imposed sanctions on Gadhafi. We have more or less isolated him and his regime. There is really no escape hatch for them. And the protesters are marching.

And so we have put them in a situation where we -- they say there is no escape. We're not going to be forgiven. We have to fight to the end and just stick this out.

So, we have given them a strong incentive to do everything possible to crush the activists. And, so, if we...

JIM LEHRER: You mean to Gadhafi?

DAVID BROOKS: To Gadhafi.

JIM LEHRER: An incentive to Gadhafi...

DAVID BROOKS: Right.

And, so, I understand why the sanctions -- I supported the sanctions. But if you are going to give the dictator an incentive to kill a lot of people, well, maybe you shouldn't stop there.

And so are we really going to stand by? If his only choice is, I'm going to do whatever it takes, are we really going to do nothing, the whole world? That is a tough thing to do.

JIM LEHRER: But that's the question, isn't it?

DAVID BROOKS: Right. And so I'm -- I understand Mark's cautions, but I don't think we can just -- to the extent that this has happened, and to what we know about Gadhafi, I don't think we can stand there while he massacres people. We should expect the violence is going to get worse, because he has no incentive to not do that.

MARK SHIELDS: The invasion and occupation of Libya, which is what we are talking about...

DAVID BROOKS: Well...

MARK SHIELDS: No, it is.

DAVID BROOKS: ... invading and occupying.

MARK SHIELDS: You don't go in, you don't go in -- you don't send a platoon in. I mean, this is a war, what we're talking about. It's a civil war in the making. And it is real.

We have as little leverage in Libya as we have any place in the world. It's unlike Egypt, where there was an army, an institution that could provide the option of leadership and the reality of leadership. There's no other countries that have any influence over them.

I mean, absent a collective act by many, many countries, you know, I just don't see the United States acting.

JIM LEHRER: What about General Deptula's idea, or not -- it wasn't an idea; it was an option that he said, well, there's that one area in Tripoli that is fortified; that's where Gadhafi and his folks are; take them out?

MARK SHIELDS: I mean, it always sounds great. I mean, it really does.

JIM LEHRER: That's the surgical...

MARK SHIELDS: That's the surgical -- I mean, let's just go in and take him out, and then we're gone.

And we don't have -- I mean, if there is evidence of a massacre, then there will be collective action. You know that. And I am tried -- I'm sorry that people are being hurt. It strikes me that the tide is going in the direction of the anti-Gadhafi forces right now, from all the reports I have had and am privy to.

So, I hope that that happens. But I do not see the United States -- one more land war in the Middle East?

DAVID BROOKS: But, I mean, nobody is talking about sending troops on land. I mean, the activists don't even want them arming us. They don't want them doing a surgical strike. I don't particularly think that is a particularly good idea.

They're asking for a little way to shift the balance of power. And we have had no-fly zones in Iraq and elsewhere around the world. It hasn't meant we have had to take over the country. In Saddam's reign, after the first Desert Storm, we had a no-fly zone. And, so, I'm not sure it is a good idea, but I'm not sure we can walk up this far and then suddenly stand back and say, OK, sorry.

MARK SHIELDS: After we wiped out Saddam's military capacity in the Persian Gulf War.

It was -- the war was stopped after 96 hours because they had been totally decimated and devastated. There was no resistance. He did...

DAVID BROOKS: Saddam had -- was using gunships on Shiites. We don't need to -- on the south, but...

This is what stopped me cold in my living room: the stark revelation that America's Greatest Conservative Public Intellectual had obviously forgotten the entire first Gulf War.

Had just slipped the whole thing down the memory hole.

Had forgotten that Iraq had been carved up by treaty like a roast after the first Gulf War.

Had forgotten that even after his army had been destroyed and his country had been cauterized by no-fly zones, Saddam Hussein had managed to hang onto power.

Had forgotten that it was precisely this fact -- that Saddam Hussein had been contained but not overthrown by the massive and sustained application of American military power -- that provided the impetus for PNAC thugs in media, in think tanks and in the White House

to lie and lie and lie and lie and lie and lie us into the disaster that is George Bush's Iraqi Debacle.

So you'd think that unless David Fucking Brooks is planning on spending the rest of his life going from town to town individually apologizing to the Americans whose lives he ruined and futures he bankrupted by being one of the Dear Leader's eager, blood-soaked, smirking Neocon boosters for his Excellent Iraqi Adventure, simple common decency would suggest that Bobo once-and-for-all shut the fuck up about Iraq already.

But of course he can't.

He can't because it squats out there, bestriding his resume and dwarfing his many, many other journalistic failures. He can't because it is the ragged hole where a massive professional tooth used to be that he just cannot keep his tongue away from.

And what's more, he doesn't have to.

He doesn't have to because we now live in a country where there is no penalty whatsoever for Conservatives who are grotesquely and serially wrong about matters of life and death. And so well-paid buffoons like Brooks have no incentive to learn the lessons of Iraq that other, less-privileged citizens have paid for with their lives. Instead, he and his ilk are left with their lives, fortunes and positions of power in American politics and media blissfully untouched, free to whitewash their failures over and over again, unmolested by the inconvenient realities of the pain and ruin they left in their wake.

From "Foreign Policy":

Whitewashing the failure in Iraq
Posted By Stephen M. Walt
On the eve of President Obama's speech to the nation on Iraq, some of the people who dreamed up this foolish war or helped persuade the nation that it was a good idea are getting out their paintbrushes and whitewash. I refer, of course, to the twin op-eds in today's New York Times by former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and neoconservative columnist David Brooks.
Wolfowitz, you will recall, was one of the main architects of the war, having pushed the invasion during the 1990s and as soon as he became Deputy Secretary of Defense in the Bush adminstration. He was the guy who recommended invading Iraq four days after 9/11, even though Osama bin Laden was nowhere near Iraq and there was no evidence that Saddam Hussein had anything to do with it. For his part, Brooks was an enthusiastic cheerleader for the war in the months prior to the invasion, and he continued to defend it long after the original rationale had been exposed as a sham.
As for Brooks, his column is a transparent attempt to retroactively justify an unnecessary war. He marshals an array of statistics showing how much things have improved in Iraq, but all his various numbers show is that after you've flattened a country and dismantled its entire political order, you can generate some positive growth rates if you pour billions of dollars back in. He claims this "nation-building" effort cost only $53 billion (hardly a trivial sum), but that figure omits all the other costs of the war (which economist Joseph Stiglitz and budget expert Linda Bilmes estimate to be in excess of $3 trillion). And like Wolfowitz, Brooks is mostly silent about the hundreds of thousands of dead Iraqis and thousands of dead and wounded Americans who paid the price for their naïve experiment in social engineering.
...

Of course, what Wolfowitz and Brooks are up to is not hard to discern. They want Americans to keep pouring resources into Iraq for as long as it takes to make their ill-fated scheme look like a success. Equally important, they want to portray Iraq in a somewhat positive light now, so that Obama and the Democrats get blamed when things go south.
...

Sadly, there is, of course, nothing new here. This is all part of a "specific, mutagenic strain of "Wingnut Doublethink"" that I referred to here as Strategic Forgettery --

...the training of an entire generation of Conservatives to mindlessly attack!attack!attack! the "Left" while holding themselves willfully and belligerently ignorant of what their Movement is really doing and who is really running it -- is, in the end, Ronald Reagan's most potent and vile political legacy: Strategic Forgettery.

-- one part of a set of radical blueprints upon which the entire Modern Conservative Movement has been constructed, and which as turned the Right into what is it today: a mob of willfully amnesiac killbots who stay angry, crazy and electorally-compliant only by completely forgetting their origins, founders, history, pedigree and basically everything else that happened before whatever Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity upchucked into their skulls yesterday.

And finally, in the most hilariously, multi-dimensional, letter-perfect, public example of "Irony" I have unearthed in many a year, consider that this succinct and damning description of exactly the sort of brutalizing mental and moral devolution upon which the entire Conservative Brain Caste depends --

"Anti-ideology consists of the attempts to shrink men's minds down to the range of the immediate moment, without regard to past or future, without context or memory -- above all, without memory. so that contradictions cannot be detected, and errors or disasters can be blamed on the victim.

"In anti-ideological practice, principles are used implicitly and used to disarm the opposition, but are never acknowledged and are switched at will when it suits the purpose of the moment. Whose purpose? The gang's. This men's moral criterion becomes not "my view of the good -- or of the right -- or of the truth", but "my gang, right or wrong."

"This is what makes today's public issues and discussions so sickeningly false and futile. Most issues rest on so many wrong premises and carry so many contradictions that instead of the question: "Who is right?" one is constantly and tacitly confronted with the question: "Which gang do you support?""

-- was penned by Ayn Rand -- the materfamilias of the whole fucking unholy Movement -- in 1967.

They have become the very monsters they used to write crappy fiction about.

And so it goes.

Professional Left Podcast #63

"Hog Butcher for the World,
Tool Maker, Stacker of Wheat,
Player with Railroads and the Nation's Freight Handler;
Stormy, husky, brawling,
City of the Big Shoulders:

They tell me you are wicked and I believe them, for I
have seen your painted women under the gas lamps
luring the farm boys.

And they tell me you are crooked and I answer: Yes, it
is true I have seen the gunman kill and go free to
kill again.

And they tell me you are brutal and my reply is: On the
faces of women and children I have seen the marks
of wanton hunger.

And having answered so I turn once more to those who
sneer at this my city, and I give them back the sneer
and say to them:

Come and show me another city with lifted head singing
so proud to be alive and coarse and strong and cunning.

Flinging magnetic curses amid the toil of piling job on
job, here is a tall bold slugger set vivid against the
little soft cities;

Fierce as a dog with tongue lapping for action, cunning
as a savage pitted against the wilderness,
Bareheaded,
Shoveling,
Wrecking,
Planning,
Building, breaking, rebuilding..."

-- from Carl Sandurg's "Chicago"

Button, Button, who's got the Button...

You do, if you take advantage to the chance to pick up this mint-condition memento of the final days of the Mainstream Media, available at Blue Gal's Cafepress Store (and keep listening later in the year for an opportunity to win one). Also too, the Podcast Donate Button Button below allows listeners to throw a contribution specifically towards the podcast. Thanks for your listenership and support!

Thanks again to Frank Chow for the graphic at the ProLeft website and Heather at Crooks and Liars Video Cafe for their help. And don't forget, our archives are available for free with no downloads at Professional Left.

Mein Führer! I can walk!

Now that his tax cuts are safely in the bank, David Brooks has once again learned to stop worrying and love Budget Cuts.

Deep, Painful Budget Cuts.

Of course, Republicans are slightly too wanton to do it right, and Democrats are (apparently) too timid or fuzzy-headed or (one assumes) beholden to dirty Commie Labor Unions, so as with virtually every other column he has ever written (that wasn't cheerleader a failed war, boostering a failed economic policy, loving up some new GOP phenom (John Thune) or faithful manservant (Scooter Libby), or desperately trying to distance himself from the brutal, bloody catastrophe of a Conservative Movement he helped create and to which he owes his entire career)...once again the New York Time's Republican Goldilocks finds the perfect solution exactly in the imaginary middle.

To accomplish his budgetary miracles, Mr. Brooks boldly proposes the following three step plan:

1. Cut the bad stuff.
2. Don't cut the good stuff.
3. Repeat.

Wowser.

Better hurry up and go look now, because once the NYT Paywall Blast Shield goes up (again) you won't be able to sup on the mutton of Mr. Brooks' genius for free anymore!

Marie Davis Burns (thx for the catch. anon) from Reality Chex carves the roast for us today in the NYT Comment Section:

We're in the mess we're in because of people like you, Mr. Brooks -- people who helped promote the Republican agenda & helped get Republicans elected. Now, come to find out, as if no one had ever mentioned it before (oh, wait, it was spelled out in the Republican campaign policy guide "Plague to America"), they have taken a cleaver to programs that matter to average Americans but won't help Republicans get more votes in 2012.

Now you're trying to redecorate the barn after the horse has trashed it. Too little, too late.

And no use making the excuse, "Well, I didn't want some of those ultra-right-wingers to win." You played right into their hands. You've written more than one column extolling the virtues of careless "moderate" Republicans like Paul "Privatize Social Security" Ryan and Mitch "Destroy Public Unions" Daniels. There's nothing moderate about taking us back to the early 20th century. (There's plenty that immoral about it.) The only substantial difference between so-called "moderate" Republicans & tea-partiers is that moderates clean up a little better. They couch their anti-American policies in fancier rhetoric. And charts. But they're all cut from the same cloth -- cut back on programs, rights and wages for middle-income Americans & decrease responsibilities for the rich -- lower their taxes, privatize, deregulate, get "the government" off their backs.

Today in a speech to the nation's governors, President Obama -- who I keep reminding myself is a Democrat -- boasted that his budget proposal -- the one you so admire -- had the lowest ratio to gross domestic product since the administration of Dwight Eisenhower. This is a shameful admission coming from any politician -- much less from a self-described Democrat -- when we are trying to pull out of a recession brought on by irresponsible banksters and their equally irresponsible government "regulators." President Obama talked about painful cuts when he should have been talking about painful expenditures and painful new taxes on big corporations & the much-put-upon rich.

You brought us these people who are ruining the nation, Mr. Brooks. You have a lot of nerve suddenly adopting the pretense that you wish they would behave a little better. They don't have to, thanks to you and other irresponsible members of the media who either promoted them or failed to stand up to them.

You are watching the Decline and Fall of America, sponsored by the Republican party & a complicit Fourth Estate.

"Gemli" from Boston also does a fine job of driving in the spikes down among the dozens of NYT commenters. all of whom seem to know vastly more about the history of the Republican Fiasco Years and Mr. Brooks' role in them than does Mr. Brooks:

When I hear conservatives talk about the economy I am reminded of a type of stroke that makes the sufferer unable to recognize half of their body. Mr. Brooks can’t see his left side, that’s for sure. Only the right, deficit-cutting side is operational. Only by starving the old can the young thrive. Only by crushing unions can workers flourish. Instead of funding schools, we have to find ways to creatively strangle their resources.

Conservatives cannot even mention raising revenue. They physically can’t say the words, much less consider the actual possibility. They’re as afraid of t-a-x as they are of s-e-x, another taboo subject that makes them sweat and mutter and make up crazy medieval punishments for things like family planning, unwed mothers, and gay people. Make everybody hurt, that’s their motto.

You may remember that conservatives destroyed the economy. But we can’t talk about responsibility for the meltdown, because apparently that’s somehow controlled by the left side of their brains. We can’t talk about the wars, either, which put untold billions into the hands of war profiteers that could have been used to build schools by the hundreds.

And so now, after years of Republican's running completely amok, running up deficits the likes of which the country had never seen before and driving the global economy to the brink of ruin without a single fucking peep from the Pig People Base, the minute the black Democrat from Chicago takes the oath of office we are now suddenly in a budget cutting arms race and the same people who never uttered a single peep about budgets when George W. Bush was bleeding the treasury white are now vying to see who can kick the crap out of the poor, the weak and the sick the hardest.

USA!USA!