Professional Left Podcast #373

"Don't ever take a fence down until you know why it was put up."  

-- Robert Frost, writer

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David Brooks: The Great Project Continues, Ctd.

Chapter XXXVII:  In The Beginning There Was Reagan...

Longtime readers know of my crazy long-since-proven-beyond-any-doubt theory that Mr. David Brooks of the New York Times does not write editorial columns twice a week per se, but is instead engaged in a massive, long-range project to assemble a sweeping, fictional alternate history of Modern Conservationism, which is being created right before our eyes by the slow, steady accretion of one godawful Whig Fan Fiction column at at time.

Put another way, every month Mr. Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr. pays Mr. David Brooks a princely sum to mutilated American history and arrange its body parts on the editorial pages of The New York Times to suit the infantile fantasies of a tiny clutch of his wealthy cronies. And for reasons no one in-the-know dares to speak of, Mr, Brooks has been allowed to dine out on the feeble-mindedness of the Sulzberger family for longer than anyone thought possible time. 

This was written by me, ten long years ago, and to The New York Times' eternal shame, with a few, minor tweaks and name changes, I could have been written this morning ("A Rose for Bobo -- Part 3-of-4"):

...

Bobo’s runty, privileged, gated-community self-image could not bear up for one second if he were ever obliged to lock eyes in the clear, noon light with the vast, greasy army of bigots and madmen to whom he offers pastel-toned cover-fire from the good, gray pages of the New York Times.

And yet all around him he sees the Conservative Revolution evaporating not from external threats or Dirty Hippy sappers inside his perimeter, but in a toxic cloud of wholly internal corruption, incompetence, delusion, fascism, demagoguery, racism, homophobia and a slimy and hateful perversion of genuine Christianity.

There is, in the end, no one to blame for the ruin and failure that Conservatives have left in their wake but that army of bigots and lunatics who have always been at the core of the Modern Conservative movement.

And they won’t even go decently into hiding so that men like Bobo can plausibly pretend they don’t exist!

In fact, quite the opposite has always been the case: Falwell and Roberston, Limbaugh and Coulter, DeLay and Gingrich, Atwater and Rove and all the rest of that sick, sadistic litany of degenerates and frauds have always been the leering, drooling, outspoken, very public and unapologetic soul of the GOP.

And Bobo has finally reached that place where reality and delusion can no longer be coaxed into coexisting.

...

So like Ishmael and Queequeg in “Moby Dick”, to save himself from going under forever, Bobo clings to Reagan’s coffin; to that last soggy relic of those Glorious Wingnut Days of Yore That Never Were which has not yet been entirely smashed to matchsticks and sent to the bottom of the sea by the deranged leaders of his doomed tribe...

Well today was a fucking banner day for Mr. Brooks' Great Project.  Because today, rather than dicking around with painstaking revisions and redactions and emendations and rectifications and rescripts and updates to the horrifying history of his Republican party (all bolted awkwardly together with Both Siderism), Mr, Brooks finally decided to go 100% Ministry of Truth.

In one stroke, everything you remember about, well, everything, has been wiped away and replaced with One, Simple Truth:  

In The Beginning There Was Reagan...

Think I'm kidding? From today's New York Times ("The Politics of Cowardice"):

This is a column directed at high school and college students. I’m going to try to convey to you how astoundingly different the Republican Party felt when I was your age.

The big guy then was Ronald Reagan. Temperamentally, though not politically, Reagan was heir to the two Roosevelts. He inherited a love of audacity from T.R. and optimism and charm from F.D.R.

He had a sunny faith in America’s destiny and...

Then, of course, comes the usual saccharine yadda yadda yadda homily to St. Ronnie, but what you need to keep your eye on is how Mr. Brooks handles the next implicit question from his imaginary high school students (poor bastards).  Specifically,  "What happens after Ronald Reagan single-handedly beats Ivan Drago and saves Murrica from the horrors of a balanced budget?"

Well, according to University of Chicago history baccalaureate David "Even David Brooks" Brooks, absolutely nothing happens.  Reagan just goes on being awesome until -- suddenly -- Trump!

When [Reagan] erred it was often on the utopian side of things, believing that tax cuts could pay for themselves, believing that he and Mikhail Gorbachev could shed history and eliminate all nuclear weapons.

The mood of the party is so different today. Donald Trump expressed the party’s new mood to David Muir of ABC, when asked about his decision to suspend immigration from some Muslim countries: “The world is a mess. The world is as angry as it gets. What, you think this is going to cause a little more anger? The world is an angry place.”

What you just read was Mr. David Brooks of The New York Times eradicating the last 40 years of American political history in one stroke.

See, the good old, high cotton days of simply lying about derangement of his Republican party are gone now: Mr. Brooks can no longer earn his keep by simply lying over and over and over again to his core readership of doddering plutocrats by pretending that his Republican party had just gone a little "funny in the head" for awhile, but by Jiminy Cricket, the Grand Old Party had finally have turned the corner:

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....

 -- David Brooks, "The Republican Party In Triumph", November 5, 2014

And now the GOP is as fit a fucking fiddle, thank you very much!

Every party in opposition goes a little crazy. For Republicans in the early Obama era, insanity took the form of the Sarah Palin spasm. Veteran politicos took the former Alaska governor seriously as a national figure. Republican primary voters nominated the likes of Todd Akin, Christine O’Donnell and Sharron Angle. Glenn Beck seemed important enough to hold a big rally at the Lincoln Memorial.

Fortunately, serious parties eventually pull back from the fever swamps. That’s what’s happening to the Republican Party...

-- David Brooks, "The Governing Party", November 6, 2014

Because the actual, depraved history of Mr. Brooks' Republican party has now become a needy, greedy mistress who has gotten way too volatile and career-threatening to be bribed or flattered into shutting up any more.

And so more drastic and permanent measures are called for.  Which is why today Mr. Brooks took Clio the Hot Recent-Divorcee of History out behind The New York Times, shot her in the head, and shoved her corpse down the same Memory Hold into which he previously dumped Ronald Reagan's Philadelphia, Mississippi speech, the Limbaugh/Gingrich takeover of the Republican Party 23 years ago, and the entire George W. Bush administration.

In Mr. Brooks' new reality, everything wrong with the Republican Party came on overnight, with no warning whatsoever, and all of it is entirely Donald Trump's fault.

Trump has changed the way the Republican Party sees the world. Republicans used to have a basic faith in the dynamism and openness of the free market. Now the party fears openness and competition... 

It’s not that the deals had changed, or reality. It was that Donald Trump became the Republican nominee and his dark fearfulness became the party’s dark fearfulness.

Words fail.  

However, as luck would have it, in Mr. Brooks' pearl-clutching denunciation of Donald Trump as the sole cause of the destruction of his Republican party rather than the logical and predictable end product of the 40 years of Republican treachery, racism and madness that Mr. Brooks is too chickenshit to acknowledge, Brooks provides the perfect coda to his own, contemptible career:

We have a word for people who are dominated by fear. We call them cowards.

Yes.  

Yes we do.  

Tom Waits Friday: The House Where Nobody Lives

Various politically and financially interested parties have been propping up the corpse of The Party of Lincoln for years and waving its rotting limbs around in imitation of life.  But in 2017 no one but lunatics or pathological liars can continue to pretend that it hasn't been dead for a long, long time.

There is now a full-grown monster, alive and deranged and rapacious standing where the GOP used to be.

But the Party of Lincoln?

There's a house on my block that's abandoned and cold
The folks moved out of it a long time ago
And they took all their things and they never came back
It looks like it's haunted with the windows all cracked
Everyone calls it the house
The house where nobody lives...

RIP Mike Connors

Every guy of a certain age remembers Mannix or remembers their Dad watching Mannix.

Fewer remember that Mike Connors, Obi Wan Kenobi and the Sundance Kid once starred in a movie about two American POWs in Germany who were never told by their jailer that the war was long over.

Matthew Dowd is Broken and Pathetic Man

@NYTNarrative huh??? I didn't vote for Trump or Clinton. The duopoly is broken.

— Matthew Dowd (@matthewjdowd) January 26, 2017

I suppose there is some virtue in ABC News finding a make-work gig for Mr. Dowd, who was so mind-fucked and hollowed out by his allegiance to the Party of Limbaugh that he flung himself into the nearest available cult which promised ouchless and financially rewarding absolution.

But couldn't they have found something other than "Chief Political Analyst" for someone so completely detached from political reality?

Maybe a nice sinecure in the cafeteria slicing carrots or scrubbing pots where he could mumble "K'rupt Duopoly! K'rupt Duopoly!" to himself all day long without scaring people.

Climb Every Mountain

The entire senior State Department staff bids the Bastard President so long, farewell,
auf Wiedersehen, adieu... (from the Washington Post):

The State Department’s entire senior administrative team just resigned

Another timely reminder that genuine patriots and people of faith should feel no compunctions about yanking out fascism's carburetors whenever and however the opportunity presents itself:

Internet Commerce: How Does It Work?

Crazy Tennessee yarn lady strikes super-Jesusy blow against First Amendment:

Franklin Yarn Store Throws a Knit Fit
Shop's owner bans women's march supporters ... days after Nashville's women's march

Yesterday the owner of The Joy of Knitting, a boutique yarn shop in Franklin, posted a message on Facebook:

With the recent women's march on Washington, I ask that you if you want yarn for any project for the women's movement that you please shop for yarn elsewhere. The vulgarity, vile and evilness of this movement is absolutely despicable. That kind of behavior is unacceptable and is not welcomed at The Joy of Knitting. I will never need that kind of business to remain open. Two wrongs will never ever make it right.

The author of the post, Elizabeth, cited her Christian beliefs as the main reason for her stance, saying, "The women's movement is counterproductive to unity of family, friends, community, and nation."...

And then all the heretics of Franklin saddled up their horses and rode to Bliss Yarns, or Haus of Yarn, or to the municipal library to use the public internet machine to order all the yarn they want.

Never in my wildest dreams would I have imagined that I would be the member of our household to write a yarn post (especially on National Spouse Day) considering that I know nothing of the dark art of string-and-stick other than my wife turns balls of yarn into miracles every day.

My wife also has a degree in theology from a Famous Ivy League University, so I am doubly out of my depth.

Fortunately I am married to a lovely lady who knits me a life-line whenever I get too lost in my own head :-)

The State of American Journalism in Two Tweets

@GlennKesslerWP @dandrezner @ABC And David Muir called him on none of them.

— Roger Cohen (@NYTimesCohen) January 26, 2017

Make a little Post-It note and put it up where you can see it every day to remind you to begin your thinking about resistance each day with two, cold facts: First, from the Bastard President all the way down to your Crazy Uncle Liberty, the Republican Party is a rabid dog, and second, the Fourth Estate sold us out and abandoned their post years ago.

Do not look for help from the media. Do not delude yourself into believing that there is any spark of humanity or sanity left inside the Party of Lincoln. Both institutions are rubble and their ruins are ruled over by swine and goblins who do not give the tiniest shit about this country or about you.

Do not waste your time trying to reason with Conservative zombies or the ghosts who haunt the boneyard of American journalism. They cannot hear you and they do not care

RIP Mary Tyler Moore

She danced us across 20 years of American turbulence and cultural upheaval with grace, intelligence, beauty and flawless comic timing.

For you, Mary, a little song, a little dance and a little seltzer down your pants.  

Matthew Dowd Continues to Be a Fundamentally Ridiculous Person

I have faith in our fellow Americans, i have faith in our country and constitution, and i have hope that President Trump will evolve.

— Matthew Dowd (@matthewjdowd) January 24, 2017

@matthewjdowd Yes! Right now this behavior is destructive on R side, but Ds are guilty too

— testudo (@winters53) January 24, 2017

Me: Trump has worst initial approval of any Pres
T Fans: fake news!
Me: those are facts.
Fans: So what
Me: just information
Fans: F#$k U

— Matthew Dowd (@matthewjdowd) January 24, 2017

When history looks back, i wonder who will be seen as the principled founding fathers and mothers of a 21st century America? I hope I am.

— Matthew Dowd (@matthewjdowd) January 25, 2017

Better pray that a merciful God will permit history to forget you completely Mr. Dowd.