This is why most Washington media creatures stay well inside Beltway Green Zone. Because if they venture out into the countryside there is always the danger that some asshole with an Improvised Recording Device might pop up and ask them, "So are you now agreeing with driftglass that the Left has been right about the Right all along?"
And that one question, properly times and executed, has the potential to fuck up their career beyond repair.
After a week of getting baked 24/7 with Walter Isaacson and Henry Kissinger at the Aspen Ideas Festival, it was clear that Mr. Brooks was in no shape to produce his 800 words of contractually-obligated bibble for The New York Times of bibble on Friday. And so, at a all-night auction-and-resume-frottage marathon that would make the late Hunter S. Thompson weep to see what has happened to respectable drug culture in this country, the rights to write a real, live "David Brooks column" were sold to Khori"Sans Serif" Mosh-Wittenstein-upon-Daffodil: a 22-year-old millionaire /visioneer/ disruptarian currently tearing up the cosseted oligarch lecture "scene" (as the kids say) which his new book, "Times New Roman: The Hidden Reciprocal Palliative of the Global Economic Order".
Which is a hurry-up/follow-up to his first book, the New York Times best-seller, "How Garamond Font Destroyed The Virtuous Ideal".
The sales was transacted with two conditions.
First, the title had to be something frivolous and stupid and "Brooksian" enough to get a whole room full of stoned plutocrats roaring.
Tuners and Spinners
Check.
Second, Mr. Brooks specified that since the editorial standards of The New York Times op-ed page were so fucking rigorous (gales of laughter from the wasted plutocrats at this punch-line, further demonstrating why Mr. Brooks is their favorite tummler* and 'splainer*) the column must be written according to the Secret David Brooks Style Book, which your humble scrivener risked life and limb to revealed to the world for the first time seven long years ago ("How To Write a David Brooks Column -- In just 10 Easy Steps you'll be punditting like a pro!):
1) Pick a subject. Any subject. From Tasseled Loafers to Torture, it literally does not matter.
2) Quote extensively from one person or group on the subject. It's OK to just more-or-less copy and paste in big hunks of what whatever-you-happen-to-be-reading-at-the-moment to flesh out your 800-word column. Here at the Times we call that "research"!
3) Quote from some other person or group on the same subject who appears to hold a different opinion. If no actual opposition exists, just put on your Magic Green Jacket and invent an opposing opinion.
4) Although such is not the case with today's subject, as often as possible, try to impute these fictional distinctions to the different hemispheres of the political Universe. So no matter how bigoted, reckless or just bugfuck crazy the Right behaves, you just go right ahead and blandly assert with no supporting evidence whatsoever that the Left is equally and oppositely bad in exactly the same qualities and quantities. Here at the Times we call that "seriousness"!
5) Discover in your final paragraph or two that -- amazingly! -- the precise midpoint between those two completely artificial positions on an imaginary spectrum just happens to be exactly the Right and Reasonable answer!
Oh boy!
6) Rinse and repeat. No matter what the subject, no matter how false or bizarre the equivalence, just rinse and repeat. Twice a week.
7) Every week.
8) Year.
9) After year.
10) After year.
And seven years later, I leave it to you, dear reader to determine how accurately Mr. Mosh-Wittenstein-upon-Daffodil has risen to the challenge of mimicking Mr. Brooks' vapid-robot-who-no-longer-gives-a-shit style...
Cass Sunstein, the eminent Harvard law professor and writer, notes that some people are spinners and some people are tuners. The spinner is the life of the party... The spinner is funny, socially adventurous and good at storytelling, even if he sometimes uses his wit to maintain distance from people... Spinners are great at hosting big parties... The tuner makes you feel known... The tuner is good at empathy and hungers for deep connection... The tuner may be bad at small talk, but in the middle of a deep conversation the tuner will ask those extra four or five questions, the way good listeners do.. Spinning and tuning are different kinds of courage — the courage to be adventurous and the courage to be intimate. It seems to me that spinners and tuners each have their own kinds of happiness and sadness. I even think writers and thinkers fall into these categories. Shakespeare, Einstein and Isaiah Berlin were... Dante, Proust and Toni Morrison fall into the... There’s one final social category I just learned about, from a talk I heard Sherry Turkle of M.I.T. give at the Aspen Ideas Festival. She observed that some 4-year-olds wander on to the beach with their own shovel and bucket. They’re fine to play alone, but they’re welcoming if anybody wants to join them. They have a mixture of self-sufficiency and sociability. Turkle noticed that other kids are drawn to these kids, just as they recoil from the kid who doesn’t have a bucket and is needy for theirs. So my lesson of the week is: Go into every social occasion with your own bucket. Be a spinner when life’s going good, a tuner when things go down, and have a great Fourth of July weekend.
I'd say the kid nailed it.
*Tummler: An employee - usually male - of a Borscht Belt resort charged with the duty of entertaining guests throughout the day by providing any number of services, from comedian to master of ceremonies.
*Splainer: a combining form extracted from mansplain, and meaning “to explain or comment on something in a condescending, overconfident, and often inaccurate or oversimplified manner, from the perspective of the group one identifies with,”
More than a year later and all the winning is making me dizzy.
Paul Ryan: Mr. Trump, how do I know you'll keep your word?
Donald Trump: Oh, I've given you no word to keep, Mr. Speaker. In my judgment, you simply have no alternative.
And now that the election is over, and Putin owns the White House, and criminals and lunatics run the government, and the stinking albatross of TrumpCare has been hung around the neck of every Republican elected official in the land, it is far too late for the Party of Trump to run away from their Dear Leader.
At the risk of repeating myself :-) President Stupid is the unholy spawn of the modern Republican Party and a compliant Beltway Both Siderist media that, for more than a quarter of a century, has reflexively excused every ever-escalating Republican atrocity with a flurry of False Equivalence hand-waving and hippy punching.
Well the thunder lizard the Right has always openly prayed for has finally come. And the well-heeled deacons and cardinals of the High and Holy Church of Both Siderism who midwifed this monstrosity into existence --
As you know that isn't why she lost. She lost because of her own character and campaign.
-- and demanding that someone, somewhere step up and do something about their beast-child that now has them in its cross-hairs.
In theory, I am still capable of imagining a universe in which I might feel something like sympathy for the Beltway cowards and kapos* who thought that by shitting on the Left every time the Right lobbed another cinderblock from the Fox News Overpass onto the Freeway of American Democracy, their fortunes would rise forever and a day of reckoning would never come.
In theory.
In practice, from my position as lowly Libtard pariah and punching bag, I am rather enjoying the sight of them scrambling down the rat-lines of a ship they themselves have conspired to sink. Enjoying it far more than I should, actually, but then I never promised that I was anything other than low and perverse.
*kapo: A kapo or prisoner functionary (German: Funktionshäftling) was a prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp who was assigned by the SS guards to supervise forced labor or carry out administrative tasks. Also called "prisoner self-administration", the prisoner functionary system minimized costs by allowing camps to function with fewer SS personnel. The system was designed to turn victim against victim, as the prisoner functionaries were pitted against their fellow prisoners in order to maintain the favor of their SS overseers. If they were derelict, they would be returned to the status of ordinary prisoners and be subject to other kapos...
Two years ago, here is what dirty Liberals like me were writing about the Rise of Trump
At Mr. Trump's Pandemonium Carnival
...
Once again our elite media is looking-with-alarm at the latest beast to lurch out of the GOP monster factory.
Once again they pretend to be appalled by the symptoms of the plague that is ravaging our democracy, and once again they dare not name the causes of a pestilence which they helped to engineer, opting instead to dab daintily at the open, suppurating pustules that cover our body politic with damp, Both Siderist towelettes...
It is now two years later. The turd-clogged bottom quartile of the American gene pool has elected "Neutron Don" --
-- to the highest office in the land.
And this is how President Stupid now spends his mornings:
I heard poorly rated @Morning_Joe speaks badly of me (don't watch anymore). Then how come low I.Q. Crazy Mika, along with Psycho Joe, came..
Krusty the Clown: "Smart lads who slip at times away/ From fields where glory will not stay/ Runners whom the race outran/ And the name died before the man." Reporter: Krusty, does this have a point? Krusty the Clown: Yes. I'm quitting show business. I was just trying to go out... with a little class, you jackass. Reporter: But, Krusty, why now? Why not 20 years ago? Krusty the Clown: 'Cause comedy ain't funny anymore...
Yes, now that Left has been proven beyond all doubt to have been right about the Right all along -- now that toxic myth of Sane Conservatism on which David Brooks has spent his entire career supping like a tick on a hound-dog has finally blowed up real good -- Mr. Brooks has finally had to go into the deepest vault of all to retrieve the oldest Conservative lie of all. The lie that the inimitable Digby crystallized for us long ago, when the world was young and all blogs had comment sections:
Conservatism cannot fail, it can only be failed.
Yes in his June 27, 2017 column filed from (this is perfection itself) the Aspen Ideas Festival, Mr. Brooks has filed the requisite paperwork to divorce himself and his fellow band of Imaginary Conservative Intellectuals who labor tirelessly upon distant mountaintops to humanely solve humanities most vexing problems --
Over the past several years many plans have emerged from the various right-leaning thinking tanks that imagine consumer-driven health care that also has universal or near universal coverage.
These plans, from places like the American Enterprise Institute, use tax credits or pre-funded health savings accounts or some other method to give middle- and working-class people coverage, while reducing regulations and improving incentives throughout the system.
-- from the scrofulous, demented members of a group calling itself "The Republican Party" --
Republican politicians could have picked up one of these plans when they set out to repeal Obamacare. They could have created a better system that did not punish the poor. But there are two crucial differences between the conservative policy johnnies and Republican politicians.
-- whose existence has apparently gone completely undiscovered by Mr. Brooks until very recently:
Because Republicans have no governing vision, they can’t argue for their plans. Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price came to the Aspen Ideas Festival to make the case for the G.O.P. approach. It’s not that he had bad arguments; he had no arguments, no vision for the sort of health care system these bills would usher in. He filled his time by rising to a level of vapid generality that was utterly detached from the choices in the actual legislation.
Because Republicans have no national vision, they seem largely uninterested in the actual effects their legislation would have on the country at large. This Senate bill would be completely unworkable because anybody with half a brain would get insurance only when they got sick.
But of course this is silly. The Republican Party has a very clear and all-encompassing governing vision. True, it is an utterly horrifying and barbaric vision, but there is nothing mysterious or surprising about it, and for decades the goals and methods of the Republican Party have been perfectly obvious to anyone who has been paying honest attention.
The lies, casual treason and policy disasters we see unspooling in every direction are not mistakaes -- they are the GOP's apotheosis, and the triumvirate of Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan and President Stupid are not the GOP's freaks and outliers, but their Father, Son and Holy Ghost.
And has been true in the wake of every Republican catastrophe in recent memory, David Brooks can once again be found slinking away from the wreckage and claiming that he and his merry band of Imaginary Conservative Intellectuals had nothing to do with it.
For the devout Both Siderist, five times each day, wherever they are on Earth, they are required to face the Acela Corridor and recite one of the ritual incantations of their creed.
Bingo. Deep partisans have a difficult time putting country over party.
