Driftglass tears David Brooks a new one (to add to the many he’s torn him in the past):
Then oer'leap with me the intervening decade during which I wrote (no kidding) over a thousand essays detailing Mr. Brooks' cartoonishly obvious incompetence and pathological dishonesty -- this was the same decade during which Mr. Brooks was being feverishly praised, paid and feted by every hack in the Beltway for his seriousness, insight and humble wisdom.
Thanks to the protective shield which Mr. Brooks' many confederates and fellow-travelers in the Beltway media, have erected around their fraud and failure, people like Mr. Brooks are never in any actually danger of being asked any embarrassing questions about their long history of being wrong about everything. However the sheer, crushing, accumulated weight of Mr. Brooks' failures as a thinker, writer, predictor-of-things and haver-of-opinions have forced him into a very weird corner.
You see, Mr. Brooks only really has four very dull tools in his op-ed toolbox: lying about the past, burying the unhappy present under a pile of false equivalence, making up pleasing fairy tales about the bright future that is just around the corner, and pseudo-rabbinical argle bargle about Values and Community and Faith, about which Mr. Brooks may well be sincere, but which are wildly at odds with everything his Republican party has been saying and doing for the last 40 years.
Great, big, whopping lies of omission about the past:
African-Americans were once Republican, but the Great Depression brought economics to the center and F.D.R. lured them the other way.
The brave and imaginary future:
There’s a good chance many of you will be switching political parties over the next 15 years. You may be a corporate executive who’s voted rock-solid Republican for decades, but you may be a consistent Democrat by 2024. You may be an African-American community activist in Cleveland, but don’t be surprised if you someday call the Republican Party home.
[...]
And of course, Values and Mores, which exist for Mr. Brooks in a parallel universe completely divorced from the policies and propaganda of his Republican party for last 40 years:
...the most important social divide today is between a well-educated America that is marked by economic openness, traditional family structures, high social capital and high trust in institutions, and a less-educated America that is marked by economic insecurity, anarchic family structures, fraying community bonds and a pervasive sense of betrayal and distrust.
And every comma and period of it in the service, once again, of steering the conversation the hell away from any questions about the here-and-now -- about how exactly we ended up with a Republican party packed to the rafters with bigots and imbeciles and the black-hearted con men who exploit them.
Because that conversation ends with Mr. Brooks being run out of town on a rail.
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At Daily Kos on this date in 2007—Gen. Petraeus's "Powell" Moment:
In its must-read editorial today, "Hiding Behind the General," The New York Times lays out the case for caution on the eve of General Petraeus's testimony on Iraq. It notes, as many have mentioned, that six weeks before the 2004 election, General Petraeus penned an op-ed in which he "rhapsodized about 'tangible progress' and how the Iraqi forces were 'developing steadily,' an assessment that may have swayed some voters but has long since proved to be untrue." It also emphasizes that tomorrow's testimony should be viewed in light of the many reports from independent agencies and organizations which paint an accurate and dire picture for the future of American involvement in Iraq.
The editorial also brings up a chilling comparison:
Mr. Bush, deeply unpopular with the American people, is counting on the general to restore credibility to his discredited Iraq policy. He frequently refers to the escalation of American forces last January as General Petraeus’s strategy — as if it were not his own creation. The situation echoes the way Mr. Bush made Colin Powell — another military man with an overly honed sense of a soldier’s duty — play frontman at the United Nations in 2003 to make the case that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Mr. Bush cannot once again subcontract his responsibility. This is his war.
On today’s Kagro in the Morning show: A Friday smörgåsbord! In Norway, Facebook censors an iconic war photo. Who do they think they are, Björn Nittmo? EarpieceGhazi! Trump loves vertical integration: 3+ beauty pageants & a modeling agency keep young ladies flowing across the border.
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