And now, the babbling Brooks

I'm not sure I have ever before read such raving panic as that in this morning's pin-wheeling eyes of David Brooks. The GOP's theatre of operations has strategically deteriorated to such a desperately squalid state of hopelessness that Brooks has chosen to blame the party's unilateral mess of a suicidal march on ... the Democrats.

With no little unease, since it seems almost sadistic, I quote Mr. Brooks:

I know there is little chance that today’s partisan players are going to adopt [an] incremental goo-goo approach. It’s more likely that today’s majority party is going to adopt a different strategy, which you might call Kill the Wounded.

And a diabolically simple strategy it is, consisting, as it does, of undeniably simple realities. First, the president notes that "Republicans are crazy," which, as already noted, is by now axiomatic. Second, the president "raise[s] a series of wedge issues meant to divide Southerners from Midwesterners, the Tea Party/Talk Radio base from the less ideological corporate and managerial class." Yes, maliciously ideated and "perfectly designed" wedge issues, such as almost embarrassingly modest gun control measures and immensely sensible immigration reform.

I repeat: Moderation is, in Brooks' book, now a wedge. It's come to that.

But there we don't stop. No, Brooks isn't through humiliating himself. And it's here that I spewed some really tasty Colombian coffee all over the laptop's screen just before reconfirming that I was indeed reading this slop in the New York Times, and not Breitbart.com:

Then [Obama] could invite a series of confrontations with Republicans over things like the debt ceiling — make them look like wackos willing to endanger the entire global economy.

Invite a confrontation over the debt ceiling, by asking, as historically asked and obliged, that it simply be raised. And should Republicans insanely refuse, then it's Obama making them look like wackos.

This is a new schtick for Brooks. He's always played the somewhat red-faced apologist, stretching and molesting reason to defend whatever the GOP's latest transgression against human decency. But he has never, in my memory, plunged nakedly into a cesspool of raving incoherence, as he so pitiably does in "The Next Four Years."

(p.s.: This post edited to mitigate the offending coffee cliche. I couldn't tolerate it, either.)

Comments

[Janicket]

I hope you delved into the comments following upon Our Mr. Brooks' inanities. They politely, thoughtfully, near-unanimously eviscerate him.

[Turgidson]

Prior to snatching his NY Times perch, Brooks wrote belligerent screeds in the Weekly Standard. For all his current NPR cred as the "reasonable conservative," (which we're apparently stuck with, no matter how many idiotic things he says) Brooks was every bit the spittle-flecked bombthrower he's supposed to be better than, back then. Slightly more lucid in his prose, but no less nasty.

Brooks is whatever he needs to be to promote himself and the GOP - preferably, but not always, at the same time.

[Peter G]

And yet the program as outlined by Brooks seems to be exactly the plan from the point of view of the administration. I had an exchange shortly after Obama's re-election with a progressive whom I quite like wherein she outlined what she thought should be a proper second term agenda. And everything she proposed that the president should do would have been divisive within the Democratic party and would have encouraged unity within the Republican party. Among the lead items was gun control. Now Sandy Hook changed everything and presented an opportunity to perhaps, at long last, achieve something. We'll see I suppose but even if decent legislation doesn't result the issue will again highlight the fundamental nuttiness of the Republicans extreme base. I see no particular errors in Brooks assessment of how the hands are being played. What I don't understand is why Brooks would imagine for a nanosecond that the Democrats owe the Republicans any courtesy when it comes to allowing them to hide their nuttiness under a veneer of bi-partisanship. Such bi-partisanship can only be forced on the Republicans and only by giving them wedgies at every opportunity. They made their own Procrustean bed and they'll just have to lie in it.

[Robert Lipscomb]

Having read and reread Brooks' article, I find him to be absolutely correct. During the fiscal cliff drama, I suggested that Obama was pwell positioned to decimate the GOP, but I questioned whether he would have the stomach to do so. I have since concluded that he apparently does, and Brooks seems to have reached the same conclusion.

I do not much care for war history, but some facets interest me. Again and again during battles, panics and retreats by a few lead to a complete collapse and route of an army. We "might" be witnessing this in the GOP. Obama had a string of wins in 2011-12 followed by an electoral win, yet the GOP's center held. Then came a deat over the cliff and now an abandonment of the debt ceiling battle field.

A full-blown route "couled" happen.

[MinneapolisPipe]

Same thing with Krauthammer's piece this week.

They're beginning to realize that Obama is outflanking them and now they're whining about it.

[Ted Frier]

I think this is just a backhanded way of Brooks saying that Obama should govern like a Republican by capitulating to the Republicans insane and unreasonable demands over the debt ceiling without a fight, thus sparing Republicans from exposing themselves as the extremists they really are by once against taking us to the brink of insolvancy and economic Armageddon.

[MinneapolisPipe]

Per Jonathan Chait: "David Brooks Now Totally Pathological"

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/01/david-brooks-now-totally-pathological.html

A good healthy laugh to start the weekend..

[Janicket]

Hee hee! Thanks, MP; that was indeed a good hearty laugh.

[majii]

Brooks, Gerson, and Krauthammer live deep within the GOP alternate universe where everything bad that happens to republicans is someone else's fault. Their articles are screeds that reflect their deep denial of reality and the fact that they have contributed to the predicament that the republicans now find themselves in. Neither of these "conservatives" could ever summon the courage to use their media platforms to force republicans to acknowledge that the party was pursuing the wrong political course. All I heard from them 99% of the time was, "Go, Republicans, America is a conservative and Christian nation!" Never mind that most of us aren't stupid and were smart enough to see that what the republicans in Congress were doing was neither conservative nor Christian.

[Jim Milstein]

An interesting point to make about Maji's comment is that Brooks and Krauthammer are Jews.

[MinneapolisPipe]

In regards to Maji & Jim's points: Brooks and Krauthammer aren't Bible-thumpers. They're simply part of the Pundit Industrial Complex. They know a meal-ticket when they see one.

Two of Chait's best lines:

"Moderate Republicanism is a tendency that increasingly defies ideological analysis and instead requires psychological analysis."

"In 2011, Obama offered an astonishingly generous budget deal to House Republicans, and Brooks argued at the time that if the GOP turned the deal down, it would prove their “fanaticism.” Naturally, they turned it down."