There was a time when I could hate-read David Brooks, back when I was young and virile and mighty and barbarously savage and could stomach a bit of hackery, but those days are long gone and now I rely on his chief eviscerator, Driftglass, to do the dirty work of rending his pious bullshit. His latest does a fine job of exposing the Republican party’s evasive strategy: always pretend the bad actor was not a true member of the party, and constantly reinvent itself in name only while promoting the same old bad behavior. Brooks is their most experienced actor at pretending to be shocked, shocked I tell you at the shenanigans he previously endorsed but have now been revealed to be criminal failures.
Driftglass also mentions the other curious phenomenon that has so wrecked our country: conservatives ruin everything they touch, and when they are caught at it, they fall upwards into the loving arms of the media, where they then get to spend the rest of their careers papering over their abuses…and bringing in the next crop of crooked conservatives to help them in their propaganda. If you ever wonder how the press got so awful in this country, you can start by blaming Watergate.
Bonus points for citing this Charles Pierce piece. We shouldn’t be surprised that Trump is thinking about refusing to abide by the results of the election. This is exactly what the Republicans have been doing for decades. He’s just more brash and less slithery than your standard Republican con artist.
It also leads to a scary prospect. I think Trump will lose, and lose hard…which just means that all those godawful idiotic Trump surrogates will be promoted to higher positions at Fox News and CNN and all the other outlets, and will never ever go away.
Rachel Maddow made a good case that Trump is setting up for a “news” network online. His minions did a livestream on both sides of the last debate, and raised 9 million dollars.
The fact is, as far as I could make out, Brooks had a pretty serious crush on Obama and came pretty close to outright endorsing him in both the last two elections. He never really defends actually Republicans anymore — he mostly seems to be staking himself out as the spokesman for the GOP circa 1980. He’s aware that that party is dead now, but he can’t just up and change his party affiliation openly, because the GOP is his brand now, and he wouldn’t keep getting bookings on all the shows if he was officially a Dem.
He may pundit as a Republican, but I’d be willing to bet he doesn’t vote like one — he’s smart enough to realize that the party he’s supposedly defending doesn’t exist anymore. After he’s gone, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if Mark Shields came out in his eulogy and said “He told me in a bar once that he hasn’t voted for a Republican since 1992.”
I’d much rather have them on TV rather than positions of actual power. At least I can switch my TV off.
Trump is likely to lose, but “lose hard” is pretty strong, considering that it looks to be about a 6 point difference, with odds for Clinton winning with less than 50% of the votes. That’s hardly “losing hard”, at least in terms of how well I sleep at night. Trump may lose, but nearly half of America is still going to vote for him, and that’s very depressing. We haven’t heard the last of people like him, not by a long shot. So long as darkness lurks within the heartland of the USA, he will arise again.