Every Tuesday and Friday I religiously check out the op-ed page at the New York Times to peruse Paul Krugman’s latest. I’m not sure if David Brooks always runs on those days as well, but if he is I also check out the title to his latest, groan, and make a mental note read the inestimable Driftglass’s deconstruction of Brooks latest bullshit. He reads Brooks do I don’t have to, and I truly appreciate it.
Today Brooks piece is titled Cory Booker Finds His Moment. (I refuse to actually link to David Brooks) I immediately knew two things upon reading that title. First, that I should push Booker even further down on my presidential preference list, though truth to tell I think he’s only been ahead of Kristin Gillibrand and Tulsi Gabbard. Second, I could sense that Driftglass would have a field day with this particular column, and indeed he did. He had something up before I put the paper down.
Brooks premise, apparently, is that Booker would seek to govern in a bipartisan fashion; would work with both Democrats and Republicans in a spirit of comity and mutual respect; that this would be a surefire way to get important and meaningful things done in this country; and that it’s about time someone tried governing like that. Driftglass points out:
Golly, if only Democrats would elect a president who is calm and humane. Formidably intelligent and fundamentally decent. A president who would reach out to Republicans to a fault, no matter how ruthlessly they slander him, how scurrilously they attack his family and no matter how relentlessly they sabotage anything he tries to accomplish, even if it means filibustering their own bills.
But of course Democrats did try that, didn’t we?
I remember it like it was yesterday. I’m sure you do too, as do billions of human beings around the world. How very, very strange it is, therefor, that quite possibly the only adult human on the planet who doesn’t remember a single thing about the Obama administration is the senior Conservative political/cultural columnist for The New York Times.
That last cut is unfair to Brooks. Lots of beltway pundits don’t remember a single thing about the Obama administration. Consider the fact that Chuck Todd just blamed Obama for failing to bring the country together.
Orwell was right about a lot of stuff. One of them was the memory hole, into which people like Brooks and Todd consign every past event that is inconvenient for any meme they wish to push in the present. In Brooks case, this very often includes his own columns, predictions and opinions from years, months, or weeks past. It is the only way to preserve the illusion that both sidesare responsible for getting us into the parlous situation in which we now find ourselves. In the Brooksian world, as Driftglass points out, right and wrong are irrelevant. Or, more precisely, they are irrelevant when your side is in the wrong.
Yet another reminder that we on the left must not forget, and must keep reminding the forgetful other side of its history.
As a bit of a sidenote, I must note that not all facts are consigned to the memory hole. It always amazed me that before he ended his pundit career by letting his racist flag fly too obviously, Jeffrey Lord constantly made the argument that Democrats were evil because they were the party of racists back in 1850 or thereabouts. An actual historical fact. No one ever asked him how, precisely, that had any salience in the second decade of the 21st century. For that is another privilege that only the right has: the right to spout non sequiturs without challenge.
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