The Rare Sane Voice

David Brooks, The New York Times' best-known conservative voice, has written a column that is receiving wide notice, with good reason:

The Republicans have changed American politics since they took control of the House of Representatives. They have put spending restraint and debt reduction at the top of the national agenda. They have sparked a discussion on entitlement reform. They have turned a bill to raise the debt limit into an opportunity to put the U.S. on a stable fiscal course.

Republican leaders have also proved to be effective negotiators. They have been tough and inflexible and forced the Democrats to come to them. The Democrats have agreed to tie budget cuts to the debt ceiling bill. They have agreed not to raise tax rates. They have agreed to a roughly 3-to-1 rate of spending cuts to revenue increases, an astonishing concession.

[...]

A normal Republican Party would seize the opportunity to put a long-term limit on the growth of government. It would seize the opportunity to put the country on a sound fiscal footing. It would seize the opportunity to do these things without putting any real crimp in economic growth.

[...]

But we can have no confidence that the Republicans will seize this opportunity. ...

The members of this movement do not accept the logic of compromise, no matter how sweet the terms. ...

The members of this movement do not accept the legitimacy of scholars and intellectual authorities. ...

The members of this movement have no sense of moral decency. ...

The members of this movement have no economic theory worthy of the name...

[...]

Over the past week, Democrats have stopped making concessions. They are coming to the conclusion that if the Republicans are fanatics then they better be fanatics, too.

[...]

If the debt ceiling talks fail, independents voters will see that Democrats were willing to compromise but Republicans were not. If responsible Republicans don’t take control, independents will conclude that Republican fanaticism caused this default. They will conclude that Republicans are not fit to govern.

And they will be right.

Couldn't have said it better myself, although god knows I've tried. And tried. And tried. And...

Others have noticed too, of course; some are even conservatives. But these are, you know, thoughtful people. Ones with facts. Ideas. The kind of people, it must be said, that teabaggRs actively ignore. They'd rather stay stupid. They'd rather lie.

Our only hope (contra current evidence) is if there are also thoughtful voters out there, in numbers enough to oust those recently-elected and enormously destructive teabaggRs. And if, against their recent track record, Democrats can find an effective voice, saying the obvious to the oblivious.

And convincing them.

Non-Babbling Brooks

David Brooks frequently annoys the hell out of me; I think it's his "I've read hard books" attitude, his frequent smugness, and, of course, his bad teeth. On the other hand, among the right wing punditry, he's maybe the least ideological and the most willing to ponder interesting things. That he's unpredictable is why I keep reading him.

In today's NYT column, he says about Barack Obama what I've been saying since the primary elections for president:

"The fact is, Obama is as he always has been, a center-left pragmatic reformer. Every time he tries to articulate a grand philosophy — from his book “The Audacity of Hope” to his joint-session health care speech last September — he always describes a moderately activist government restrained by a sense of trade-offs. He always uses the same on-the-one-hand-on-the-other sentence structure. Government should address problems without interfering with the dynamism of the market."

Correctamundo. He expands:

"Take health care. He has pushed a program that expands coverage, creates exchanges and moderately tinkers with the status quo — too moderately to restrain costs. To call this an orthodox liberal plan is an absurdity. It more closely resembles the center-left deals cut by Tom Daschle and Bob Dole, or Ted Kennedy and Mitt Romney. Obama has pushed this program with a tenacity unmatched in modern political history; with more tenacity than Bill Clinton pushed his health care plan or George W. Bush pushed Social Security reform.

Take education. Obama has taken on a Democratic constituency, the teachers’ unions, with a courage not seen since George W. Bush took on the anti-immigration forces in his own party. In a remarkable speech on March 1, he went straight at the guardians of the status quo by calling for the removal of failing teachers in failing schools. Obama has been the most determined education reformer in the modern presidency."

And here's the part that makes me want to scream -- because the truth of it is so painful:

"In a sensible country, people would see Obama as a president trying to define a modern brand of moderate progressivism. In a sensible country, Obama would be able to clearly define this project without fear of offending the people he needs to get legislation passed. But we don’t live in that country. We live in a country in which many people live in information cocoons in which they only talk to members of their own party and read blogs of their own sect. They come away with perceptions fundamentally at odds with reality, fundamentally misunderstanding the man in the Oval Office."

Yet for a large part of the electorate, the dishonest and destructive force that is Fox "news" is the opinionator of record. Led by a certifiably insane person, they see evil where there is none, brook conspiracies of dire import, bathing in their own fears and -- for reasons only they could explain, were they able to marshall an iota of self-reflection -- relishing it. Begging for more. Admitting -- as one of my commenters frequently does -- they have no idea what they're talking about, they nevertheless have opinions of biblical certitude. Facing immeasurably complex problems, having a president who is neither an ideologue nor closed to thoughtful input, these people have allowed themselves to be led by the craziest -- in the case of the Fox folk -- and the most egregiously dishonest -- in the case of the Congressional Rs -- voices out there.

And so we march steadily on the path to failure. On this occasion David Brooks seems to sense it as well, and, like anyone who thinks seriously about issues, he can't quite believe it.

Shrinking the Violets

Now, for a little psychology. Or to put it more accurately, a wish I were able to look into their heads and understand how Rich Lowry and David Brooks, without a scintilla of self-consciousness, can expose so revealingly their unfulfilled adolescent fantasies, the disappointments they must have had in their pubescence.

Or is that it? Frankly, I have no idea. But there they are, two elitists (in the Republicanesque, ignorance-is-good, smart-is-bad meaning of the term) if ever there were such, fawning. Sarah Palin winked, they ejaculated. Probably simultaneously. Maybe they were talking to each other on the phone at the time. Seriously. How is it that guys whose style is to drop literary references like rose petals, who flash erudition like psychos in raincoats (the gent in the photo, by the way, was the mayor of my hometown, Bud C----, to whom my aunt, while on the city council, used to refer as "Bud Lite"), are gaga -- and by gaga I mean tongue-out, hyperhidrotic, pustulo-papular-squeezing-in-a-mirror -- over a woman who proudly frames herself as the opposite? Who ridicules, to the ecstatic cheers of her supporters, their very type? (Funny thing: they're not buying it in Alaska.) What's the dynamic, anyway? Is it some sort of BDSM thing?

Going out on a limb here, I'm guessing Rich and Dave were übergeeks in high school. Couldn't get the cute girls to look at them if they were bleeding on the floor. And whereas I consider both of them to be nearly clueless, reality-testing-wise (cheerleaders for the war, going in, as they both were), I sense they're both not below 100, IQ-wise. I bet they're able to recognize talking-points when they see them; I know they can tell when someone is parroting prepped phrases, free of understanding. Giving credit where credit is due, I'm certain they know Miss Sarah was bullshitting her way through the debate and that if the format had allowed followup questions, she'd have upped her baseline blithering to prodigious levels. So what gives?

Ping: they spend all their adult lives proving how brilliant they are, dripping sarcasm (sarcasm? what's that?) when talking about their perceived inferiors. Pong: they profess to love -- just moosie-love her to death -- her for her, well, her, uh, style. Her gen-u-wine genuineness, her rejection of everything they stand for. Socially.

"Serious people." Anyone who listens to or reads Brooks (my history of same now being officially over) knows how much he loves that phrase. Professes to admire those who think deeply about deep problems. So this goes beyond simple cynicism or despondent desperation. Something else is at work. Suppressed somewhere in his endorphinized, androgen-starved brain, subverted by some unspeakable and deeply personal need, there must be a dormant detector of dung. But he flushed it away, like a soiled (as it were) tissue.

I'm a liberal. I'm empathetic, I wish well for humanity and even for many of the people in it. So, for their sakes, I deeply hope Rich Lowry and David Brooks will surprise us all, redeem themselves, by waking up some day soon feeling really, really, really embarrassed. It'd be redemptive, if ever so slightly.