Brooks’ featured reaction is much, much more unethical than #1. After all, Gaffigan is only a stand-up comic (and a pretty decent actor), and carries no authority with his opinions. Brooks, however, does, although after he accepted and ran with his lucrative job as a Times fake conservative (the technical term is “sell-out”), he shouldn’t.
The latest evidence of Brooks’ pompous advocacy of nonsense was on the PBS News Hour, where he for some reason shares a show with knee-jerk, race-baiting progressive hack Jonathan Capehart. I guess because Capeheart is a black, gay progressive hack while Brooks is a white, heterosexual, under-cover progressive hack, this is what NPR regards as “balance.” Here was Brooks’ pronouncement regarding what Democrats have to do in the wake of Trump’s re-ascension to the White House. As with the previous installment, I’ll have some comments.
“Yes, well, first, they have to stand for institutions. I’m an institutionalist. I believe we’re born into a world of institutions, the Constitution, the Treasury Department, the U.S. military, the ‘News Hour.’
Ha-ha! Good one, Dave! Does including the PBS New Hour in that list lower the rest to its abysmal level, or is it supposed to give Brooks added prestige?
“We enter these institutions, we achieve our moral progress, such as we have it, by adhering to the standards of these institutions. We become stewards of institutions and try to pass them along better. It’s a whole moral ethos of being an institutionalist.”
Gibberish, almost on a Kamala Harris scale. I guess the Times editors earn their salaries when Brooks submits a column.
“Trump reverses that.”
Reverses what? Reverses the assumption of blind fealty to corrupt and untrustworthy institutions? Reverses the “whole moral ethos of being an institutionalist” like David Brooks?
“He thinks all institutions are illegitimate and therefore the people who will be most destructive to institutions…”
Trump thinks corrupt institution and untrustworthy institutions are destructive and dangerous to a democracy, which they are. Does Brooks think the catastrophic decline of Americans’ trust in our institutions is benign? Nothing to get upset about? That’s only because the institution he belongs to, American journalism, is one of the most corrupt of all.
“…basically the manly men who take what they want and break the rules, those are his paragons of virtue. They’re my paragons of vice.”
Nothing like sucking up to the gay guy, David. Brooks is even mouthing the Left’s bigotry against men: suuure, he’s a conservative, all right. You know who “breaks ‘the rules'”? Great Presidents. Leaders. Jackson, Lincoln, Teddy, FDR, Eisenhower, Reagan. They fixed things, often by tearing them down and starting over again.
“Restraint, which I regard as a virtue, he regards as a vice. So it’s a complete transvaluation of values, what he’s doing, and the Democrats need to stand up for the institutions.”
What does that even mean? Democrats have shown no restraint whatsoever: their party has revealed itself as the radical party. Defunding the police, open borders, the elevation of group identity over merit. Stand up for the institutions? Has Brooks been living in a cave? Which party would have eliminated the filibuster? Which party wants to pack the Supreme Court? Which party skipped the usual nominating process for President? Which party wants to censor speech on social media? Which party made a laughing stock of the institution Trump now holds, the Presidency?
“But what they do not need to do is be defenders of the status quo. And I’m a little afraid they’re going to do that. They’re going to see this assault on institutions and say, no, we defend it.”
Here Brooks makes his whole speech self-contradictory nonsense.
“They have to be like a lot of institutionalists — one of my heroes, George C. Marshall, was chief of staff of the Army in World War II. He was a firm institutionalist, but he was also a reformer. He knows that to love an institution, you have to change it. And in my mind, Democrats cannot be the stand-patters. We’re defending the institutions. They have to be reformers, not revolutionaries.”
And the best he can come up with is the same double standard we’ve seen from the Axis for eight long years. When the opposition seeks to change malfunctioning institutions, it’s an insurrection, chaos, “defying norms” and revolutionary. When Democrats and progressive do it, its reform.
Was Brooks ever smarter than this, or is this what he’s like without an editor?
________________
Pointer: Old Bill
