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Pardon me if I have a problem with someone who was happy to be a cheerleader for us invading a couple of countries that were not a threat to us and the huge overreach by the Bush administration in response to 9-11, now saying that maybe the city of Boston and law enforcement there potentially overreacted because they locked down a good deal of the city, while in pursuit of suspects who were lobbing explosives in their path as they tried to escape.

JEFFREY BROWN: But 9/11 was a while ago. Have we forgotten that sense of -- in our own cities?

DAVID BROOKS: Well, I don't think so, judging by the reaction.

When this is all over, I want to see a debate from people who know what they're talking about, about the wisdom of shutting down a region to chase one 19-year-old. I mean, it -- it could be an overreaction. We will wait and see.

And, also, when you go to places that suffer from these sorts of attacks, Israel and other places, one of the things they tell you is that the power and the importance of resilience and the importance of normalcy. So, say in Israel, during the Intifada days, when there would be an attack in a cafe, that cafe would be open the next day. And so the idea was to keep society normal, not to minimize what's happened, but to keep society as normal as possible.

And so I'm not sure we're achieving that with the media coverage and the shutting down an entire city.

Brooks is a decade late with his feigned concern for Americans and their response to terrorist attacks. He's also a day late and a dollar short with catching up to Chris Hayes and Jon Stewart, who both expressed similar concerns over the way Americans react to gun and crime compared to the resources they're willing to pour into the name of preventing terrorism.

Full transcript below the fold.

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Hey, what do you know. Mark Shields, the normally hapless faux liberal that The PBS Newshour puts across from Bobo week after week, actually called David Brooks out for his hackery. Republicans just mindlessly repeat these ridiculous claims that big evil government just needs to "get out of the way" and let the private sector get to creating those jobs -- and they're almost never called on it. This was one of those rare times that Brooks had someone actually take him to task for it.

MARK SHIELDS: Getting government out of the way, I love that. That's a great one, after what we have been through in this country with absolutely no control. And we just learned again this week that banks too big to fail are even too big to be reprimanded, controlled by the federal government.

Later in the segment, Brooks attempted to defend his remarks and Shields hit back at him again, this time for his hypocrisy on what is or is not good government spending. Brooks responded by backpedaling so fast, you could see tread marks:

DAVID BROOKS: Well, it sort of doesn't feel like the first year of an administration, like the first few months. It feels kind of exhaustion.

Those of us who -- we have interviews in the White House, interviews in Congress. They have differences, not as big as they think. They have a lot of mythology about the other sides. And so just having these meetings would be a good thing, personal relationships.

And so I think we have begun to see a little change in mode, as I say. Secondly, they have created space for some deals, so the people right now, there are eight senators sitting in Capitol Hill doing immigration. They're making incredible progress, really good progress. And I think that's part of the tune.

And if I could just defend this idea of getting government out of the way, listen, we have got 24 percent of the economy as the government. We're not shrinking into Hong Kong wonderland here. But it's -- without question, just in a cyclical sense, uncertainty about Washington, these fiscal catastrophes, these debt ceiling, middle-of-the-night things, that's had an unnerving effect on investment. And if we could just stop that, that would help the economy.

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While I agree with my colleague here at C&L that Ezra Klein went too easy on David Brooks and that it would have been nice to see Brooks called out directly for being a clueless liar who doesn't even appear to understand the policy proposals he's criticizing, Klein handed a load of ammunition to a host of others who weren't quite so worried about being polite.

Here are some of the examples that I've come across and I'm sure the list is getting longer as I type:

Booman at The Booman Tribune: David Brooks is a Fraud

Digby's Hullabaloo: Breaking: David Brooks doesn't know what he's talking about

Greg Sargent's The Plum Line: The Morning Plum: Questions for the “blame it on both sides” crowd

Doug Galt at Balloon Juice: Velvet glove, pimp slap

And from Steve Benen at The Maddow Blog: 'But I've read Robert Rubin's tax plan...'

Somehow the PBS Newshour decided that all of the criticism Brooks has been getting wasn't important enough to bring up when asking him for his opinion on the sequester during his regular segment with Mark Shields this Friday. Imagine that. Obviously there's no punishment for bad behavior over at PBS. And just as he did during an interview on NPR that same day, Brooks doubled down on some of the lies he told in his column.

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I have to say that I have been enjoying watching Republicans squirm while they try to figure out what to do about the fact that pandering to the worst elements among their base for decades has put them in the position where they're going to have to decide how to deal with this Frankenstein monster that they've created, or eventually all of the gerrymandering and election rigging in the world isn't going to keep them from going the way of Whigs.

I also thoroughly enjoyed seeing a conversation about their predicament end up leading to Republican history revisionist and head turd-polisher David Brooks inadvertently admitting to something I'm sure he'd rather not talk about at all -- which is the fact that these politicians calling themselves members of the "tea party" are actually just Republicans.

Sadly you're never going to hear Brooks or anyone on PBS admit that there is no "tea party" and that it's just an AstroTurf rebranding effort by the Koch brothers and their allies to get people to forget that George W. Bush ever existed after the damage he did to their party.

And as my fellow C&L contributor Driftglass has reminded his readers on a regular basis, they built this, and what they are finally being forced to confront right now is nothing new by any means: The Fall of the House of Bircher:

They built this.

Yes they did.

A long assembly-line of Conservative miners, smelters, cutters, assemblers, welders and polishers stretching back through Fox and Rove and Bush, through Falwell and Weyrich, through Atwater and Limbaugh, through Reagan and Nixon, though Wallace and Thurmond...all playing with the awful tools of paranoia, rage, white supremacy and faith...all scavenging the barking mad remnants of the Confederacy and the Jesusland dreams of Christopaths to forge for themselves a mighty machine.

A mighty, angry, crazy, bigoted reactionary electoral beast fed on drivel and dung and led by the nose from cause to cause and candidate to candidate, getting a stronger and wilder and more anxious to spit out the bit and run amok every day.

They were warned.

Yes they were.

They were warned -- by Liberals -- as far back as the 1960s that they were tampering with terrible forces (from me, five years ago):

From Rod Serling writing in an editorial in the (then very right-wing) Los Angeles Times in 1964, in response to a series of articles by wingnut-apologist Morrie Ryskind:

…

What Mr. Ryskind seems constitutionally unable to understand is that there is a vast difference between the criticism of a man or a party, and the setting up of criteria or patriotism which equates differences of opinion with disloyalty.

We have need in the country for an enlightened, watchful and articulate opposition. We have no need for semi-secret societies who are absolutist, dictatorial, and would substitute for a rule of law and reason an indiscriminate assault on the institutions of this republic that should and must be held sacrosanct. …

“[The far right cannot] discount the fact that sitting it their parlor is the Ku Klux Klan, the American Nazi Party, every racist group in the United States and not a few of some Fascist orders that have scrambled their way up from the sewers to a position of new respectability.”

Modern Conservatism was born steeped in original, bigoted sin ever since Lyndon Johnson and the 1964 Civil Rights Act --

In conjunction with the civil rights movement, Johnson overcame southern resistance and convinced Congress to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed most forms of racial segregation. Johnson signed it into law on July 2, 1964. Legend has it that, as he put down his pen, Johnson told an aide, "We have lost the South for a generation," anticipating a coming backlash from Southern whites against Johnson's Democratic Party.

-- and the rise of the Southern Strategy --

From now on, the Republicans are never going to get more than 10 to 20 percent of the Negro vote and they don't need any more than that... but Republicans would be shortsighted if they weakened enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That's where the votes are. Without that prodding from the blacks, the whites will backslide into their old comfortable arrangement with the local Democrats.

-- and has been sliding deeper into the septic tank ever since.

They were warned, but they did it anyway. Kept mollifying thugs. Kept flattering bigots. Kept slaughtering science to appease the theocrats and the garden-variety stoopid. Kept whispering to the stone crazy that their paranoia was patriotic. And, of course, kept on dehumanizing and demonizing patriotic, reality-based Liberals who were trying their damnedest to keep their Pretty Hate Machine from rolling back the whole Enlightenment.

More there so go read the rest. And never mind all that according to David Brooks "the establishment is going to have maybe an easier time of it than some might think" with reigning these people in and there's going to be some "new wing that's going to rise up and change the party from the outside." That's going to be a neat trick without completely alienating their wingnut base they've been pandering to for ages now. Sounds like Brooks is still pushing the same "Third Way," "No Labels" crap we've been hearing from him and his ilk for years now.

Full transcript below the fold.

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If anyone is still suffering from the illusion that we get any better programming from public broadcasting than we do from the majority of our corporate media, that is determined to push our politicians into going after our social safety nets, you need look no further than their regular Friday evening series featuring The New York Times' overpaid op-ed columnist and Republican turd polisher David Brooks and their favorite faux liberal, Mark Shields.

This week, Brooks was still carping about how the so-called "fiscal cliff" deal went over and that we didn't get any meaningful deficit reduction from the debacle, or in other words, he's mad that President Obama didn't give away the store and gut our social safety net programs. And for "balance" the viewers got treated to Shields repeating every right-wing trope in the book about how those who would like to see our New Deal programs remain in place are expecting a "free lunch" or being selfish because they don't want to cut Social Security benefits and "don't want to pay" for the benefits they receive from government.

Who needs right-wing Republicans when you've got the likes of Shields out there repeating their talking points for them? And as I've written here along with a ton of others, no mention about what's really needed to solve our deficit problems without balancing budgets on the backs of the poor, working class and elderly. No mention about getting us back to full employment and what policies should be fixed to bring jobs back to the United States that pay a living wage. No mention of the enormous income disparity and concentration of wealth at the top. No mention of the fact that Social Security not adding to our deficit and that there are some fairly simple ways to keep it solvent for decades to come.

Instead it's more talk of who is acting like an "adult" by doing their best to make those gaps between the rich and the poor even worse. What irritates the hell out of me about shows like this is that there are people out there, like my dad, who watch this stuff and think it's unbiased programming because it's PBS.

It's really disheartening to see just how much the Pete Petersons of the world have managed to dominate this conversation, where instead of talking about what is driving up our health care costs, what to do to contain them and whether The Affordable Care Act is going to address those costs once the law is fully implemented, we're seeing discussions on every network from PBS to Fox to you name it in between, pretending as though all of those things exist in a vacuum and the only solutions are for the working class to make some more sacrifices. It's actually beyond disheartening. It's really disgusting and inexcusable.

Transcript via PBS below the fold.

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You've got to hand it to David Brooks. No matter how badly the Republicans are behaving, he always finds a way to blame it on President Obama. He says the president just wasn't willing to reach out them quite enough in these so-called "fiscal cliff" negotiations, and he dismisses the fact that the only thing they really care about is looking out for their wealthiest base.

Here he was on this Friday's PBS Newshour, doing exactly that and sounding a lot like Fox's Sean Hannity, mocking President Obama for coming back from his vacation in Hawaii and pretending that the President hasn't already offered Republicans so much that he's angered the Democratic base.

JEFFREY BROWN: Well, developing fiscal cliff, walking, walking, walking, David.

A short time ago, the president came out of the meeting with the congressional leaders, and he said he was modestly optimistic. Are you?

DAVID BROOKS: No. No. No.

I think everyone is trying to look busy, so when we go over, they can say, well, we tried. He came back from Hawaii. He had to do something. And so they had a meeting.

If you don't have new offers, you are not really making progress. You could have a nice frank exchange, but they are in the business of making a deal.

And there is really, as far as we know, no real evidence that they moved. So I remain convinced, as I have been, that we are probably going to go over. And then, once that happens, then all sort of things start aligning. Speaker Boehner gets reelected as speaker. He doesn't have to worry about that.

It's a lot easier to pass a tax cut for the middle class than to try to do it beforehand. Everyone goes crazy outside. And so there is a little more pressure. So I still think it's much more likely that not much is happening.

Yeah, that's it. "Not much is happening," so just disregard the meetings that took place that same day. And we're going to go over that cliff, but in Brooks' world, we wouldn't dream of blaming the Republicans. And never mind that Boehner is angling to protect his speakership. The real problem is that President Obama wasn't willing to give them their pound of flesh from the working class for them to make a deal. And how dare Obama call them out for being obstructionists? He's the leader, after all.

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David Brooks is not happy about the way the negotiations over the so-called "fiscal cliff" have been going so far and expressed some of that discontent on this Friday's PBS Newshour. Brooks apparently has President Obama mixed up with House Speaker John Boehner when it comes to who has been "thumping" their chest during these negotiations.

He also accused President Obama of over-reading his mandate and attempted to link what's going on now to George W. Bush going out there and pushing his extremely unpopular views on privatizing Social Security, which Brooks called "reform" (a.k.a. privatizing) during this segment on PBS. Brooks now claims that it was a mistake for Bush to have done that back in 2004.

I looked around for any columns by Brooks after Bush made his statement that he had a mandate and didn't have any luck finding any. If any of our readers happen to come across commenting on the "mandate" remarks by Bush, I'd love to see what he was saying back then compared to now and if he's done a 180 on whether he thought actually thought Bush was wrong at the time, as he's saying he believes now.

I hate to bread it do David Brooks, but raising taxes on the wealthy is very popular with Americans. President Obama does actually have a mandate to do something about the income disparity in America, unlike Bush, where the more he talked about his plans for Social Security, and how wrong Al Gore was about the "lock box," and how the trust fund was nothing but a bunch of worthless I.O.U.s that those like him that borrowed against for wars and tax cuts should never have to pay back, the less popular his ideas became.

And I don't recall Bush campaigning on privatizing Social Security. So Brooks' analogy here is completely ridiculous, but that's about what I'd expect from someone who has spent his entire career trying to make Republican policies palatable to those they can con into voting against their own economic interests.

Here's more from Driftglass, who also flagged this segment and who thought as little of Brooks' remarks as I did:

Only in the precious, punch-drunk imagination of the Apostate Conservative is actually learning from your previous confrontations with vicious, reckless assholes considered an insulting affront to magnanimity.

Only measured by the dissolute sensibilities of the Apostate Conservative is opening negotiations by saying that you intend to do what you were just re-elected a stick in the eye.

Go read the rest for more on David Brooks' fellow Republican turd polisher, Andrew Sullivan's similar remarks.

Full transcript below the fold.

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After watching this week's The PBS Newshour, it was really hard to decide which portion of this segment with David Brooks and his supposed "liberal" counterpart, Mark Shields, upset me the most. I think it would have to be the way Brooks almost nonchalantly brushed off the fact that the Bush administration did lie about the WMDs in Iraq and that it was not a failure by the intelligence agencies, but the Bush administration misrepresenting that intelligence.

Dick Cheney was out there making weekly visits to the CIA and pushing them to put out intelligence that fit the administration's justification for attacking Iraq, and any comparison between that and Susan Rice not putting out before the public information that might have compromised our intelligence assets in Libya is just ridiculous, to put it mildly. I'm sure Brooks knows better, but apparently he doesn't have enough respect for his audience to assume they do as well.

Right behind Brooks' revisionist history, we had Mark Shields first excusing Lindsey Graham's attacks on Susan Rice over the Benghazi drummed-up fake controversy, and telling the audience that it couldn't possibly be racism or sexism, because after all, Graham allowed Justices Kagan and Sotomayor to be appointed. Or in other words, it's the Stephen Colbert, I've got one black friend, so I can't be a racist excuse for why their attacks on her could not possibly be racist, or sexist.

And then there's Shields claiming that there are "liberal press people come out citing the shortcomings, personality shortcomings of Susan Rice." I assume the "liberal press people" he's talking about amount to one Dana Milbank, who wrote an op-ed which Kathleen Geier took down quite nicely at The Washington Monthly last week.

Democratic women defend Susan Rice, call out her critics’ sexism, racism, and mediocrity:

This is gratifying; Democratic women have gone to bat for UN Ambassador Susan Rice, defending her against racist, sexist attacks by conservative Republican critics. In case you missed it, as part of the right’s pathetic campaign to gin up a huge scandal over Benghazi, leading Republicans have lately been directing their fire at Rice. Their criticism has been not only nasty but unusually personal. John McCain, for example, called her “not very bright” and “not qualified.” Lindsay Graham portrayed her as a dizzy, delusional untrustworthy broad, alleging that “She is so disconnected from reality that I don’t trust her.” Both have pledged to do “whatever is in our power” to block Rice’s appointment as Secretary of State, should President Obama nominate her.

This isn’t the only heavy-handed, sexist, racist criticism that has been aimed at Rice. It’s not just conservative lawmakers who been going after Rice; the Villagers clearly have the knives out for her as well. Villager-in-good-standing Dana Millbank has impugned Rice’s allegedly “tarnished resume” and apparently finds her behavior most unladylike (though the euphemism he prefers to use is “undiplomatic”). Among Rice’s sins, according to Millbank, is this:

Back when she was an assistant secretary of state during the Clinton administration, she appalled colleagues by flipping her middle finger at Richard Holbrooke during a meeting with senior staff at the State Department, according to witnesses. Colleagues talk of shouting matches and insults.

Oh noes! Bring out the smelling salts! This stuff is especially odd coming from Millbank, known for writing nauseating fanboy drivel about Rahm Emanuel, a man not exactly famous for his dainty language or decorous approach to politics. Read on...

If PBS doesn't want themselves to be branded as Fox-lite, they might want to reconsider their weekly segments with Mark Shields and David Brooks, and include some actual liberal commentators to balance either of them, but I expect that to happen about the time hell freezes over.

If you're tired of both PBS and the NYT for giving Brooks a steady paycheck week after week, you can contact PBS here. And The New York Times here.

Full transcript below the fold.

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David Brooks was apparently very enamored with Mitt Romney's flip flopping during the first presidential debate and believes that he is somehow not beholden to the right wing of his party because he shifted a bunch of his positions back to the so-called "center."

The reason Mitt Romney has gotten away from having one of the most lie-filled presidential campaigns and with being on every side of every issue without being punished in the court of public opinion for his mendacity, is exactly because of the likes of David Brooks and his ilk in the media who continually either excuse or praise his behavior, as Brooks did here.

Here's how he ended the segment above:

JUDY WOODRUFF: The Obama folks are saying it is a different Mitt Romney.

DAVID BROOKS: Yes. Well, they had a big decision to make six, eight months ago, which was, do we attack him as a right-wing ideologue or as a flip-flopper? They went ideologue. Now they're trying to switch to flip-flopper.

But I think he will have to continue that. It's working for him.

Yes folks, all that lying is working out splendidly. As I've heard a few people -- one being Randi Rhodes on her radio show -- point out after listening to Romney again 'pivot" on a number of his positions, if you're on a debate team at your high school or college, there are actually penalties for lying. You lie like a rug and reverse yourself and tell easily disprovable lies like we've been hearing from Romney for ages now, and you lose the debate just for that. Sadly, we don't have anything close to those standards in the corporate media or for presidential debates. There, the opposite is true and the lying is rewarded.

And if anyone actually believes that Romney won't be beholden to the right wing of his party if we're unfortunate enough to find him as our next president just because he's shifting some of his stances again to appease some low information voters who watched the debate, I'd say they're deluding themselves. All you have to do is look at how he's responded to them during this campaign and the fact that what moves he did make during that debate were empty rhetoric which either he or his staff started to immediately reverse course on as soon as he left the stage.

And speaking of Romney lying, here's more from Joe Conason, who did not excuse President Obama's performance, but expressed some of the same frustration I had while watching the debate -- Highly Debatable: The Big Liar’s Biggest Lies:

“It’s not easy to debate a liar,” complained an email from one observer of the first presidential debate – and there was no question about which candidate he meant. Prevarication, falsification, fabrication are all familiar tactics that have been employed by Mitt Romney without much consequence to him ever since he entered public life, thanks to the inviolable taboo in the mainstream media against calling out a liar (unless, of course, he lies about sex).

Yes, President Obama ought to have been better prepared for Romney’s barrage of blather and bull. The Republican’s own chief advisor, Eric Fehrnstrom, had glibly described the “Etch-a-Sketch” strategy they would deploy in the general election, to make swing voters forget the “severe conservative” of the primaries. Romney executed that pivot on Wednesday night, but he could do so only by spouting literally dozens of provably fraudulent assertions — which various diligent fact-checkers proceeded to debunk. Read on...

And here's Steve Benen's latest with his update on the staggering number of lies told by Willard over the last thirty seven weeks -- Chronicling Mitt's Mendacity, Vol. XXXVII.

Full transcript below the fold.

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From this Friday's PBS Newshour, in case anyone thought Fox was the only place where no matter what, IOKIYAR and if you engage in a political witch hunt, you will be given cover for your actions, look no further than The New York Times overpaid Villager and turd polisher of all things Republican, David Brooks and his regular weekly appearances on The Newshour on PBS.

Brooks excuses Issa as "doing what they're supposed to be doing" with his committee's attack on Attorney General Eric Holder, and justifies the committee having political gain as a motivation with this Fast and Furious investigation, while ignoring the fact that that Issa has used his chairmanship for issues other than going after actual corruption, which he's ignored time and time again, if he doesn't think his party can benefit from their actions politically and that anything he's actually bothered to have hearings on has been purely political.

Sorry Mr. Brooks, but you can make all the excuses you want, but that's not how these committees are supposed to work. And as a member of the media, opinion based or not, your job should be holding these people accountable for their actions, not making excuses for them and calling it playing politics as usual when they don't do their jobs, and treating the public as though they should just be accepting of how broken and corrupt our political system is right now.

David Brooks... proof that if you're willing to carry enough water for Republicans and make their horrible ideas palatable to the American public, you'll be allowed to continually fail upwards with ever larger pay checks as a reward.

Transcript below the fold.

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