There are so many things wrong with this appearance by David Brooks on Meet the Press it's hard to know where to begin, but for starters we had David Gregory singing the praises of Brooks' latest op-ed The Government War. Driftglass already dissected that bit of history revisionism -- David Brooks Loses His Mind (warning not safe for work), so I'm not going to do that here other than to add this point made by Paul Waldman at The American Prospect in response to Brooks' hackery -- Obama Didn't Create the Tea Party:
The prevailing narrative about our current political moment goes something like this:
Obama took office facing some large challenges. Then he overreached, by doing all kinds of big-governmenty things. This provoked a backlash, and now we're fighting over it.
We see the latest version of this narrative in today's David Brooks column, one of surpassing more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger Brooksness. As a moderate, Brooks is deeply saddened by all the arguing that's going on. "Just as America was leaving the culture war and the war war, the Democrats thrust it back into the government war, only this time nastier and with higher stakes," he laments.
The problem with this narrative is that it assumes that if Obama had taken some other course of action, the Tea Partiers would never have gotten so mad, and we would be having a much more civil discussion. But that's just absurd.
Exactly. But that's not going to stop the likes of David Gregory from gushing over his as Driftglass put it "fact-free garbage island of Centrism". David Gregory then lets him get away with this whopper:
BROOKS: Can I just say something about the Republican mounting strategy, which is people like me would like there to be centrist, like Governor Crist, people like that. But the center has so far proved unprincipled, and people like Marco Rubio and Paul Ryan have shown they're principled. And when you're disgusted by government, you congregate toward people like that. And so the evidence shows overwhelmingly, so far, that the further right the party gets, as long as they're principled, the better they do. Has any party had a worse year than the Democrats have had politically this year? Democratic favorability rating has dropped 22 points in a year. The Democrats a year ago had an 11 point party idea advantage over the Republicans. All that's gone. So the Republicans are surging at the point they're moving to the right with people like Rubio. And so that's where the data is. People like me would wish, you know, go for the middle. But the data supports the idea that people like Rubio are driving the party to victory.
The mind reels. Here are David Brooks' "principled" Republicans. Marco Rubio with his expense account problems -- Did Marco Rubio's free enterprising ways put an extra hundred grand in his pocket? and Paul Ryan who wants to destroy Social Security. Obviously Brooks has been drinking the same Kool Aid as George Will -- George Will Touts Paul Ryan's Social Security Privatization Scheme as Election Strategy for GOP.
Transcript below the fold.
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