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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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You can add this interview to "part the infinity" as to why anything David Brooks says should never be taken seriously again. Why, oh why is this man paid to write a column for The New York Times every week? From this week's The PBS Newshour, Brooks apparently believes that GOP Ayn Rand fanboy Paul Ryan, who has never met a budget he could actually balance should be considered a policy "wonk."

Listening to this tragedy on PBS reminded me of Esquire's Charlie Pierce and his similar dismay over the praise of Ryan in Politico, or as he appropriately calls them, Tiger Beat on the Potomac: Things In Politico That Make Me Want To Guzzle Antifreeze, Part The Infinity:

Sometimes, it's the way it does its business, and sometimes, it's simply what's in it.

Obama, who has always regarded Ryan as one of the leading intellectual forces of the opposition...

Is this a dagger I see before me? Let me plunge it into my eyeballs.

His budgets don't balance. The CBO has his picture up on the wall like the mug shots of stalkers that hang in the guard shacks of Hollywood studios. Actual economists look at his work, when he actually shows it, which is not often, and they tell the tales of it to their children to scare their children out of ever becoming economists. His performance on the national stage last autumn was a clown show of epic proportions. He is a Leading Intellectual Force in a party full of people who eat oatmeal with their toes. [...]

It goes without saying, but we will say it anyway, and again, but there is simply nothing that the zombie-eyed granny-starver could propose that should be treated by any Democratic president any differently than a free introductory case of the mange. He has nothing to offer to any progressive vision of the country, not even the president's, which is admittedly a fairly pale one. He wants to demolish the social-welfare component of the government because he considers it philosophically illegitimate. He wants to establish an oligarchical system, not because it will profit him personally, although it will, but because he considers it the natural order of democracy. In every sense of the word, he is an extremist, the Louie Gohmert of economic policy.

Never mind that though. Here's what passes for a very Serious conversation by the "adults" in Washington where Brooks is downplaying the damage this sequester might do to our economy if it's allowed to go on, and praising Ryan as though he cares about anything other than lowering taxes on the rich at the expense of the rest of the country.

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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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From The PBS Newshour, correspondent Paul Solman asked retiring Rep. Barney Frank about the intelligence of members of Congress and true to form, Barney didn't pull any punches: Barney Frank: How Smart Is Congress?:

Paul Solman: How intelligent are House members in general? I hear some people say very intelligent, other people say, nah, they don't know what they're talking about.

Barney Frank: No. I think they do. Remember, if you're in the House, you are required to talk about a whole range of things...I have found, when I'm asked by a journalist what my opinion is on something, and I say I don't know enough to have an opinion, they seem frustrated and press me to have an opinion. And I say, "why do you try to get me to tell you something when I said I don't really know enough?"

Paul Solman: I have not heard you say that very often, at least to me over the course of time.

Barney Frank: That's because you ask very specialized questions. You have a special beat in business and about which I know something. But I get the general press asking, "do you want to comment on this and comment on that?" when I haven't read about it and don't know about it. And what I have found is that, on the whole, the members of Congress are smarter than average.

Now, here's the deal. It's not been the case with people elected in 2010 and this is important. Ordinarily, to get elected to Congress, it takes a certain amount of energy and creativity. When you get one of those elections where one party wins overwhelmingly, it tends to sweep in some flotsam and jetsam. And that's been true of the Democrats and the Republicans.

Normally, though, I think very highly of the intelligence of my colleagues. I will say this: when I was in the state legislature in the '70s, I would sometimes have to stop to say, all right, I've got to explain it. Let me think about how I explain it, how do I break it down. I have never felt the need to do that in the U.S. House of Representatives.

h/t Raw Story

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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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It seems Paul Krugman is about as tired as I am of these talking heads and politicians who seem to be obsessed with inflicting pain on the working class. Republicans aren't going to be happy until they undo every New Deal program, destroy our social safety nets and destroy what's left of the dwindling middle class in America.

The PBS Newshour had Paul Krugman on this Tuesday evening to counter some of Erskine Bowles deficit fetishism from the previous night and all I can say is I hope the Democrats are listening to him. We don't have a deficit crisis. We've got a jobs crisis and what Republicans are proposing will just make that worse: Paul Krugman: Hasty Fiscal Fix to the Deficit Would Cause 'Austerity Bomb':

GWEN IFILL: Erskine Bowles may be one of the people you have written about in the past who you called deficit scolds who were touting a phantom menace known as the fiscal cliff.

PAUL KRUGMAN,PrincetonUniversity: Yes.

GWEN IFILL: Am I right about that?

PAUL KRUGMAN: Fiscal cliff is not a phantom menace. The deficit right now is, the notion that something terrible will happen if we don't deal with the deficit right away.

The fiscal cliff is a very different story. That's about reducing the deficit too fast.

GWEN IFILL: In fact, you call it an austerity bomb. Describe that, what you mean by that.

PAUL KRUGMAN: Yes.

Well, what's happening is that we are scheduled, unless something is done, basically to do to ourselves gratuitously what has been happening to some of the European economies.

We're going to have substantial spending cuts, substantial tax increases at a time when the economy is still very weak. And, of course, that's a recipe for sliding back into recession.

So, we set ourselves up with the land mine in the road in front of our economy, which is not based on anything real. It's just based on our political mess.

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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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