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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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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 evening's PBS Newshour, David Brooks decided to share with the viewers something he learned after watching the exiled from Fox, hate monger Glenn Beck, about the "true" nature of Mitt Romney and how compassionate he is towards those that he's ministered to in his church.

And don't worry, Brooks is not really "a fan" of Beck, but he's ready to tell everyone about his show that you can only watch if you pay for a subscription. Who wants to take dibs that he's watching Beck daily along with a dose of right wing hatred from Limbaugh's show? Gotta' keep your finger on the pulse of the nation if you're going to continue to pump out the type of op-eds we've come to expect from Brooks in the New York Times week after week.

JUDY WOODRUFF: What do you think?

DAVID BROOKS: A brilliant move to distract people from the 47 percent. So it's like...

MARK SHIELDS: OK.

DAVID BROOKS: So, it's like, you have diabetes to distract from your cancer.

So, no, I think it was mostly the promise. They did this. The accountants did their work. They came up with results. They might as well get it out on a Friday afternoon. So, I think that was fine.

I never thought the -- the issue that cut was the, he's hiding something. And that is the leitmotif of the Romney campaign: He is hiding something, whether it is his plans, which he is not really making a case for, or his personality, which is hiding behind a faux persona. And so that cut.

I don't think the actual details of did he pay this or that tax -- to me, the mystery -- the essential mystery of Romney was sort of embedded in them, which is the guy gives $4 million to charity. He is a genuinely good person around the people he knows.

Yet, they don't talk about that. You -- I saw Glenn Beck's show -- I'm not a big fan of Glenn Beck, but I saw a Glenn Beck show this week where he's interviewing people after -- person after person, alcoholics, people Romney has personally ministered to, all this -- incredibly uplifting stories.

We saw a hint of it at the conventions. And yet it either doesn't come -- he's not talking about that in public, and it doesn't translate into a compassionate conservatism, which it could, which is the logical outgrowth of his personal life.

Ah yes, Romney is this wonderful compassionate conservative when it comes to members of his church. Too bad he doesn't feel the same compassion for that 47 percent he derided as supposedly being lazy moochers who just want to suck off of the government teet.

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It takes a special sort of cravenness to be someone who supported the United States invading a couple of countries that were never a threat to us and then have the gall to ask if the Middle East is better off now than it was four years ago. But that's exactly what we got from Romney surrogate Norm Colemen during this Wednesday's PBS Newshour.

Sadly the likes of Coleman are going to be allowed back on the air time and again without ever having to explain why anyone should listen to them now when they were so wrong not too long ago, because there is no punishment for lying to the public on our airways any more.

Coleman was on there trying to make the case that Romney didn't shoot himself in the foot with his response to the attacks on our embassies. I'd say he didn't do any better than Romney did himself during his debacle of a press conference this Tuesday.

Coleman's talking points on the Middle East are going to end up falling just as flat as their four years ago economic nonsense has so far. The Romney campaign has been extremely long on name calling and extremely short on policy, even though they keep pretending they're the "serious" people in this campaign. The GOP clown care is more like it these days and you can add Coleman's ridiculous statement here to the list of why.

Transcript below the fold.

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From this Friday's PBS Newshour, we have yet another example of how PBS is doing their best to show they can be as bad as Fox or some of the other cable media outlets, with the inclusion of hackery like this from David Brooks every week.

While discussing the fact that Mitt Romney doesn't want to let the public know too many details about his plans for the economy, or health care, or much of anything else for that matter and would prefer to spend his time "laying low" and trashing President Obama and hoping the voters turn to him as an alternative, we found out that apparently David Brooks is capable of reading Mitt Romney's mind.

That or he knows what the rest of us know, and that it's no secret at all what Mitt Romney would do if elected, which is overturn the Affordable Care Act if he regains the Congress as well, take us right back to the status quo before the law was passed, tort "reform," deregulation and enact Paul Ryan's budget. And as E.J. Dionne rightfully pointed out, Romney doesn't want to talk much about the details of what he'd like to do because the public won't like it and it will lose him the election.

David Brooks on the other hand, just loves Romney's "secret" plan that he is supposedly yet to tell us about. That goes without saying of course, because Brooks is paid enough in wingnut welfare every week to write his terrible column at the New York Times and to appear on shows like this one, that he doesn't have to worry about not having insurance or adequate medical coverage.

Transcript below the fold. It's a pretty sad day for Brooks when even Judy Woodruff does a double take on him and has to ask him what the hell he's talking about as she did here.

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From this Friday's PBS Newshour, David Brooks with a bit of revisionist history on what happened over the last year that led to the House Republicans eventually caving and passing the two month extension on the payroll tax bill that was passed overwhelmingly by the Senate.

Brooks conveniently forgot to mention that the only "stand on principle" we saw from Republicans is that they're not willing to raise taxes on the rich... ever, no matter who else suffers. Brooks also wants the PBS audience to believe that Republicans are actually concerned about preserving Social Security, when their party has been intent on either destroying it or privatizing it since the day it was enacted. They absolutely hate every social safety net we've got in this country and would like to see all of them destroyed and are to this day still using the politics of divide and conquer with the working class, demonizing "the welfare state" and trying to characterize the unemployed as lazy.

Brian Beutler did a nice summary of what actually happened over at TPM which you can read here -- How The Payroll Tax Fight Descended Into Chaos. Give that a read for a review and then take a look at Brooks' claptrap below the fold.

To his credit, Mark Shields who typically doesn't do a very good job at pushing back at Brooks' talking points at all, did do a good job of pointing out the hypocrisy by Republicans who never showed an iota of concern for how the Bush tax cuts or the invasion of Iraq were going to be paid for, but now they're demanding that any help for the working class or the unemployed is paid for because they suddenly found religion on budget deficits.

Transcript via PBS below the fold.

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This piece by the PBS Newshour would have been better titled, support for Republicans declines as voters realize AstroTurf 'tea partiers' are just looking out for the interests of big business and obstructing. They instead decided to completely ignore who's funding these co-called "tea party" groups and or inform their viewers that those voters are nothing more than disgruntled Republicans who probably never took the Bush/Cheney bumper stickers off of their cars yet.

That said, it's nice to see that it looks like the voters have finally started to have a belly-full of them and are realizing that these Republicans are not looking out for their interests or doing anything constructive to improve the economy.

Here's how they framed the segment instead -- Amid Sagging Support, Does Tea Party Have Staying Power for 2012?:

JEFFREY BROWN: Next, the Tea Party burst on the scene as a new political force, but does it have staying power?

Judy Woodruff has our look.

JUDY WOODRUFF: A fresh survey released yesterday by the Pew Research Center found that support for the Tea Party had decreased over the past year. The decline was seen nationally, but also in districts represented by members of the House Tea Party Caucus.

The Pew poll found that 27 percent of Americans now disagree with the movement, while 20 percent support it. In Tea Party-represented districts, 25 percent of respondents said they backed the movement, while 23 percent were against it. [...] Andy Kohut, let me start with you.

We just heard what these numbers say about what support for the Tea Party is like right now. What did it look like a year ago around the time of the midterms?

ANDREW KOHUT, Pew Research Center: At the time of the midterms, we had a plurality of Americans saying they agreed with the ideas of the Tea Party.

Now, keep in mind, most people -- only about half of the people have an opinion, but among the people who do have an opinion, a plurality said, we agree with them. At the beginning of the year, when we asked people, what effect do you think the Tea Party is going to have on Congress, most people who had an opinion said it's going to be a good effect.

By August, we had 29 percent to 22 percent plurality saying, by the way, they're having a bad effect. And so we have seen a deterioration of the view that they're a positive force here in Washington, and we have seen fewer people agreeing with them, both, as you pointed out, in the country nationwide and also in the 60 districts where members of the Republican -- of the Tea Party Caucus come from.

JUDY WOODRUFF: Andy Kohut, you look at the polling numbers all the time. Is this a significant drop?

ANDREW KOHUT: It is pretty significant, given how influential they have been and how intense the views have been about the issues that they take on.

And what adds the significance to it is we see the same trend with respect to the Republican Party. It's not just the Tea Party. Throughout much of this year, the early part of the year, even numbers of people had a favorable and unfavorable view of the Republican Party, just as they have of the Democratic Party.

By October of this year, we have a 36 percent to 55 percent margin saying, I have an unfavorable view of the Republican Party.

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