David Brooks Advises His Young Padewan

 

Pointing proudly to his 228th consecutive New York Times Pundit of The Month plaque, Mr. David Brooks put his arm around Young Ezra Klein and whispered, "Look, kid, if you stick to gassy generalities, saccharine pieties and blaming Both Sides, you too can be there for-ever."

Clearly Young Ezra has  taken that advice to heart.

Contemptible, indefensible both-sidesing by @ezraklein.bsky.social: “Twitter was, and X is, as happy to be a slingshot for the great replacement theory or anti-Semitism or Islamophobia as for calls to defund the police or abolish ICE.” www.nytimes.com/2026/08/23/o... seriously wtf

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— Dan Froomkin/Press Watch/Heads Up News (@froomkin.bsky.social) August 23, 2026 at 8:57 AM

Burn The Lifeboats

Professional Left Podcast Episode 1016: F**k Civility

"The tone policing of respectability ensures that the fight for equality becomes the responsibility of the oppressed."  -- Mikki Kendall

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Hit Dogs Holler: Modern Lessons from a Vintage Freakout

On the next episode of the Professional Left Podcast, we will be taking a deep dive into the long history of Republicans wildly overreacting.  (Spoiler: It didn't start with Natalie Harp.) And I thought one of the examples we pulled from the archives might be of special interest today.  

It's from a November 2005 column in The New York Times by the most ubiquitous Conservative writer in America, who is also America's leading finger-wagging chastiser on the subject of humility, comity and keeping a god-damn civil tongue in your head at all times no matter what the provocation.

At the time this column was published, Bush's Iraq debacle -- the war Bill Kristol said would be over in a matter of weeks and David Brooks declared won in April 2003 -- had dragged on longer than the entire U.S. involvement in World War I.  

2 years, 7 months, and 19 days, and counting.  And no WMDs had been found.  No bioweapons that we had been told were days away from being loaded onto planes and dispersed.  No hint of a nuclear program of any kind.  Nothing, except an armed Iraqi resistance that was getting stronger and more lethal every day.  An armed resistance we had created when Coalition Provisional Authority Order Number 2: "Dissolution of Entities" was issued on May 23, 2003, by L. Paul Bremer and which told the entire Iraqi army that they no longer had a job or a future under the U.S. occupation.  

So in late 2005,  Democratic Senator Harry Reid made the perfectly reasonable point that, now that it was undeniable that the intelligence used to justify the war had been wrong, Congress should investigate how the administration used – or misused – that intel in the run-up to the war.

And David Brooks Lost. His. Fucking. Mind.

From The Harry da Reid Code, by David Brooks, November 5, 2005, in The New York Times:

Harry Reid sits alone at his kitchen table at 4 a.m., writing important notes in crayon on the outside of envelopes. It's been four weeks since he launched his personal investigation into the Republican plot to manipulate intelligence to trick the American people into believing Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

Reid had heard of the secret G.O.P. cabal bent on global empire, but he had no idea that he would find a conspiracy so immense.

Reid now knows that as far back as 1998, Karl Rove was beaming microwaves into Bill Clinton's fillings to get him to exaggerate the intelligence on Iraq. Reid now knows that in the late 1990's, Dick Cheney and other Republican officials used fluoridated water in the State Department and other government agencies to brainwash Clinton administration officials into exaggerating the threat posed by Saddam Hussein…

Harry Reid sits alone at his kitchen table at 4 a.m., writing important notes in crayon on the outside of envelopes. It has been four weeks since he began investigating this conspiracy and three weeks since he sealed his windows with aluminum foil to ward off the Illuminati…

Harry Reid sits alone at his kitchen table at 4 a.m. He knows now that seven centuries ago at a secret meeting of the Bilderberg Society-Trilateral Commission-American Enterprise Institute, the six High Lords of the Secret Order of the Neocons decided to implant alien life forms into potential Democratic officials that could be activated in case there was a need to manipulate intelligence on Iraq...

Harry Reid sits alone at his kitchen table at 4 a.m. Odd thoughts rush through his brain. He cannot trust the letter "r," so he must change his name to Hawwy Weed. Brian Lamb secretly rules the world by manipulating the serial numbers on milk cartons.

Reid realizes there is only one solution: "Must call a secret session of the Senate. Must expose global conspiracy to sap vital juices! Must expose Republican plot to manipulate intelligence!"

Harry Reid sits alone at his kitchen table at 4 a.m. 

Scattered among these feeble chunks of... what?  Humor?  Satire?  ... there is a steady refrain of  "But Clinton!  What about Clinton!"  All of which was sad, and sick, and deeply pathetic. 

But most importantly, it also reeked of shrill desperation.  Because at this point even someone as ideologically blinkered as Brooks could see that the war he had so energetically championed was a disaster.  And the anti-war Left he had so ferociously mocked and slandered were turning out to have been right all along.

But instead of manning up, doing the right thing and owning his colossal fuck up, Brooks opted to use his Times real estate to do the Republican thing: stage a ludicrously over-the-top attack on Harry Reid for daring to suggest that pre-war intel should be looked into.  

And having been to this rodeo more than once, we OG bloggers know the yelping, freakout sound of a nerve being struck.

It sounds like The Harry da Reid Code, by David Brooks.

It also sounds like this:

Burn The Lifeboats

Can't Stop Won't Stop

This was a lead story in The New York Times today.

The short answer, which is actually rather long, is "No".

This is roughly the 12,258th "think piece" on progressive outsiders winning a few Democratic primaries.  It's nearing the "But Her Emails" saturation point. And these articles tend to come either in one of two flavors.  

First, Dire!Warnings! cursing Democrats for risking dooming us all by not becoming GOP Lite in order to chase the votes of disaffected Republicans.  These articles tend to come from (small wonder) recently-former Republicans whose "advice" to Democrats has always been -- rain or shine -- to keep moving rightward, ever-rightward -- in pursuit of an imaginary Center which is always, somehow, slipping over the horizon.  

Second, there are the breathless articles touting how a few members of the Democratic majority (do the math) are fighting back hard against a small number of progressives with whom they have no intention of sharing even a small corner of the Democrat's Big Tent.  Mind you, they had no fucking problem when it came to sharing our Big Tent with ghouls like Liz Cheney who spent their entire career slandering Democrats in the most monstrous language imaginable...but us New Deal Democrats get nothing but the stink-eye and a boot in the ass from the gatekeepers who own the velvet ropes. 

From The New York  Times, August 6, 2026:

Moderate Democrats Prepare for ‘War’ Against an Ascendant Left

One moderate group says the progressive wins are “deeply troubling” and is planning a $15 million effort against democratic socialism.

The embattled establishment of the Democratic Party searched furiously for a political reset after Dr. Abdul El-Sayed’s progressive victory in Michigan handed the party’s long-dominant moderate wing its most painful defeat of the year.

Some strategists urgently pressed to adopt a sharper edge to tap into the fury among Democratic voters that was felling its centrist candidates. Others wanted to attack democratic socialism, undercutting a budding movement now set to have far more than a toehold in the next Congress. Yet another young democratic socialist ousted an incumbent congressman in Detroit on Tuesday.

“We are preparing for the next war that is coming,” said Jonathan Cowan, the president of Third Way, a leading centrist Democratic group, revealing to The New York Times a new $15 million effort between now and 2028 to discredit democratic socialism. 

It will not shock you to learn that Third Way gets its money from Big Pharma, Big Banks, Big Tech as well as outfits such as ExxonMobil and various health insurance companies.  All the usual suspects who would rather see a MAGA flag flying over this country forever than share the Democratic Party with actual progressives.

Now, it is rumored that this “Better Dead than Al-Sayed” gang of Regressives is led by a shadowy figure known only as “David Fucking Brooks”.  And two Fridays ago Mr. Brooks left his Bethesda Maryland compound just long enough to appear on the PBS News Hour where, practically in tears, he said this.

Voters in almost every presidential race, I think, in every one of my lifetime, have always said, who's closer to the center? And they vote for that person. Trump seemed closer to the center than Kamala Harris. Biden seemed closer to the center than Donald Trump.

Donald Trump over the last few years has run away from the center. He is handing this election to the Democrats. All they have to do is sit there and be couch potatoes. They do not have to support Medicare for all so that Republicans can go to them and say, you like your private health insurance? Mr. El-Sayed's going to take that away from you.

That is politically bad news, and that's only one of the issues on which the party is moving further and further away from the center, and therefore…

At which point, Brooks co-panelist, Jonathan Capehart, reached his limit of politely tolerating this old fraud's endless bullshit and interrupted him with:

I mean, I disagree that the Democratic Party writ large is moving far away from the center, and that a few races won by Democratic Socialists or people who identify as progressive, like Dr. El-Sayed, that -- to me, I just don't -- I do not see it that you can put this -- make this blanket argument that the Democratic Party is running far left. 

That was the signal for the host – Amna Nawaz – to do the PBS thing of quickly moving on to the next topic at the slightest sign of conflict.

However, since I do not abide by PBS rules, I will just add that it is a matter of public record that David Brooks has never had any workable definition of "the center" beyond: "What I, David Brooks, happen to think at this moment".  

It is also irrefutably true that he has spent the past quarter-century publicly demonstrating that he knows fuck-all about what "voters" think about anything.

And of course Third Way is not a solo act. They have plenty of fellow travelers who are horrified that a few Democratic candidates have won their primaries in ways that Third Way, LLC does not approve of.  

From The Washington Post, June 3rd, 2026:

Centrist Democrats launch new pledge: ‘We are capitalist, not socialist’

Two Democrats in Congress who flipped Republican-held seats in 2024 are launching a pledge for their party’s candidates they hope will act as a rallying cry for centrists, calling for a “politics of persuasion over purity” and declaring that “we are capitalist, not socialist.”

The pledge is a direct rebuke to the party’s leftward tilt as democratic socialists such as New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) capture the party’s energy and activism.

Rep. Tom Suozzi (D-New York) and Rep. Adam Gray (D-California) said they will unveil the pledge Wednesday afternoon at the center-left conference WelcomeFest, and hope to get candidates up and down the ballot to join them in signing it. 

From Common Dreams, February 9th, 2026:

‘One More Billionaire Front Group’: Centrist Dems Mocked Over New Initiative Led by Corporate Lobbyist

In fact, establishment panic over even mildly social-democratic ideas predates the current cycle by years.

From In These Times, seven years ago,  February 7, 2019:

Why Is the Political Establishment So Afraid of Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal?

So, the short answer is "No".

The longer answer -- the reason why the answer is "No" -- is uglier and deeply embarrassing to the legacy media, which is why you will never hear them speak of it.  Because it has to do with what the "Tea Party" actually was.

For several years I bored you all silly with post after post after post about how the Tea Party was not some new, insurgent outsider group who were storming the barricades of the moribund Republican party.  That they were the Republican party: the same ignorant, racist, shoutycrackers Republican base they'd always been, but now that the Bush administration had shit the bed hard enough to crack the Earth's mantle, they needed their own, incredibly inconvenient past to go away so they could get on with the important work of having a full-on, eight-year-long, screaming mental breakdown over the election of a Black man as president.

And they accomplished this by A) Putting on stupid hats, waving Gadsden flags, and swearing that they'd never even heard of George W. Bush and, B) Getting the legacy media to go along with this massive fraud, which the legacy media was only too eager to do, given their own despicable complicity with the various crimes and treasons of the Bush administration.

And it worked.  And, as is our eternal fate, the only people willing to straight-up call bullshit on the whole scam were us dirty, disreputable Liberals who no one listens to anyway.

By early 2010, it was absolutely clear to anyone who wasn't a Republican operative or enabler that the "tea party" was emphatically not a spontaneous movement of concerned citizens with no previous political affiliation, but was just one more, GOP-manufactured re-branding scam.  Ed Kilgore wrote about it, as did Max Blumenthal (pay-walled site) and E.J. Dionne. There was also this July, 2010 Gallup poll that concluded:

The Tea Party movement has been the focus of media attention during the past year, and has had some success in getting its preferred candidates nominated or elected in the 2009-2010 election cycle. However, as Gallup has pointed out, those who describe themselves as Tea Party supporters are in many ways indistinguishable from, and largely a subset of, Republican identifiers more generally.

But here's the thing.  There was absolutely no stomach in the Beltway media for reporting the obvious fact that these idiots in tricorner hats were nothing but the same old Republican wingnuts who, as one wag put it in 2009...

Like German soldiers after the fall of Berlin...have stopped running away from the catastrophe they created only long enough to burn their uniforms.

No, no, no!  Definitely could not say that because that would violate the post-Dubya Generally Accepted Beltway Narrative that all problem are caused by "the extremes on Both Sides" and in the middle there is a "vital Center" full of millions of political virgins who had been moved by the noblest of motives to abandon their neutrality and take to the streets.

And to this very day, that lie continues to be one of those "Zombie lies", which everyone sorta knows is nonsense -- like Tax Cuts Pay For Themselves -- but has so completely passed into the realm of myth that the legacy media keeps right on pretending that it was actually true.  

In fact, the Beltway's lockout of the truth was so secure that by 2016 Joe Scarborough could finally come right out and say of course the whole "tea party" thing was bullshit and of course we all knew it  and know with perfect certainty that there would be consequences (h/t Heather at Crooks & Liars)

And that's the longer answer.  The Democrats are not facing their own "Tea Party" moment because There. Was. No. Tea. Party.  There was just the Bush-Off Machine goin' like 60 to rebrand the Republican base.  

What corporate Democrats are facing are ... New Deal Democrats.  People who revere FDR as the man who crushed fascism, and whose programs built the Middle Class, strengthened the union movement and helped insure that old age and poverty weren't a death sentence.   

People who remember that FDR was called a commie by the Republican party and the Republican media every inch of the way.

People who look at the mess the establishment has made of this country and think the Middle Class could used some help, the aged, infirm and poor could use some help, that good health care should be affordable, that unions are a good thing, that robber barons and Republican looters are bleeding us dry and, most importantly, for any of that to happen, fascism in America must be discredited and destroyed, root and branch.  

I Am The Liberal Media!

Professional Left Podcast Episode 1015: James and the Giant Screech

“All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds"  -- said sarcastically by Voltaire.

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Professional Left Podcast Episode 1001: 119 Billion Kilometers and Counting

“My characters hope for better lives.”  -- Octavia Butler

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Professional Left Podcast Episode 1000: For Your Consideration

“It usually takes me more than three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech”  -- Mark Twain

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PBS Steel Cage Death Match...

...are words no sensible person would ever hammer together into a sentence.  But you good people get a sneak peek at the reason for that sentence, which we will be covering in greater length on the 1000th episode of the Professional Left Podcast on Thursday (weather permitting.) 

The reason that sentence makes no sense is because anyone who has watched PBS panels for more than a minute can identify their unique set of cultural expectations.  Avoid profanity.  No muttering asides about what a dumbfuck so-and-so is.  No reality teevee 'confessionals" after the panel where a participant can really cut loose.  Always be collegial, even when your "colleague" is lying their ass off.  

And above all, no shouting.  Business must be conducted in the proper tone -- interactions kept within the 50 to 60 decibel "quiet conversation" range.  Maybe jump it up to 65 when propping up someone's lame joke with some PBS-brand jolly laughter.  

But however hard they work to sand down any differences, then pack those differences in the cotton batting of PBS-speak, there are moments more and more frequently when it's clear that the Left side of the panel would very much like to call the Right side of the panel out for being a lying sumbitch. 

So this banal exchange is about as close as you're going to get to PBS News Hour panelists rasslin'.

From The PBS News Hour, June 12...

This is the exchange on PBS Friday between Mr. David Brooks and Mr. Jonathan Capehart, with emphasis added:

David Brooks:  ... The Trump thing is just weird. He's just -- he appoints Bill Pulte, who's clearly not even close, within a Pacific Ocean, of being qualified for this job. And then he turns around, and to make the permanent acting, not acting, but the permanent director of DNI, Jay Clayton, who's totally like superstar level by Trump's standards.

So how does the same guy pick two people, one with such radically different qualifications? The one thing I should add is that I don't like what the Democrats are doing here. I understand you don't like Bill Pulte. I understand you think he should not have been appointed. And that, you're absolutely 100 percent correct.

But the FISA program works well. We are now -- as Speaker Johnson made the point, we're now -- we got the World Cup here. We got the Iranian thing going on. We need all the intelligence I can get. And that FISA program supplies, I'm told, half the president's daily intelligence brief.

That's a lot of information and valuable information. It's a very well-working program. And the Democrats are not repeal -- or not renewing it sort of in my view out of spite, but they're making us less safe.  

The moderator then turns to Jonathan Capehart, who asks an obvious question

Jonathan Capehart:   How this became the Democrats' fault is curious to me.

One -- a couple of things to keep in mind. One, even though the law has expired, it was reauthorized by a FISA court in March of 2026', this past March, which goes through March of 27. So Congress has time to come back and reauthorize it, do whatever they need to do, because it's not just Democrats who have concerns about the law. It's Republicans as well.

So I just don't think it's right to say it's all the Democrats' fault, especially when they're not even in the majority in either house.  

After which the moderator, Geoff Bennett, immediately changes the subject, which is what the moderator always does whenever there is the slightest danger of David Brooks being made a fool of by someone who came armed with facts.  

So, rather than pursuing the question of, hey, why the hell are you blaming Democrats when they don’t control anything, we get, "In the time that remains, David, do your Sunday night plans involve being at the White House for a UFC match, by chance?"

Ha ha ha.  Potential unpleasantness averted.  Collegiality restored.  Audience soothed.    

Trivial, right?  Hardly worth mentioning, right?  And I wouldn’t have mentioned it were it not for the fact that it is one more example of an unholy ritual performed over and over again on that set, involving the same people, operating according to the same assumptions.

For example, you will undoubtedly remember that, one day after one of Trump’s ICE goons murdered Rene Good in cold blood on camera, the same Messer's. Brooks and Capehart were invited to share their opinions about that murder.

And Brooks did his thing like a man dispatched from Centrist Thought HQ with a very important mission: whatever the question is, the answer must always be “both sides are basically the same kind of confused, noble, tragic souls squinting at reality through fogged-up moral lenses.”

And in this case, the prompt is not subtle. It’s a video of a woman being shot in Minnesota. A real-world, immediate, ugly, concrete thing. The sort of thing that, historically speaking, usually calls for at least a directional opinion.

Instead, Brooks doesn’t just bend over backward – he gave it the full Cirque du Soleil routine of intellectual contortion, folding himself across multiple dimensions just to avoid saying, plainly, what he thinks of what people just saw.

And you can almost hear the gears turning: how do I not take a position, but still sound like I am wisely refusing to take a position?

So he doesn’t say “I’m not taking a side.” No. That would be too simple. Too honest. Instead, he goes searching through the attic of American memory and drags down a dusty old artifact: a 1951 football game film.   A filmed college football game where both teams watched it afterward and each concluded the refs had screwed them differently. Which, apparently, is now the master key to understanding modern political violence.

And the argument emerges in its full Brooksian foulness: people interpret reality through bias, everyone sees what they want to see, therefore everything is politics, therefore no interpretation is more grounded than any other, therefore the wise posture is… eternal suspended judgment.

It’s the same fucking column he’s been writing for 24 years. Different props, same stage play. Swap in Iraq, swap in Trump, swap in a shooting in Minnesota—doesn’t matter. The conclusion is always hovering in a nonexistent middle ground.  

Meanwhile, sitting across from him was Jonathan Capehart, doing that very modern cable-news thing where you are professionally required to witness something grotesque and surreal and respond with PBS impassivity.

You can see the “are you hearing this shit?” energy radiating off him. The body language of someone who is one sentence away from standing up and walking off set, but is restrained by the invisible PBS leash that says: we will discuss your feelings, but only in approved tonal ranges.

And he tries to steer it back toward something resembling the actual subject. Because the question was not “what does 1951 college football teach us about epistemology.” The question was: what do you think about this shooting?

Brooks, however, has already made track for Centerville.  He’s back in his seminar on the Sociology of Perception mode, concluding that all humans are basically trapped in interpretive fog banks and therefore—surprise—we should be very cautious about concluding anything at all.

Which is how you end up in that very familiar elite media cul-de-sac where:

Something happens in the real world

It is immediately translated into a meditation on perception

The meditation conveniently avoids any judgment about the thing that happened

And the absence of judgment is reframed as wisdom

And the segment lands where it always lands: in that posture of cultivated detachment that looks, from the outside, less like intellectual humility and more like refusal to face reality. 

You will also remember these same people on this same stage back in August of last year.  Brooks "Both Sidesed" Trump ordering Texas to gerrymander him five new congressional seats out of thin air, and Gavin Newsom fighting back with the only weapon he has.  

He also bitched that "no one is marching in the streets" over this shit because apparently from the Acela corridor quiet car he can't see the millions who have been out in the streets in all kinds of weather for all kinds of marches.  Or maybe he's just a legacy media troll who shoulda been given the hook 20 years ago.

You see, it’s not any one of these examples – and there are dozens more on PBS alone.  Hundreds more from Brooks over the years.  And hundreds of thousands more across all legacy media platforms over the decades.  

It is the collective weight of all of them.  The relentless repetition of variations of this one lie that has incepted that lie as an axiomatic truth in the subconscious of millions and millions of our fellow citizens.  

That's when you get the 10,000th iteration of garbage like this.  From Wake Up To Politics:

Could There Be a Third Party for Moderates?

It turns out, Americans agree on an awful lot.

Burn The Lifeboats

The Atlantic Lied To You

The 7,000 words of meandering TL;DR Both Siderism that The Atlantic paid David Brooks to write is actually just three David Brooks New York Times, "The Extremes on Both Sides" columns in a trench coat.

Once again Brooks has divided the human universe into "traditionalists" and "progressives", who are both a little bit right and both equally wrong.  Example:

...to contend successfully with the traditionalists’ effects on our politics and culture, we also need to recognize that elements of their worldview are correct. But which parts are correct, and which are completely off the rails?

And, as always, Brooks offers up a Third Way out of the artificial and reductive binary human universe he has invented: a sorta forward-leaning revival of tradition within modernity.

It's really nothing more than that, bloated up to 7,000 words.

Some scientists have theorized that the reason David Brooks has been unwilling to write anything other than variations on "Both Sides Do It" for the last quarter of a century is that he was traumatized by this terrible season three episode of Star Trek TOS at a tender age -- 

-- and that, in order to temporarily exorcise that trauma, he enacts and externalizes it every time he sits down to write.  

Others, who are less charitable, think that Mr. Brooks figured out early on that the American political, academic and corporate elite will never tire of having their favorite cliche Beltway fairy tale endlessly repackaged and repeated back to them.  And that dedicating his professional life to doing that one thing was the key to winning the devotion of those elites, and a a license to print money.

 

Burn The Lifeboats

And Then, When No One Was Watching, Came This Remarkable Exchange

While everyone else (including me) was watching the Artemis II crew's bull's-eye splashdown, safely and successfully ending their historic mission, over in the pocket universe of PBS three relics of a bygone media age sat around a table asking, "What the fuck happened to our profession?"

 Geoff Bennett:

And, Jonathan, 61 percent of Americans, including 30 percent of Republicans, now say that President Trump has become erratic with age. That's according to a recent Reuters-Ipsos poll.

The press corps -- I guess we should hold up a mirror to ourselves. The press corps spent two years making President Biden's mental fitness, his acuity the story. Why isn't that same scrutiny now being applied to President Trump broadly?

Jonathan Capehart:

Yes. Yes, exactly.

That has been my question since -- excuse me -- since January 20 of last year. We, the press, spent a lot of time talking about President Biden and his age because he looked old. He moved slowly. He wasn't as vigorous and agile, supposedly, as the guy he pushed out of office and then the guy who was running against him.

And even little slips of the tongue were used to show, see, aha, he's not all there. He's losing his mind.

How does that compare to what we're going through right now? I wish people who have written books -- people who have gone on air talking about President Biden nonstop, where are they now? Where are those books now that we have a president who has given ample evidence, ample evidence that something is not right?

Where are the people who are standing up and saying, you know what, something needs to be done? And that goes back to some -- you were talking about the founders. They were prepared for something like this. What they weren't prepared for was the Article I branch just ceding all authority.

What they weren't prepared for were people from the president's own party willing to either turn a blind eye or enable him to run roughshod over the Constitution. Even when you have got him out there threatening annihilation of a civilization, even when he's started a war for no reason and the enemy is in a stronger position now than it was before he started this war of his own choosing?

At some point, Republicans writ large and those on Capitol Hill have to start standing up for the Article I prerogatives, but also start standing up for the country. I don't know how much longer we as a nation can withstand this. And I know the world is beyond done with us, but I think they're also frightened of us.

David Brooks:

I wouldn't say that we in the mainstream media have been exactly pro-Trump Cheering section. I mean, our business model is bashing Trump. We know we can get clicks and ratings if we bash Trump enough. So we do it over and over and over and again, without having anything interesting to say half the time.

And, by the way, if we did do everything we could, it wouldn't -- it wouldn't make a difference. The people who need to be persuaded are not persuaded by us. We have been doing this since 2015. And so I'm not totally persuaded it would make a huge difference if we challenged his age and mental acuity, because we have been doing it morally for 10 years.

So, to summarize, in this creaky, ancient ritual, as the moderator, Bennet, is constrained to never state an opinion about anything.  If a meteor smacked into the studio during taping, his contractually obligated response would be, "Some people say that a meteor has just crashed through our ceiling.  What, if any, are the political implications?"  

The other participants, one supposedly "Right" and the other putatively "Left" then engage in a civil exchange in which David Brooks says something absurd or ridiculous or false on its face, and the other party is required by the rules of this kabuki to never raise their voice or call into question Mr. Brooks' honesty or integrity.   

Thus the illusion of a free press operating in an open marketplace of ideas is maintained for the eleven people who still watch this routinized diorama.

However, on any given Friday there are theoretically an unlimited number of questions that could be posed by the moderator.  And usually those questions are designed to be very...beige. Tepid.  Bland, poorly seasoned potato salad at the barbecue, served up so as not to raise the blood pressure of the eleven senior citizens for whom this is Friday evening must-see teevee.  But this time the question was about the media itself.  Specifically -- and swaddled in carefully neutral tones -- about how the media has catastrophically failed us all.  

To be clear, according to the arcane rules under which this ritual operates, Mr. Capehart could not come right out and say, "Fuck you Jake Tapper."  But he might as well have.  Also taking pains to specify that the Republican party is the problem is always appreciated.

Of course, finishing with "At some point, Republicans writ large and those on Capitol Hill have to start standing up for..." yadda yadda is just sheer wish-casting nonsense.  The GOP Capehart dreams of is long dead and its zombie corpse is trying to drag the rest of us into the grave with it.

But the real prize here is the bitter, post-facto nihilism of David Brooks.  

As Judd Legum amply documents here...

Manufacturing a political crisis
...

But while Hur's views about Biden's memory were worth mentioning, the media instead treated Hur's amateur medical judgments as a political crisis for Biden and an existential threat to his reelection campaign. But the actual threat to Biden's political prospects is the deluge of negative media coverage based on Hur's conjecture. A Popular Information analysis found that just three major papers — the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal — collectively published 81 articles about Hur's assessment of Biden's memory in the four days following the release of Hur's report. Incidents that raised questions about former President Trump's mental state received far less coverage by the same outlets.

Overall, The New York Times published 30 stories about Biden's alleged memory issues between February 7 and February 10. Over those four days, the story was covered by 24 reporters (some of whom filed multiple stories), four opinion columnists, and the New York Times Editorial Board.

Hur's report legally clearing Biden was described in the New York Times as "a political disaster," "a political nightmare," "a new political crisis," and "a political mess." The paper said the report inflicted "searing political damage," placed "Mr. Biden’s advanced age… back at the center of America’s political conversation," and constituted "a gift" to Republicans. And that's just what was included in purportedly objective "news" reports. After Hur's report, New York Times opinion columnists with no medical credentials said Biden showed "signs of senescence" and suggested he was sliding "into dementia." Another said Hur's report proved "Biden should not be running for re-election" and blamed Biden's mental state for "the emboldenment of America’s rivals." The New York Times Editorial Board described the report ominously as "a dark moment for Mr. Biden’s presidency."

Only one of those stories mentioned a key fact: Hur is completely unqualified to render a judgment on Biden's mental capacity.

...and Margaret Sullivan documents here...

The media's circular logic and destructive obsession with Biden's age

Yes, it's fast becoming the 2024 version of the media's obsession with Hillary's emails

The New York Times was, of course, just asking questions.

Why, oh why, do Joe Biden’s age, memory failures and gaffes seem to hurt him so much more than Donald Trump’s age, memory failures and gaffes hurt him?

These questions were being pondered in the most influential real estate in all of media: a front-page news article, above the fold, on Sunday. (Even in this digital age, that print front page, especially on Sunday, packs a punch.)

The sub-headline summarized the issue: “Biden Is Hurt by Flubs More Than Trump Is.”

And the article stated: “While Mr. Biden, 81, has been dogged by doubts and concerns about his advancing years from voters, Mr. Trump, who is 77, has not felt the same blowback.”

“Dogged by,” you say? Who, exactly, is doing the dogging?

Maybe the Times and other major media outlets ought to look in the mirror.

CNN, meanwhile, was running this chyron: “Is Biden’s Age Now a Bigger Problem Than Trump’s Indictments?” A panel gave this question every due consideration, and then some.

And then there was the rundown of Times opinion offerings — one piece after another, all in a neat row, about Biden’s age and memory.

...The New York Times led the pack of "Biden is old" legacy media jackals trying to kneecap the 2024 Biden campaign, at a time when Mr. Brooks was the apex op-ed writer at that publication.

Also Margaret Sullivan's comparison was spot-on: "Biden is old" did become the 2024 version of the media's obsession with Hillary's emails.

And, as long-time readers may recall, Mr. Brooks was also the apex op-ed writer at The New York Times as it led the pack of "But her emails" legacy media jackals trying to kneecap the 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign.  First, when it looked like Bernie Sanders might win the Democratic nomination, Brooks cranked out 700 words of drivel "Both Sidesing" Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump.  And when Hillary Clinton won the Democratic nomination, Brooks immediately pivoted, cranking out 700 words of drivel "Both Sidesing" Hillary and Trump (see "David Brooks: Both Siderism Is a Farce that Gives Us Meaning").

And this was not a one-off.   After the Bush regime collapsed and all of Brooks' Neocon National Greatness dreams died with it, Brooks spent the rest of his career literally doing nothing but vomiting out one column of Both Sides garbage after another on the op-ed page of The New York Times.

And now that the mask has dropped and the beating heart of Brooks' former party has shown itself to be the fascist monster Liberals warned that it was?  

Now that it is unequivocally clear that the media's "Both Sides" fetish is what helped keep MAGA bigots and imbeciles on-side, and lowered the bar far enough for America's feckless, clueless "Undecides" and "Independents" to vote to put the worst person in the world back in the White House?

After all that, where does Mr. Brooks land?

First, he renders his profession down to what clowns like Brooks have made of it: the crass pursuit of "clicks and ratings".

Second, and most pathetically of all, he reduces his entire, toxic career to a giant shrug emoji.  Claiming as his alibi for his poisonous career choices that none of it made any difference.  That even if clowns like Brooks had actually tried harder, it wouldn't have matter.

And, by the way, if we did do everything we could, it wouldn't -- it wouldn't make a difference. The people who need to be persuaded are not persuaded by us. 

This is a lie so immense that it's genuinely hard to quantify.  

Sure, the MAGA zombies are unpersuadable, but that's because they're wired that way.  Their impregnable ignorance?  Their impervious bigotry.  Son, those were features, not bugs.  These MAGA zombies were drawn into the party precisely because they found a welcome home there.  Their ignorance was flattered.  Their intolerance was praised as patriotism.  They became the GOP's reliably reprogrammable meatbags, in a process that unfolded over decades right in front of David Brooks -- America's most ubiquitous public "intellectual" -- who went right on pretending that everything was fine and/or that Both Sides were equally awful.  

But as for the "Both Sides Do It" media cult that Brooks piloted?  Take it from someone who has been documenting its deleterious effects on our politics for 21 years, that has been wildly successful.  

We may never know how many millions of wobbly Republicans who were having doubts about the GOP were persuaded to stay on Team Evil because they believed the Both Sides lie.  And we may never know how many additional millions of those feckless, clueless "Undecide" and "Independent" voters -- people who actually watch things like PBS and Meet the Press and read publications like The New York Times and believe what they see and read -- cast their ballot for the worst people in the world or pissed their vote away on doomed third-party candidates because scum like Brooks spent a professional lifetime telling them that it didn't matter because speech codes at Cornell University were somehow as bad and dangerous as an armed insurrection waged against the United States government.   

But we can say with confidence that the Both Sides lie has been incredibly persuasive.  That it has helped determine the outcome of critical elections.  And that it has done real and permanent damage to this country.

And for his sins, Mr. David Brooks has been lured away from the Times by The Atlantic, where he will spend his declining years cranking out the same drivel as always, but instead of being paid a princely sum to perform his little dance twice a week,  The Atlantic appears to be happy paying him a princely sum to do his thing once every few months.

Funny old world.

I Am The Liberal Media

Shut Up and Go Away

Most of you are no doubt familiar with Tom Friedman's infamous "Suck on this" moment on the now-defunct Charlie Rose Show in May of 2003.  

But but don't sleep on Rose leading Friedman off by confidently asserting, "Now that the war is over...":

At the time, this was the received wisdom of the Beltway Sages.  For example, here is David Brooks writing for Bill Kristol's Weekly Standard in 2003, practically endzone dancing with delight because now that Bush had been proven unequivocally right about everything, boy howdy were those dirty hippies gonna finally get what's coming to them.

The Collapse of the Dream Palaces 

Mass destruction of mistaken ideas. 

APR 28, 2003

... Now that the war in Iraq is over, we'll find out how many people around the world are capable of facing unpleasant facts. For the events of recent months confirm that millions of human beings are living in dream palaces, to use Fouad Ajami's phrase. They are living with versions of reality that simply do not comport with the way things are. They circulate and recirculate conspiracy theories, myths, and allegations with little regard for whether or not these fantasies are true. And the events of the past month have exposed them as the falsehoods they are... 

Finally, there is the dream palace of the American Bush haters. In this dream palace, there is so much contempt for Bush that none is left over for Saddam or for tyranny. Whatever the question, the answer is that Bush and his cronies are evil. What to do about Iraq? Bush is evil. What to do about the economy? Bush is venal. What to do about North Korea? Bush is a hypocrite.

In this dream palace, Bush, Cheney, and a junta of corporate oligarchs stole the presidential election, then declared war on Iraq to seize its oil and hand out the spoils to Halliburton and Bechtel. In this dream palace, the warmongering Likudniks in the administration sit around dreaming of conquests in Syria, Iran, and beyond. In this dream palace, the boy genius Karl Rove hatches schemes to use the Confederate flag issue to win more elections, John Ashcroft wages holy war on American liberties, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and his cabal of neoconservatives long for global empire. In this dream palace, every story of Republican villainy is believed, and all the windows are shuttered with hate.

My third guess is that the Bush haters will grow more vociferous as their numbers shrink. Even progress in Iraq will not dampen their anger, because as many people have noted, hatred of Bush and his corporate cronies is all that is left of their leftism. And this hatred is tribal, not ideological. And so they will still have their rallies, their alternative weeklies, and their Gore Vidal polemics. They will still have a huge influence over the Democratic party, perhaps even determining its next presidential nominee. But they will seem increasingly unattractive to most moderate and even many normally Democratic voters who never really adopted outrage as their dominant public emotion. 

In other words, there will be no magic "Aha!" moment that brings the dream palaces down. Even if Saddam's remains are found, even if weapons of mass destruction are displayed, even if Iraq starts to move along a winding, muddled path toward normalcy, no day will come when the enemies of this endeavor turn around and say, "We were wrong. Bush was right." They will just extend their forebodings into a more distant future. Nevertheless, the frame of the debate will shift. The war's opponents will lose self-confidence and vitality. And they will backtrack. They will claim that they always accepted certain realities, which, in fact, they rejected only months ago.

The magic of this piece of persiflage -- and all such super-patriot Salacious B. Crumb caterwauling...

...by all your favorite Neocon pundits back in the day -- is not merely that it got everything wrong, but that it got everything perfectly backwards.  

It's the GOP base/Tea Party/MAGA meatheads that grew more vociferous.  Even President Obama trying to clean up the ruin they left in their wake, and asking nothing more than everyone help out and meet in the middle did not dampen their anger, because as many people have noted, hatred of the Left (and all the usual fascist scapegoats) is all that is left of Right. 

And this hatred is tribal, not ideological. And so they will still have their MAGA rallies, their podcasts, their Hate Radio and their Fox News garbage. They will still have a huge influence over the Republican party, perhaps even determining its next presidential nominee. But they will seem increasingly unattractive to sane, normal humans who never really adopted outrage as their dominant public emotion. 

And there was never any  magic "Aha!" moment that brought their Neocon dream palaces down.  None of them ever missed a meal.  Most of the got promotions and book deals. No matter how far Democrats extend themselves and offer compromise after compromise to repair the damage the GOP has done to this country, no day will come when Republican politicians, pundits and the base of the party turn around and say, "We were wrong. The Left was right." They will just extend their forebodings into a more distant future. 

Nevertheless, the frame of the debate will shift. The Right's lies and conspiracy theories will get progressively stupider, as the ghouls and grifters who spread them get progressively richer.  And they will backtrack, and reverse themselves again and again. 

They will claim that they always accepted certain realities, which, in fact...

...they rejected...

...only days before...

2011 video of Trump is going viral after Iran attack:

"Our president will start a war with Iran because he has no ability to negotiate. He's weak and he's ineffective."pic.twitter.com/QR9v3h0hdo

— Joe Rogan Podcast News (@joeroganhq) February 28, 2026

No Half Measures

Professional Left Podcast Episode 970: Lifeboats And How To Burn Them

"The Nazi regime is devoid of all theme and principle except appetite and racial domination."  --Winston Churchill, June 22, 1941.

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The Gospel According to Saint David

Sitting in a dark room, blindfolded, using only my fingertips while wearing goatskin insulated electrician's gloves, I can still find the "But the Democrats...",  "But the Liberals...",  "But the speech codes at Swarthmore..." razor in the apple of every Brooks column critiquing Trump/Republicans. 

Or, for that matter, any column of any kind on any subject dating back to good old days of George Allen and Tom Delay.

Mr. David Brooks was raised in academic privilege, loitered at the University of Chicago long enough to score a BA in history (which, based on how routinely he molests and whitewashes the past in order to advance his political agenda, should have been revoked decades ago), after which he latched onto the wingnut welfare teat like a lamprey and has been nursing at its ample bosom ever since.

Since his days misreading history at the Wall Street Journal, Brooks has been America's most ubiquitous cheerleader for the myopically wealthy, the cluelessly privileged and politically inbred, and has made his career out of telling the rich and powerful the silky lies they desperately wish to be true.

Yes, truly it can be said that in all this wide, bountiful, fatally-conflicted nation—from the mountains to the prairies and the whole rest of that song—there is no one who can speak with less forged-in-the-crucible-of-hardship authority about what hard times have to teach us than David Brooks.

I've been writing about David Brooks for over two decades now, and I didn't do all that readin' and spill all those pixels because I find anything meritorious about Mr. Brooks. Quite the opposite: I lost count of the sheer tonnage of indefensible, toxic codswallop that sharts out of this man's pen more than a decade ago.

Mr. David Brooks has made a very good living hauling water for the worst political party in modern American history. He has done it by lying about the history and direction of his Republican party. By pretending that any outward evidence of the depravity of his Republican party is merely a transient, surface nuisance. By deflecting any honest discussion of the unique, toxic madness and malice of his Republican party by relentlessly playing Both Siderist games.

Week after week, month after month, year after year, Mr. Brooks has plied his deeply dishonest and very profitable craft. Along with the rest of the conservative brain caste, he spent most of the 1990s and the early 2000s railing against us vile liberals  As long as it was popular to treat liberals like fifth columnists, David Brooks was first in line for the hippie bashing. But when it finally became impossible to ignore that the Iraq War he had cheerled was a complete disaster, that the Bush administration was staffed by morons, charlatans and zealots, and that—surprise, surprise—the liberals had been right all along, what did Brooks do?

Apologize for his journalistic malpractice?  Heaven forefend!

No, he simply became the newest and loudest cheerleader of the "Both Sides Do It" cult, claiming that the liberals were just as much to blame for the current situation as the war criminals in the White House. Thus was launched Brooks' second career as the chief evangelist of that poisonous cult of privilege and pretense.  There followed hundreds of sermons about the Sensible Center wherein resided a whole colony of sensible Republican candidates and noble Republican voters who spent their days making America with their own two hands, and their evenings reading "An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs" to their towheaded children. Mythical creatures that have never existed and never will.

Now that Mr. David Brooks has successfully scammed the New York Times and PBS and NPR and Yale and NBC and The Aspen Institute and Oprah into underwriting his midlife crisis, various paeans are being written about his heroic moral journey from unrepentant Beltway Republican hack to unrepentant Beltway Both Siderist hack.

The Right's now openly insane, which means the Both Sides Did It lie must be spun even harder and the Temple of Centrism even better attended. That's the Brooks patter, and he's been running it for so long that it's worn grooves in the public discourse. The only honorable way to alter the course of the storm of Republicans' madness and violence bearing down on us would be to invent a time machine and go back to when the madness began to grow and metastasize and thoroughly and publicly discredit those elite media influencers like Brooks who were swearing up, down and sideways that there was nothing to worry about.

That George W. Bush was a military genius. 

That the Iraq War was an unalloyed success. 

That tax cuts fix everything. 

That we would never have deficits again. 

That the Tea Party wasn't racist. 

That Obama was to blame for GOP intransigence. 

That everything was fine: that the GOP had gotten over being weird and was now back to being awesome. 

That Liberals are crackpot alarmists for fretting over the trajectory of the GOP. 

That Both Sides are to blame. 

That Bernie was just as bad as Trump. 

That we needn't worry about Trump because it was definitely gonna be Rubio. 

That Hillary was just as bad as Trump. 

That we needn't worry about Trump because the Wise Men of the GOP would definitely keep him in line. 

That the base of the GOP weren't racist meatheads drunk on Hate Radio and Fox News rotgut.

At at no point on this long, ugly trek did the Sulzberger family decide that David Brooks, their doddering, ideologically-incontinent housepet, has finally shit on one too many of the family's hand-knotted Bokhara rugs to be kept around any longer.  At no point did they think it was finally time to dispatch him to an Elite Pundit Farm upstate where he could frolic and opine all day long in the warm sunshine with the ghosts of fellow pundits like David Broder and William Safire?

Instead, Brooks finally packed up his medicine show and hopped the Acela corridor train for a quick ride southwest to his new digs at The Atlantic.  

Because David Brooks is never going to change, and because he's already been guest-writing at The Atlantic for years, we can safely assume that they know exactly what they're buying.  

During his tenure at the Times, Brooks job has been to provide institutional cover for the GOP's descent into madness by insisting, over and over again, that Both Sides are equally to blame for the catastrophe which one side -- and only one side -- has deliberately engineered.

That's his job. That's his racket. He's been very good at it. And now he'll be plying that same old snake under a new label.

Old whine in new skins, if you'll pardon the pun.  

I Am The Liberal Media