David Brooks writes that his most recent transgression against overt reality and basic fairness prompted him to rethink Obama's mistakes and his own "dissatisfaction" with them. And this, from the penumbral universe of desperately thrashing-about conservatism, is what Brooks' ponderous rethink comes up with:
The problem is that [Obama's 'Democratic orthodoxy'] locks us into the same debate framework we’ve been stuck in since 1980, which has produced so much gridlock. If politics is framed [as big government versus small, as the individual versus the collective], then the country divides and policy stagnates. We will keep having these endless budget squabbles. The dysfunction will metastasize.
A moment of silence ...
There. Perhaps by now you've absorbed that offensive barrage of fanciful bullshit. You don't believe it, because it's patently unbelievable, but you've absorbed it. And its thrust is unmistakable: The right, from fringe to core, has got nothing--nothing but make-believe tales and pseudo-realities and a weird kind of deeply disingenuous post-conservatism which even the post-conservatives don't really believe. Because it's patently, provably unbelievable.
To pin the label of "Democratic orthodoxy" on the most philosophically pragmatic president since FDR--as well as a president who has taken as much unhinged heat from the orthodox left as from the intoxicated right--is unbelievably offensive enough. Yet Brooks compounds this trespass by falsely witnessing the president's responsibility for government's resultant gridlock, division, stagnation and dysfunction.
Not even Sean Hannity believes that. He too says it, of course, because it's patently, provably--and best of all--offensively untrue, which is what passes for conservative analysis in these post-conservative days.
David Brooks has sunk to that.