This. is. real:

So here, at the end of all things, only one question remains.

At what point does 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 Bokara rugs to be kept around any longer?

At what point will he be dispatched to an Elite Pundit Farm upstate where he can gambol and opine all day long in the warm sunshine with the ghosts of fellow pundits like David Broder and William Safire?

My guess is never.

I've been writing about David Brooks for +17 years 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.

Brooks' dubious virtue is that he has always been an utterly reliable barometer of the state of cravenness and brokenness of the mainstream media. Not just based on the objectively cringy awfulness of his own work, but in the way his colleagues have climbed over each other to praise him, fete him and emulate him. He is the total package: the complete Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of How Fucked-In-The-Head The Elite Media Is all wrapped up in a single person.

Mr. Brooks ends his column like this:

It feels as though we’re walking toward some sort of storm, and there’s no honorable way to alter our course.

And he's right. The only honorable way to alter the course of the storm of Republicans' madness and violence that is 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 who were swearing up, down and sideway 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. How dare you suggest that St. Ronald Reagan played on the racist anger and fear of the GOP base to win? That we would never have deficits again, and anyone who said otherwise was crazy and stupid. 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 for [fill in the blank.] That Bernie was just as bad as Trump. That we needn't worry about Trump because it was definitely gonna be Rubio! That Both Sides are to blame for [fill in the blank.] That Hillary was just as bad as Trump. That Both Sides are to blame for [fill in the blank.] That we needn't worry about Trump because he was definitely going to lose. That Both Sides are to blame for [fill in the blank.] That we needn't worry about Trump because the Wise Men of the GOP would definitely keep him in line. That Both Sides are to blame for [fill in the blank]. That the base of the GOP weren't racist meatheads drunk on Hate Radio of Fox News rotgut.

And did I mention that Both Sides are always, always, always to blame for [fill in the blank]?

If you haven't caught on by now, these represent just a few of the many, many "highlights" of the opinion-having career of Mr. David Brooks while he has been on the Weekly Standard and the Sulzberger family payrolls.

And trying my damndest every single day to use whatever gifts I have in every way I could think of to thoroughly pants and publicly discredit elite media influencers like David Fucking Brooks, who helped manufacture the storm of Republicans' madness and violence that is now bearing down on us is how I spent the 2000s.

And the 2010s.

And, so far, the 2020s.

And if I have learned anything from the past +17 years spent at the Liberal blogosphere and podcasting coal-face, it is this.

David Brooks is never going to change.

And the Sulzberger family is never going to give him up.

Republished with permission from Driftglass.