Tuesday, November 08, 2022

The Chasming.

Who'sWedging
WhoVille


No matter what happens with the US'ian midterm election returns you're sure to be reading all sorts of aftermath stories noting that the American populace is more divided than ever.

Heckfire.

Sulzberger family sinecure David Brooks even did his best to get out in front of this colour-free big media wave to come when he slipped stuff like the following into his New York Times column late last week:

"... America has riven itself into two different cultures. It’s very hard for the party based in one culture to reach out and win voters in the other culture — or even to understand what people in the other culture are thinking.

As I’ve shuttled between red and blue America over decades of reporting on American politics, I’ve seen social, cultural, moral and ideological rifts widen from cracks to chasms..."


But here's the thing.

Like many a never Trumper who, starting in January of 2017, suddenly saw the light when it comes to the divided state of the American body politic, the good Mr. Brooks didn't always do what he's doing now.

In point of fact, Mr. Brooks once wrote stuff like the following, over and over and over again, for William Kristol in the Weekly Chasm Maker Standard, pre-Trump and Tea Party, in this specific case 2003, when a super-fine fellow named Bush stood on an aircraft carrier off of San Diego and declared the mission in Iraq accomplished:

"...My 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..."


Put that in your once-a-week appearance forever (no matter how many wedges he has driven into cracks to create chasms) PBS Newshour pipe and smoke it!



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If you would like to learn just how far down the depravity curve Mr. Brooks and his ilk have slid, Driftglass is the guy for you...


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1 comment:

e.a.f. said...

read the Driftglass post! Interesting, funny, sad.....
Some of those "idiots" have impressive educations. Their getting on the maga train, may be simply they thought it was an express to where they wanted their careers to go and feeling their entitlement to whatever they wanted. Its hard to believe, or perhaps not, how stupid some of the things they said are. They ought to know better.

Guys like Brooks always made me think he was playing both sides of the fence to keep getting his salary and exploiting situations to his advantage. To many he seemed reasonable with some of his articles, but in the whole over of what he writes, not so much.

Sometimes you do wonder about guys like Kevin McCarthy. Immediately after the insurrection and realized he had the shit scared out of him, he said the right thing. Later he goes to Mara logo and has a new song sheet and you wonder omg he can't have been drinking that much, but when it comes to cool aid its hard to know.