David Brooks is Magic

As soon as I read two sentences of this week's David Brooks column in the NYT (not directly, through Steve M), I knew Driftglass wouldn't be able to help himself. It was especially silly this week:

If you could give Donald Trump the gift of a single trait to help his presidency, what would it be?

... the gift I would give Trump would be an emotional gift, the gift of fraternity. I’d give him the gift of some crisis he absolutely could not handle on his own. The only way to survive would be to fall back entirely on others, and then to experience what it feels like to have them hold him up.

A gift of a crisis? Fuck you, David Brooks. That means from your platform of sheer stupidity and lack of empathy (though maintaining his unique façade of cloying, patronizing sensitivity), you're wishing disaster on all of us.

Also, how do you think Donald Trump is going to handle such a crisis? Steve explains:

...Trump was raised to believe that life is war and the way to win is to be a lone wolf and the meanest SOB on the planet -- and then, perhaps more important for the present circumstances, he was politicized by Fox News, a channel run for years by Roger Ailes, who also believes that life is war and America needs a strongman. The new Ailes in Trump's life, Steve Bannon, also believes in strongmen and perpetual war.

Yeah. Also, All the orange shitgibbon needs is friends? That's just mind-blowingly dumb and a figment of Brooks's imagination. And that's Driftglass's territory, as he walks us through the birth of a Brooks column:

And that is when you fly!fly! to The New York Times archives, there to calm yourself and comfort yourself in the knowledge that your profession is now so utterly debased that even the algorithm that poops out "David Brooks" columns for the Times twice a week doesn't even try any more.

Eleven minutes until deadline?  Ha!  Fuck that!  Eleven minutes is forever.  So relax.  Put your feet up and knock back that half glass of Dewars you failed to finish last night before you slipped off to dreams of Will and Schalfly, and let America's Most Ubiquitous Conservative Public Intellectual take you on a tour of his Build-a-Buckley Workshop and show you how it's done.

 Read the whole thing.

Also, while I'm at it, take a listen to this week's Professional Left. They have a new sponsor -- Dukakis's Khakis!

UPDATE (2/10/2017, 11:38 PM): Professional Left has a new logo and it's awesome: