Rough log of Susan Collins announcing she's a NO on Betsy DeVos: "I cannot vote to confirm her as our nation's next secretary of education" pic.twitter.com/eABe3cofxN— Bradd Jaffy (@BraddJaffy) February 1, 2017
So I'll retract my criticism of her for today. HOOOOOWEVER, I will unretract it if she votes for Sessions.
UPDATE (2/2/2017, 9:40 AM): Welcome, Crooks & Liars readers. If any of you can answer this, let me know! C&L is the kind of community that's good at that stuff.
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David Brooks is not our friend and never will be our friend. Justin Rosario of the Daily Banter asserts otherwise, though:
With the election of Trump, however, Brooks, like many Republicans, realize they fucked up. Badly. But unlike many Republicans, Brooks is free to sound the alarm and has done what was once unthinkable for a major conservative columnist - openly describe the Trump administration as rooted in white nationalism:
...the Trump administration is not a Republican administration; it is an ethnic nationalist administration.
That is astonishing considering that it took the "liberal" newspapers and media outlets what seemed like an eternity to make the same point.
First off, I guess when there are 330 million people in this country, you can say "many" of anything and be correct. And ooh! I get to quote Led Zeppelin here:
Many is a word
That only leaves you guessing
Guessing 'bout a thing
You really ought to know
So let's not guess. What percentage of Republicans are we talking about? Two percent? Five percent? What percentage of Republicans didn't vote for him? According to the CBS exit polls, eleven percent.
What percentage didn't vote for Romney? Seven percent.
That's within or near the margin of error! But, taking those numbers at face value, FOUR PERCENT of Republicans decided that Trump was less acceptable than Mitt Romney (I personally don't think he was *that* much less acceptable, but that's just me). Not to mention that he crushed everyone else in the Republican primaries. Further, how many Republican elected officials are voting against, say, his horrendous cabinet nominees? As I said earlier this week and I expect to hold as a core belief for the rest of my life, "if we can't get three Republican motherfuckers to vote against Jefferson Fucking Beauregarde Sessions III we should resolve to dissolve the Republican Party next time the Democrats are in power; they're domestic enemies." Let's see if even one ultimately votes against him.
Bannon, she told Maine Public Radio, lacks “the expertise that the director of national intelligence or the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff have.”
That is not the issue. I mean, yeah, subbing in an inexperienced advisor for the DNI or Chairman of the Joint Chiefs is dumb. But that's inside baseball stuff, and it happens here and there all the time. It's happening all over the Trump cabinet. The issue is that Steve Bannon is an evil Nazi. But Collins can't see that or say that.
Back to Brooks. We have known who Trump is for years. It was pretty clear that he was a racist and a fascist since day one of his campaign. So why is it "astonishing" that David Brooks is picking up on this SO QUICKLY?
Brooks is not speaking to the left, after all.
Yes, yes he is. I rarely hear conservatives cite David Brooks. But liberals do all the time. David Brooks's entire job is to tell liberals that there is a giant swath of the Republican Party scurried away by the Witness Protection Program, but they're there, really. Just give them one more chance. They'll come out of hiding this time!
Now I'm in the territory of Driftglass, the country's #1 Brooksologist, so I'm just going to let him take it from here:
Now I'm in the territory of Driftglass, the country's #1 Brooksologist, so I'm just going to let him take it from here:
In case you hadn't caught on by now, Mr. David Brooks of The New York Times is not really a person.
Mr. David Brooks is a brand. Mr. David Brooks is a profitable multimedia Conservative corporation that specializes in one and only one service. Like a bank or insurance company or funeral home, Mr. David Brooks sells reassurance. He specializes in very high-dollar, high-influence clients. Addlepated university presidents, for example. CEOs. Political professionals. Beltway media assholes. Sclerotic, plutocrat shut-ins. And so on.
His job for the last 20 years has been to reassure his clients that no matter how fucking insane, obstructionist, incompetent, vicious, dishonest, seditious and pig-ignorant the Republican Party may appear to be on any given day, it's not really as bad as you think. In fact, the real Republican Party -- the secret Republican Party which operates behind a curtain that only Mr. David Brooks can peek and sets policy using a code only Mr. David Brooks can decipher -- is doing just fine.
Everything is under control.
And if there are evident cracks below the water-line? Well you can trust Me. David Brooks when he tells you that they're very tiny cracks -- inconsequential really -- and certainly weren't caused by the captain and crew of the USS Saint Ronald Reagan rammed the ship repeatedly into every fucking iceberg in the North Atlantic.
And if steerage is already filling up with ice water and people down there are drowning and pleading for help? Well if that is happening -- and Mr. Brooks is not saying that it is, just if it is -- it's probably a result of the 1960s and/or Woodstock and/or the disordered communities that the peasants come from and all the unauthorized and irresponsible sexytime they keep having. And anyway, once the captain and crew of the USS Saint Ronald Reagan guides the ship safely to port, a Grand Bargain will be waiting at the docks to solve everything. So really, it's best to just ignore whatever you think you're hearing from below-decks have the band play a little louder until we arrive,
Reassurance.
Read the whole thing. And I encourage you to always pay a visit to Mr. Glass before you consider clicking the "Share" button on a Brooks article.
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