Hand Over Ears Saying "Lalalalala!"

DougJ at Balloon Juice catches David Brooks in an act of intellectual dishonesty, which is much like catching the sun in an act of producing heat and light through fusion. Brooks tries to deconstruct what went wrong with the GOP in Bush's second term and can't quite figure out what the problem was...

It was interesting to watch the Republican Party lose touch with America. You had a party led by conservative Southerners who neither understood nor sympathized with moderates or representatives from swing districts.

They brought in pollsters to their party conferences to persuade their members that the country was fervently behind them. They were supported by their interest groups and cheered on by their activists and the partisan press. They spent federal money in an effort to buy support but ended up disgusting the country instead.

DougJ of course just might have the answer:

No mention of the Iraq war—that’s bold even for Bobo. Let’s say this plainly: the country initially turned on Bush—and by extension the Republican party—because of the Iraq war.

He was in negative territory by early 2005 and there’s little doubt that it was primarily because of the war. What else could it have been? The economy wasn’t bad, the press still loved him, Katrina hadn’t happened yet.

There is no way the Republican electoral disasters of 2006 and 2008 would have happened if Bush had had a healthy approval rating. And there’s no way his approval rating would ever gone so low without the Iraq war.

Which is bad enough for Brooks. But then Brooks spends the entire rest of the article going "And then the liberals will implode any second now."

We’re only in the early stages of the liberal suicide march, but there already have been three phases. First, there was the stimulus package. You would have thought that a stimulus package would be designed to fight unemployment and stimulate the economy during a recession. But Congressional Democrats used it as a pretext to pay for $787 billion worth of pet programs with borrowed money. Only 11 percent of the money will be spent by the end of the fiscal year — a triumph of ideology over pragmatism.

Then there is the budget. Instead of allaying moderate anxieties about the deficits, the budget is expected to increase the government debt by $11 trillion between 2009 and 2019.

Finally, there is health care. Every cliché Ann Coulter throws at the Democrats is gloriously fulfilled by the Democratic health care bills. The bills do almost nothing to control health care inflation. They are modeled on the Massachusetts health reform law that is currently coming apart at the seams precisely because it doesn’t control costs. They do little to reward efficient providers and reform inefficient ones.

The House bill adds $239 billion to the federal deficit during the first 10 years, according to the Congressional Budget Office. It would pummel small businesses with an 8 percent payroll penalty. It would jack America’s top tax rate above those in Italy and France. Top earners in New York and California would be giving more than 55 percent of earnings to one government entity or another.

Nancy Pelosi has lower approval ratings than Dick Cheney and far lower approval ratings than Sarah Palin. And yet Democrats have allowed her policy values to carry the day — this in an era in which independents dominate the electoral landscape.

That's right, Nancy Pelosi is running the country, not that Obama guy. The Village goalposts for the Democratic Party have been moved to another stadium. It's no longer about President Obama, it's all about San Fran Nan.

Are we even pretending anymore that David Brooks has credibility? He's worried about crusading for the tax rates of America's wealthiest while millions of us face a health care crisis? He's worried about a stimulus package that acts primarily in 2010 rather than 2009 as signs of complete and systemic failure of the plan? He's worried about how anxious moderates are about the national debt, and all these are signs of the apocalypse?

Six months in and the President's agenda is a "suicide march". This is what the discourse in our Beltway wise men community has been reduced to, the impending end of David Brooks's entire concept of America where a 1-3% surtax on 1.2% of America is financially crippling, health insurance for all is doom for all, and Nancy Pelosi has been unleashed to prey upon our soft, tender, nubile rich people.

And he's worried about Democrats being out of touch. Ai-ya.

I swear, if you Village jagoffs make me add a Pelosi Derangement Syndrome tag in the next couple of months, I will be cross.