I also get comments and letters nearly every time I take the wood saw to David Brooks, which falls into the annoying category of people telling me how I should invest my time. Helpfully, driftglass explains the purpose of our hobby. However, he neglects to mention an additional rationale…that it is just so damn fun to mock BoBo. Don’t let anyone try to convince you that David Brooks doesn’t matter because no one ever watches The Charlie Rose Show. He matters. He matters if for no other reason than he is about the best and most decent man we can possibly hope for to represent the “reasonable right” in this country, and that alone is cause for a revival of the art of bomb shelter design.

When this incredibly stupid man (who has many a time come right to the brink of understanding the conservative movement that provides him with his vast spaces for entertaining, only to shrink from the precipice) is the only adult in the Republican room, you know our country is screwed. Is there no blind soothsayer of Thebes who can scrape the scales from Mr. Brooks’ eyes? Or, as Upton Sinclair once noted, is this a case of ‘It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it’?

Yes, Mitt Romney is running a depressing campaign, but it is many unsavory and deplorable things besides. To wit:

Was Brooks alive in 1980? Did he hear the campaign that Reagan ran? Has he looked recently at Reagan’s first budget? Everything that Mitt Romney said at that fundraiser was the inevitable result of a process that began under Barry Goldwater, when extremist economics and the sad detritus of American apartheid both got mainstreamed into the Republican party, that reached its apogee under Reagan, and that has been the ideological identity of the Republican party ever since.

Maybe we can debate about the time and location of the ‘apogee,’ because I don’t think we’ve yet reached Peak Wingnut. Not when Patrick Buchanan begat Gary Bauer and Gary Bauer begat Alan Keyes and Alan Keyes begat Michele Bachmann. No, that is not a trajectory away from the apogee (unless, by ‘apogee,’ you mean this).

Bowles-Simpson has about as much to do with modern Republicanism as an Orange County convening of the John Birch Society has to do with the Civl Rights Movement. And never the twain shall meet.

Paul Ryan, ladies and gentleman, would sooner use David Brooks’ brain as a free weight as he would see things from his point of view. He will never come around to the kind of centrism Brooks seems to believe is possible but must know is not.

I admired Rodney King when, after discovering it was legal for him to be beaten half to death by publicly-funded police, he asked why we all couldn’t just get along. But I thought he was hopelessly naïve, too. How many more billy-club blows will Brooks have to receive from publicly-funded Republican politicos before he stops asking that question?