We need a word for the category of blogging which is devoted to mocking David Brooks. This week, we saw absolutely epic efforts by driftglass and Charles P. Pearce. This type of blogging is inspired. It’s as if Brooks’ prose provides the bass line, and then the improvisation begins. There is something exquisitely ridiculous about both Brooks and the position the Republicans have put him in by moving to the right of the Partito Nazionale Fascista on both social and economic issues. If Brooks went away, what would happen to Moral Hazard, the Irish Setter? What would become of driftglass’s Pretty Hate Machine? Do they need David Brooks for inspiration even more than the Hate Machine needs him for coolant?
And outside of the Heart of Confederate Darkness, moderate GOP voters who are kept carefully shielded from the truth and lulled into a cozy, supply-side coma by the Bobo Koolant are genuinely horrified when the Core of their Party is suddenly exposed and they are forced to face with eyes wide open the naked, roaring, venomous, unreconstructed filth that actually fuels and pilots the Conservative’s Pretty Hate Machine.
There’s always Peggy Noonan, but her output is too little. And it just isn’t the same.
So, what do we want to call this genre?
