Brooks’ featured reaction is much, much more unethical than #1. After all, Gaffigan is only a stand-up comic (and a pretty decent actor), and carries no authority with his opinions. Brooks, however, does, although after he accepted and ran with his lucrative job as a Times fake conservative (the technical term is “sell-out”), he shouldn’t.
The latest evidence of Brooks’ pompous advocacy of nonsense was on the PBS News Hour, where he for some reason shares a show with knee-jerk, race-baiting progressive hack Jonathan Capehart. I guess because Capeheart is a black, gay progressive hack while Brooks is a white, heterosexual, under-cover progressive hack, this is what NPR regards as “balance.” Here was Brooks’ pronouncement regarding what Democrats have to do in the wake of Trump’s re-ascension to the White House. As with the previous installment, I’ll have some comments.
“Yes, well, first, they have to stand for institutions. I’m an institutionalist. I believe we’re born into a world of institutions, the Constitution, the Treasury Department, the U.S. military, the ‘News Hour.’
Ha-ha! Good one, Dave! Does including the PBS New Hour in that list lower the rest to its abysmal level, or is it supposed to give Brooks added prestige?
“We enter these institutions, we achieve our moral progress, such as we have it, by adhering to the standards of these institutions. We become stewards of institutions and try to pass them along better. It’s a whole moral ethos of being an institutionalist.”
Gibberish, almost on a Kamala Harris scale. I guess the Times editors earn their salaries when Brooks submits a column.
“Trump reverses that.”
Reverses what? Reverses the assumption of blind fealty to corrupt and untrustworthy institutions? Reverses the “whole moral ethos of being an institutionalist” like David Brooks?
“He thinks all institutions are illegitimate and therefore the people who will be most destructive to institutions…”
Trump thinks corrupt institution and untrustworthy institutions are destructive and dangerous to a democracy, which they are. Does Brooks think the catastrophic decline of Americans’ trust in our institutions is benign? Nothing to get upset about? That’s only because the institution he belongs to, American journalism, is one of the most corrupt of all.
“…basically the manly men who take what they want and break the rules, those are his paragons of virtue. They’re my paragons of vice.”
Nothing like sucking up to the gay guy, David. Brooks is even mouthing the Left’s bigotry against men: suuure, he’s a conservative, all right. You know who “breaks ‘the rules'”? Great Presidents. Leaders. Jackson, Lincoln, Teddy, FDR, Eisenhower, Reagan. They fixed things, often by tearing them down and starting over again.
“Restraint, which I regard as a virtue, he regards as a vice. So it’s a complete transvaluation of values, what he’s doing, and the Democrats need to stand up for the institutions.”
What does that even mean? Democrats have shown no restraint whatsoever: their party has revealed itself as the radical party. Defunding the police, open borders, the elevation of group identity over merit. Stand up for the institutions? Has Brooks been living in a cave? Which party would have eliminated the filibuster? Which party wants to pack the Supreme Court? Which party skipped the usual nominating process for President? Which party wants to censor speech on social media? Which party made a laughing stock of the institution Trump now holds, the Presidency?
“But what they do not need to do is be defenders of the status quo. And I’m a little afraid they’re going to do that. They’re going to see this assault on institutions and say, no, we defend it.”
Here Brooks makes his whole speech self-contradictory nonsense.
“They have to be like a lot of institutionalists — one of my heroes, George C. Marshall, was chief of staff of the Army in World War II. He was a firm institutionalist, but he was also a reformer. He knows that to love an institution, you have to change it. And in my mind, Democrats cannot be the stand-patters. We’re defending the institutions. They have to be reformers, not revolutionaries.”
And the best he can come up with is the same double standard we’ve seen from the Axis for eight long years. When the opposition seeks to change malfunctioning institutions, it’s an insurrection, chaos, “defying norms” and revolutionary. When Democrats and progressive do it, its reform.
Was Brooks ever smarter than this, or is this what he’s like without an editor?
________________
Pointer: Old Bill
Ethics Alarms 
You said: “You know who “breaks ‘the rules’”? Great Presidents. Leaders. Jackson, Lincoln, Teddy, FDR, Eisenhower, Reagan. They fixed things, often by tearing them down and starting over again.”
This makes me look forward to your next (hopefully) edition of analyses of presidents. As I recall, you were, chrionoogically, up to maybe Eisenhower. I may have that wrong, but your analyses always give considerable insight into our presidents. The six you cite above are clearly exceptional, and we can hope that maybe in four years we can include 45/47 in their company.
Yes, I am abashed that I have neglected to finish that, and I will soon, I promise.
Standard Dem trope: “All the Republicans have to do, now that they’ve won [the Presidency, control of the House or Senate, or a Supreme Court majority] is act like they’re actually, you know, Democrats! That’s bipartisanship! Right?” And if they don’t act like Democrats? Why, they’re breaking norms.
Amazing Jack took the time to fisk this word salad. It’s simply Authentic Frontier Gibberish. George C. Marshall? Are you kidding me? Why, whenever I think of an institution needing to be reformed, George C. Marshall is top of mind. I guess I’m supposed to think, “Boy, this guy knows who George C. Marshall was. This guy must be way smarter than I am. I’m not really sure what he’s saying, but he must be right.”
David, YOU need to be institutionalized. You can love it just like George C. Marshall did. We’ll call your treatment regimen “The Marshall Plan.” Asshole.
So, since we’re talking about George C. Marshall, here is something that hadn’t ever occurred to me.
You may know that up to about December, 1943, George Marshall was assumed by everyone as the person who would be named Supreme Allied Commander for the assault on France and Germany in 1944. He was the Army chief of staff and had done a superlative job of getting the army ready for WWII.
Well, apparently Roosevelt decided in the fall of 1943 that he just could not bear to lose Marshall to the European command. So he promoted Eisenhower instead, rather than bringing Eisenhower home to switch with Marshall.
Eisenhower went on to have a reasonably successful career both in and after the Army (as did Marshall, actually).
But what occurs to me tonight is, if we had carried through with the original plan and made Marshall the Allied commander for Overlord and beyond — would Marshall, could Marshall have gone on to be elected president? Or would the Republicans have come up with someone entirely different?
Eisenhower was an impactful choice right off because he had the prestige and guts to say “I will go to Korea” and push through a cease fire in Korea despite major obstacles.
I don’t know enough about Marshall to know how he might have done in politics, although he did pretty good as Secretary of State. I suspect Eisenhower was much, much better as a president than Marshall might have been.
But that is my George C. Marshall speculation for today.
——————-
Ooohh, if not Eisenhower, could it have been MacArthur? Ugh.
Thanks for the info on Marshall (John C.) D.G. Other than his eponymously named plan, I knew nothing about him.
Ooops. George, not John. Du-oh.
I don’t know if Brooks has amnesia or if he thanks voters in the US have the memory of lobsters 🦞 or are just plain stupid. 🤪. The Democrats need to defend institutions? It wasn’t even quite five years ago when the Democrats were either looking the other way or actively using Black Lives Matter and Antifa as a militia to tear everything apart like Bolsheviks and terrorize ordinary people. If you don’t remember, you can go ahead and look at the interior of most American cities for a lot of buildings that were burned still have not been rebuilt or replaced, or check out the dozens of empty plinths where these same people ripped statues down they decided couldn’t stand for another second.
It’s not like this is even a new thing. When the Republicans in the Senate fought back against Obama’s attempt to replace Scalia with a liberal, the Democrats were saying maybe the Senate’s role in the confirmation process should be circumscribed with a new rule that said if they did not take action on a nomination within 60 days the appointee should automatically be considered confirmed. When Trump was approaching the end of his first term, they were the ones saying that the president’s pardon power should be pared back in order to limit Trump from pardoning those they considered unworthy. Now their guy has the audacity to pardon his own POS, influence peddling son, and say that he was singled out, when for the last 4 years they singled out their main political opponent to be bankrupted and put in jail.
I pointed out sometime ago that the Democratic party only uses people and groups as pawns to get or keep power. As soon as they decide a different group can net them more power, they will switch. That’s why the Catholic Church is no longer the Democratic party at prayer, the Democrats decided they could get more votes from pushing unlimited abortion. The Democratic party also only uses institutions as far as they can be used to acquire, maintain, or retain power. If it had been 300 of their adherents assaulting the capitol four Januaries ago, and the Republicans were now prosecuting them and throwing them in jail for long periods, they’d be the ones saying that this was just a peaceful protest, just like the assault on the White House in 2020 that caused the secret service to move Trump to a secure bunker, only so he could be mocked as a coward for doing so.
Brooks needs to be thrown in jail together with all the other Democrat propagandists, just like the allies threw most of the Nazi propagandists in jail and sent the worst of them who still survived, Julius Streicher, to the gallows. Unfortunately, the tip top propagandist, Josef Goebbels, had already taken his own life, so the allies didn’t get to try him, convict him, and send him to do a well-deserved strangulation jig.
I’d venture to say that the only thing stopping the Democratic party from encouraging another revolt or declaring an emergency to keep Trump from the White House is the fact that Trump won this election game, set, and match, and the Democrats have painted themselves into a corner by calling him an election denier for 4 years and they know that would be a bridge too far. Personally, I think that the Department of Justice needs to start targeting all those writers like Jennifer Rubin and Leonard Pitts, who tried to lead a charge to shut the other party out of public life and throw its supporters into jail, and throw them into jail instead. It’s dangerous to act like a hanging judge, you never know when you might be the one on trial, subject to the mercy of the merciless.
Can I get an “Amen”?!?
You’re right, Steve. Brooks’s piece is major league projection. Which continues to amaze me as it seems to be all the Dems can do these days.
If that which Brooks spouts is contradictory, then maybe he can achieve the maintenance of TDS for his audience while avoiding legal notices(Sunny Hostin) by leaning on the fact that all he does is spout nonsense.
OK, another interesting factoid albeit one that many here may already realize.
I looked at the vote percentages in 2020 versus 2024. It looks to me that in every single state plus D.C. that Biden carried in 2020, Trump got a higher percentage of the vote in 2024 than in 2020, often significantly higher. About the only states, aside from the seven battleground states, where it was close were Oregon and Washington — Trump improved his numbers there but only by a percentage point or so.
I didn’t look at all the states Trump carried in 2020, but the ones I looked at showed a similar, although perhaps smaller, trend.
To me that is not happenstance or a coincidence, it is a realignment.