David Brooks should shut the fuck up

I think we now know where RFK Jr. got his brainworm. It was about to starve on the cerebral cavity contents of the NY Time's David Brooks.

Upward failing columnist for the shitty NY Times, David Brooks, woke up this morning after reading the moldering pile of dogshit that Bretbug Stephens posted earlier in the week and decided to say “Hold my Beer”

So, he penned this OpEd to give us his mediocre middle aged white male shit-take - “Making Peace With the Kamala Nomination” - you can tell this is a desperate attempt to appear relevant.

What did he have to say? Well, turns out in 2019/2020 he was a Kamala-stan:

At the beginning of 2019 I wrote a column enthusiastically arguing that Kamala Harris was the Democratic Party’s strongest candidate to take on Donald Trump. My core argument was pretty simple: If Democrats hoped to defeat him, they needed the toughest gladiator they could get, and Harris filled that bill.

Her campaign memoir from that year features a string of scenes in which she trounced powerful men. People who watched her as a prosecutor and a rising political star have testified to her skills in the art of confrontation. In the column, I quoted something that Gary Delagnes, the former head of San Francisco’s police union, told Politico: “She’s an intelligent person. She is a — let’s see, I better pick this word carefully: ruthless.”

Hmm, seems pretty good, right?

Then he dives in with this drivel …

Looking back, that column was not wrong, but it was limited. We’ve seen a lot more of Harris in the ensuing years. Today, as she seemingly cruises to the Democratic nomination, I find myself experiencing a dizzying range of emotions. Some moments, I share the jolt of enthusiasm many are feeling. Other moments, I think the Democrats are suffering from a mass hypnotic delusion, nominating a candidate who is seriously flawed. In order to make sense of this mishmash of thoughts, I thought I’d put together a report card of her strengths and weaknesses. (emphasis mine)

Uh, what the fuck are you talking about? Democrats are suffering from mass delusion? Bro, first, stay in your fucking lane. I know you cultivate a “centrist” persona, but we all know you are a Republican thru and thru, and you really are bad at submerging your true beliefs to ostensibly play “both sides” and offer yourself as a reasonable voice.

He then goes into grading her:

Toughness: A.; Leadership and management skills: C; Analytical abilities: B+, Relatability: B, Composure: C, Overall reputation: C.

C’mon Davie, do this for Trump and Vance too. I did want to pull one of these out in total because his reasoning is really as tortured as that poor ferret that lives attached to the mango Mussolini’s blade pate.

Vision: C. One problem with her terrible 2020 presidential campaign was that she was running as a prosecutor at a time when her party was lurching leftward. Another was identified by the former Obama adviser David Axelrod in an interview with Elaina Plott Calabro of The Atlantic: “It looked as if she didn’t know where to plant her feet. That she wasn’t sort of grounded, that she didn’t know exactly who she was.” That’s still somewhat true. She hasn’t shown that she has the kind of coherent worldview — the way, say, Biden does — you need to be a good decision maker in the White House. Over the past few years, when Harris has been asked to articulate her overall philosophy, she often produces a meaningless word salad, ripe for ridicule.

In California politics the safe thing to do is to play to the progressive base. So in interviews she gave during her 2020 run she would often revert to positions that some progressives loved, even though they were politically suicidal in the swing states. She said she wanted to ban fracking, decriminalize illegal immigration, end the filibuster to pass the Green New Deal and eliminate private health insurance. Republicans are now making hay out of these statements, but it’s not clear how much she believes what she claimed to believe back then.

He gets close to why her first pass in presidential politics fizzled. Indeed, the focus on the increasing tension surrounding the epidemic of police officers behaving really badly towards black males in particular, her background in law enforcement and career as a prosecutor, and attorney general of the state of California, so she had to walk a precarious path to thread the needle with the progressive wing of the Democratic party.

That was not a good place to be.

Still, I fucking dare Brooks to try to unearth Trump’s vision to be anything other than “I am a god, and I want to not go to jail”.

But I ain’t holding my breath.

No, David Brooks should have mashed that snooze button or called in sick today, because dude, this is just weak tea all the fucking way. The final thoughts of your essay:

My bottom line, I guess, is that Harris is a smart and forceful person with a commanding political presence. But as of 18 months ago, she would not have made an effective president or even a good candidate. She ran a disastrous presidential campaign and has been a mediocre vice president, even measured by the low standards of the office. She could always repeat the normal Democratic positions but had no distinctive view for where the country needed to go.

The crucial question is: Has she learned and grown? Democrats keep telling me that she’s a much more confident campaigner, a much more effective manager, a much more focused thinker. I’m open to that possibility. But I just spent a week in Milwaukee during which Republicans kept reassuring me that Trump had changed for the better, was a man transformed.

Stay in your lane bro. You have metric tons of privilege that you seem incapable of acknowledging, you should sit this one out.

---