That paragraph is so Brooksian! Well done.
Moderating:
Yes. If y’all want to talk about plumbing regulations, please take it to another thread. Thanks.
For your continuing amusement. From Wonkette:
…
In his New York Times column yesterday (gift link … Or Temba, his arms wide link), Brooks makes the case that Trump and Trumpism threaten all the good things that civilization has to offer: rule of law, international order, science and medicine, education, the free press, charitable organizations, even businesses that “build wealth and spread prosperity.” All these institutions, he says, “make our lives sweet, loving and creative, rather than nasty, brutish and short.”…
Welcome to the Resistance, Mr. Brooks, however you got here. We need everyone if we’re to stop Trump from grabbing people off the streets and sending them to foreign prisons, maybe forever. That’s pretty averse to humanity.
…
We can agree with well over half of what Brooks says here, which is pretty good in politics:
[A] civic uprising has to have a short-term vision and a long-term vision. Short term: Stop Trump. Foil his efforts. Pile on the lawsuits. Turn some of his followers against him. The second is a long-term vision of a fairer society that is not just hard on Trump, but hard on the causes of Trumpism — one that offers a positive vision. Whether it’s the universities, the immigration system or the global economy, we can’t go back to the status quo that prevailed when Trump first rode down the escalator.
We’ll almost certainly disagree with what exact shape that second half takes. David Brooks being David Brooks, he would very much like a post-Trump destination that David Brooks can get behind.
…
My bold.
So, and this is no surprise, David wants to go back to The Before-- before Biden, Obama, Clinton. He doesn’t want to go forward to where many of us want to go. But he’s right that stopping trump is the business at hand.
Those are my attorneys.
Here is the first paragraph from Brooks’s op-ed piece today:
“I’ve detested at least three-quarters of what the Trump administration has done so far, but it possesses one quality I can’t help admiring: energy. I don’t know which cliché to throw at you, but it is flooding the zone, firing on all cylinders, moving rapidly on all fronts at once. It is operating at a tremendous tempo, taking the initiative in one sphere after another.”
I read about half the piece and then gave up because I could not figure out what his point was. Apparently that Dems (or liberals) are not energetic enough, while Trump is a bundle of energy. Sure he looks like it since he doesn’t actually do any work.
Yeah, that column undid any good will I may have developed for the man as a result of the ThelmaLou column. “Flood the zone” is particularly unfortunate:
STEVE BANNON: All we have to do is flood the zone. Every day, we hit them with three things. They’ll bite on one, and we’ll get all of our stuff done, bang, bang, bang. These guys will never be able to recover, but we got to start with muzzle velocities.
This is not a practice by a good president for good people to admire. There is something seriously wrong with Brooks.
I agree.
He forgot “moving fast and breaking things.”
I remember hearing from someone before the election that Trump would only pardon the non-violent rioters from January 6th. After the election, it was too much work to go through the whole list and figure out who was violent and who wasn’t, so he just pardoned all of them.
He says he’s only deporting illegal immigrants who are violent criminals, but we’ve all seen that’s not true.
How many different tariffs has he announced? I lost count.
If other presidents looked less energetic than Trump, it’s because they put in the effort behind the scenes to get the details of their decisions right. Every announcement or executive order is the result of weeks or months of work we never see. Trump is not burdened by such concerns. He makes decisions as the result of seconds of painstaking deliberation.
It’s easy to look energetic when you don’t give a fuck about doing things right. If that’s the best Brooks can find to say about him, it just means he can’t face how wrong he’s been.
Thus has it been, thus ever shall it be.
Like firing vital government employees and ending important health programs, only to say “Oops, made some mistakes there, nevermind.”
“Part of the Doge, we talked about this from the beginning, is we’re going to do 80% cuts, but 20% of those are going to have to be reinstated, because we’ll make mistakes,” (RFK Jr.) told reporters at a stop in Virginia."
But ya gotta admire all that energy, right David?
It’s kinda like the people who complain that Trump plays too much golf. Personally, I want Trump to be golfing as much as he can; two rounds every day, if possible. Every minute on a golf course is a minute that he’s not in the Oval Office, or meeting with someone, or talking into a microphone. It’s where he can do the least damage to the country.
If David Brooks really hates three-quarters of what Trump has done, you’d think he’d be all in favor of a lazy, lethargic president.