Brooks Is Making Me Crazy

David Brooks shakes his head and says that nothing major changed in the 2008 elections, as regards foreign policy. The big change, he says, already happened a few years ago - and was effected by Condi Rice, Robert Gates, and George mother-fucking-W Bush. He's up on stage waving his hands around, trying to convince us that what we chose was something the previous administration already figured out, and that Obama's highest goal can be to continue these late-game shifts in policy.

Obama and his team didn’t invent this approach. But if they can put it into action, that would be continuity we can believe in.

If you've had enough of this bullshit, go read "Requiem for a Maverick" by Matt Taibbi, where he refuses to be cowered by the Republican attempts to write a non-embarrasing version of the history of this election, to somehow soften the American people's clear request to NOT BE GOVERNED BY THEM ANYMORE.

The ironic thing is that the destruction of the Republican Party was a two-part process. Their president, George W. Bush, did most of the work by making virtually every mistake possible in his two terms, reducing the mightiest economy on Earth to the status of a beggar-debtor nation like Pakistan or Zambia. This was fucking up on a scale known only to a select few groups in history, your Romanovs, your Habsburgs, maybe the Han Dynasty, which pissed away a golden age of Chinese history by letting eunuchs take over the state. But John McCain and Sarah Palin made their own unique contribution to the disaster by running perhaps the most incompetent presidential campaign in modern times. They compounded a millionfold Bush's legacy of incompetence by soiling both possible Republican ideological strategies going forward: They killed off Bush-style neoconservatism as well as the more traditional fiscal conservatism McCain himself was once known for by trying to fuse both approaches into one gorgeously incoherent ticket. It was like trying to follow the recipes for Texas 10-alarm chili and a three-layer Black Forest chocolate cake in the same pan at the same time. The result — well, just take a bite!

We don't want you. Go tell your stories to your fellow rejectees.