TPM - Marshall - "David Brooks, Derp and the Poverty of Trump-Russia Hot Takes"

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/david-brooks-derp-and-the-poverty-of-trump-russia-hot-takes

By JOSH MARSHALL Published JUNE 21, 2017 10:47 AM

This morning I had the chance to read David Brooks column pooh-poohing the Russia probe and the scandal engulfing the Trump administration. There are many things I could say about it. But I’ve resolved to be nicer and less cutting in my writing, or to do the contrary only when it is inextricably tied to explaining and conveying points of substance. Certainly this is a resolution that won’t last long.

Suffice it to say that Brooks framing proposition is both glorious and parodic: that is, that his own ring-side seat on the Whitewater probe gives him a special insight into the politics of scandal, how scandal frenzy can quickly get overblown and how these episodes poison our public life.

It is now plain for basically everyone to see what was fairly clear at the time: that the ‘Whitewater’ scandal was the grand parody of DC scandals. I don’t think Brooks ever had the bile or moral blindness that characterized the true hatchetmen at the Journal oped page – the deep driver of so much of that charade. But even a sideline presence there is something to answer for. (Yes, I’ve already failed.) The Whitewater scandal was truly a scandal about nothing which managed to bag a handful of associates in smallbore white collar crimes unrelated to the Clintons. It’s only final ‘success’ was getting Clinton on his real fatal flow – impulsive and reckless sexual behavior. In that case for an assignation that was years in the future when the investigation kicked off. Even the label given the ‘Whitewater’ scandal captured its essence: a Potemkin scandal inextricably tied to payback and projection over the Watergate scandal of a decade earlier.

This passage shows that Brooks is still captive of the 90s nonsense culture that gave birth to his career and in most respects he has happily transcended.

In retrospect Whitewater seems overblown. And yet it has to be confessed that, at least so far, the Whitewater scandal was far more substantive than the Russia-collusion scandal now gripping Washington.

Brooks’ subsequent suggestion that a probe like the Russia probe might well drive even a “paragon” like Abraham Lincoln to fire a James Comey and “do something that had the whiff of obstruction” is just too insipid and fatuous for words, a hot take told to an idiot version of himself signifying nothing. (I embrace my failure.) Even a Bill Clinton, neither a crook like Trump nor a paragon like Obama, never came close to what Trump has now done in front of eyes with a scandal that was really special prosecutor who typified all the excesses of scandal politics. Even what we currently know about Michael Flynn is a wildly bigger deal than everything uncovered in eight years of the Whitewater probe. Yes, it went on that long.

snip - much more; long, and well worth reading if only to remind ourselves that we should never expect a right winger to really change their stripes. Brooks, once a hack, always a hack.