Here's Young Ezra moderating a panel at yet another one of Pete Peterson's "fiscal summits."

This is what drives me crazy about the media today. Ezra Klein, who made his bones as a liberal blogger, scales the heights of establishment to helm the Washington Post's Wonkblog. Television soon follows and even the hint of having his own show. And with that elevation of visibility, so too, goes Klein's need to represent the liberal point of view, falling backwards into some weird Broderism in his column. He, after all, anointed Ayn Rand devotee Paul Ryan a "serious" budget person.

I don't think Ryan is a charlatan or a flim-flam artist. More to the point, I think he's playing an important role, and one I'm happy to try and help him play: The worlds of liberals and conservatives are increasingly closed loops. Very few politicians from one side are willing to seriously engage with the other side, particularly on substance. Substance is scary. Substance is where you can be made to look bad. And substance has occasionally made Ryan look bad. But the willingness to engage has made him look good. It's given some people the information they need to decide him a charlatan, and others the information they need to decide him a bright spot. It's also given Ryan a much deeper understanding of liberal ideas than most conservative politicians have.

And therein lies the problem. Ryan doesn't have a deep understanding of anything. His entire world view is filtered through a terribly written and economically ridiculous novel by a sociopathic hypocrite. It is incumbent upon journalists to make this truth known -- especially the token liberal columnist for the paper of record in the nation's capitol. By not doing so, Klein validates this false equivalency: that conservative and liberal ideas are of equal value.

Don't look now, but Klein's done it again. This time, his "target" is David Brooks, a columnist who exists solely to be mocked for his omnipresent wrongness, as my colleague Driftglass demonstrates weekly. Ezra makes a point that he disagrees with Brooks, but then simply gives him more column inches to back off on some of more ridiculous points without acknowledging that Brooks simply doesn't know what he's writing about.

EK: On that point, one theme in your column, and in a lot of columns these days, is this idea that the president should, on the one hand, be putting forward centrist policies, and on the other hand, that if he’s putting forward policies that the Republican Party won’t agree to, those policies don’t count, as they’re nothing more than political ploys. But while I agree that some level of political realism should enter into any White House’s calculations, it seems a bit dangerous and strange to say the boundaries of the discussion should be set by the agenda that lost the last election.

DB: In my ideal world, the Obama administration would do something Clintonesque: They’d govern from the center; they’d have a budget policy that looked a lot more like what Robert Rubin would describe, and if the Republicans rejected that, moderates like me would say that’s awful, the White House really did come out with a centrist plan.

EK: But I’ve read Robert Rubin’s tax plan. He wants $1.8 trillion in new revenues. The White House, these days, is down to $1.2 trillion. I’m with Rubin on this one, but given our two political parties, the White House’s offer seems more centrist. And you see this a lot. People say the White House should do something centrist like Simpson-Bowles, even though their plan has less in tax hikes and less in defense cuts. So it often seems like a no-win for them.

DB: My first reaction is I’m not a huge fan of Simpson-Bowles anymore; I used to be. Among others, you persuaded me the tax reform scheme in theirs is not the best. Simpson-Bowles just doesn’t do enough on entitlements. For sensible reasons, they took health care more or less off the table. I don’t know where Rubin is right now. I held him up as an exemplar of Democratic centrism, but if he had a big tax increase and entitlement reform, I’d be for that.

There are times when I think the White House offered Republicans plans they were crazy not to take. I wrote that in 2011. And I hope Republicans look back on that as a gigantic missed opportunity. So I agree with you they shouldn’t be given veto power over the debate, but I still think that if you look at what moderates want the administration to do, they have not gone far enough.

Did you catch all of that? How many times did Brooks claim ignorance of facts, backtrack and hold up what he suspects of centrism absent any data?

This is not a serious person. He deserves no such attention in national debate. His opinions are based on what he feels like writing, not on facts.

And instead of pointing this out, Klein simply validates his existence in the punditry world.

Wrong again, David Brooks!

I'm thinking about starting a weekly post on the stupid writing of David Brooks. We talk about how Conservatives love rewriting history, but I think Brooks even tops that with his latest screed, titled "A Second G.O.P.".

Basically, he misses the moderate Republican wing of the G.O.P. and longs for their return:

It’s probably futile to try to change current Republicans. It’s smarter to build a new wing of the Republican Party, one that can compete in the Northeast, the mid-Atlantic states, in the upper Midwest and along the West Coast. It’s smarter to build a new division that is different the way the Westin is different than the Sheraton. The second G.O.P. wouldn’t be based on the Encroachment Story. It would be based on the idea that America is being hit simultaneously by two crises, which you might call the Mancur Olson crisis and the Charles Murray crisis.

Olson argued that nations decline because their aging institutions get bloated and sclerotic and retard national dynamism. Murray argues that America is coming apart, dividing into two nations — one with high education levels, stable families and good opportunities and the other with low education levels, unstable families and bad opportunities.

The second G.O.P. would tackle both problems at once. It would be filled with people who recoiled at President Obama’s second Inaugural Address because of its excessive faith in centralized power, but who don’t share the absolute antigovernment story of the current G.O.P. Would a coastal and Midwestern G.O.P. sit easily with the Southern and Western one? No, but majority parties are usually coalitions of the incompatible. This is really the only chance Republicans have. The question is: Who’s going to build a second G.O.P.?

He promote the theories of the "Bell Curve's" insane Charles Murray, who he has fawned over for a long time. But aside from that, isn't Brooks missing something that is kind of important?

His conservative allies purged the G.O.P. of any moderates that were still lingering in the party during the 2010 House bloodletting by the Tea Party. They're gone, David, and you know it. And the anti-government message is never going away from the GOP.

It appears there's a new reality show taking form: "Who Will Write The Stupidest F*&king Op-Ed of the Year?" Every week, conservative columnists compete to capture the judges' glee and the liberals' ire.

I told Ryan Seacrest today that Brooks was a shoo-in to win.

David Brooks is everything that's wrong inside the Beltway. And yet, he is reliably on one or the other of the Sunday shows every damn week. In just one minute of soundbyte, Brooks was so full of wrong and stupidity that it's hard not to pick it apart and just respond:

First, let’s just say, what’s happening in Washington right now is pathetic. When you think about what the Revolutionary generation did, what the Civil War generation did, what the WWII generation did, we’re asking not to bankrupt our children and we’ve got a shambolic, dysfunctional process.I think most of the blame still has to go to the Republicans.

How very generous of you, David. Let's be honest, ALL of the blame belongs to the Republicans. The fiscal "cliff" was created because the Republicans refused to vote on deficit reduction earlier and the "crisis" was created by bozos like David Brooks in the media. In a fragile economic recovery, we don't need to focus on the damn deficit. We can't cut spending. That will contract the economy and EVERY. SINGLE. ONE. OF. THESE. CONSERVATIVES. KNOWS. THAT. and want the economy to struggle more so that they can say, "See, those leftist liberal policies hurt America!"

They’ve had a brain freeze since the election.

Since the election? Be honest. They haven't employed their brains since the Eisenhower era.

They have no strategy. They don’t know what they want and they haven’t decided what they want.

C'mon, Bobo. You know what they want. They haven't hidden it. They want Obama to fail as a president. EVERYTHING they do is for that end. Not for the American people. Not for the good of the country. Everything is a political calculus to hurt the Democratic Party and President.

But if I had to fault President Obama...

Do you have to? Why?

... I would say sometimes he governs like a visitor from a morally superior civilization.

They're called the Democratic Party. You can call them by their correct name.

He comes in here and he will not….he’ll talk to a Boehner, but he won’t with the other Republicans.

Besides being factually incorrect--not that that has ever stopped David Brooks--John Boehner is the Speaker of the House and Majority Leader. Nothing gets voted on that he doesn't sanction. Doesn't it make sense to talk to head guy? Or is Obama expected to show his good faith (and Brooks-like misunderstanding of how government runs) by talking to every single Republican in Congress? How is that effective?

He hasn’t built the trust.

On the contrary, I think that the Republicans trust that if they stall and posture for as long as possible, President Obama will concede just about everything to get a deal done. That's the only way they have any negotiating ground or leverage and four years of dealmaking precedent to rely on.

Boehner actually made a pretty serious concession, $800 billion in tax revenues, probably willing to go up on rates, but the trust wasn’t there to get that done.

Boehner's own party didn't trust him to get that deal done. That didn't get scuttled by Obama, that was scuttled by the extreme fringe of the ....wait for it....REPUBLICANS. Nice revisionism, Bobo.

If the President wants to get stuff done in the next four years, it’s gotta be a lot more than making the intellectual concessions. It’s got to get to the place where Republicans say, ‘okay, we’ll take a risk, this guy won’t screw us.’

Holy FSM, the Republicans are all about screwing. It's just that they want to be the ones clearly screwing the President, not vice versa. There's been no reason for the President to trust the Republicans, but this intellectual heavyweight of conservative thought can't or won't admit it.

Again, Brooks is everything wrong inside the Beltway.

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Earlier this week, Marco Rubio and Paul Ryan were both feted at the Jack Kemp Foundation, and at the banquet, both attempted to distance themselves from the Republican Party's favorite talking point of 2012 -- that the problem with this America is that the freeloading, moocher "takers" outnumber the noble, job-creating "makers."

Bobo, apparently really desperate to find any glimmer of hope these days, highlighted this passage from Rubio's speech.

As he was telling this story, Rubio motioned to some of the service staff at the Kemp dinner. They stopped to listen to him. “It all starts with our people,” Rubio continued. “In the kitchens of our hotels. In the landscaping crews that work in our neighborhoods. In the late-night janitorial shifts that clean our offices. There you will find the dreams America was built on. There you will find the promise of tomorrow. Their journey is our nation’s destiny. And if they can give their children what our parents gave us, the 21st-century America will be the single greatest nation that man has ever known.”

People at the dinner say that there was a hushed silence for a second as Rubio concluded with this refrain. Then a roaring ovation swelled and filled the room.

The Republican Party has a long way to go before it revives itself as a majority party. But that speech signifies a moment in that revival. And I would say the last month has marked a moment.

Yes, Rubio's failure to label the hotel wait staff a bunch of parasites in their presence is the new "Tear Down This Wall" speech.

But here's the funny part.

The wait staff at the Mayflower Renaissance Hotel are union members. And Marco Rubio is one of the most anti-labor lawmakers in Congress.

He's said unions are un-American, sponsored the RAISE Act, which was an assault on collective bargaining and he's received a perfect 100%/A+ score from one of the leading union-busting organizations on the right.

The reality is, Rubio's wants to make it harder for these workers to give their children a better future. He and his party offer them absolutely nothing. Giving them a pat on the head and not calling them leeches hardly marks a new day for the GOP, no matter what Bobo says.

One of the few memes about Mitt Romney that got traction over his six years of running for president is one of flip-flopper. It has hurt his credibility and favorability to be on literally every side of every issue at one point or another.

So what are partisan hacks like David Brooks and David Gregory to do? Float an idea out there that flip-flopping could actually be a good thing in a president:

The bottom line is this: If Obama wins, we’ll probably get small-bore stasis; if Romney wins, we’re more likely to get bipartisan reform. Romney is more of a flexible flip-flopper than Obama. He has more influence over the most intransigent element in the Washington equation House Republicans. He’s more likely to get big stuff done.

What a nakedly obvious and pathetic ploy to sell a weak and failing candidate. And of course, there's no conservative meme that David Gregory is unwilling to echo out as a serious Beltway notion.

For what it's worth, there's no factual precedent behind the notion that Romney has worked in a more bipartisan fashion. Do we really think that the same man who had his vetoes over-ridden nine out of ten times in Massachusetts is the guy who is going to get big stuff done? Do either point out that Obama has offered up bills that were by and large created and promoted by conservative think tanks only to find reflexive partisan obstructionism?

Of course not. That would be counter to the cognitive dissonance necessary to be the kind of partisan hack that Brooks and Gregory so obviously desire to be.

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Sunday's Meet the Press was supposed to be a "serious" discussion about race in the context of the Trayvon Martin case. What it felt like to me was David Gregory trying to flog the idea that President Obama hasn't led us into some "meaningful" national discussion about race while at the same time trying to minimize the impact race had on how the Trayvon Martin case has been handled.

Let's begin with David Brooks' statement at the very beginning of this particular segment, where he opines that racism is a "natural sin"; that is, it's inherent in all of us, and not learned. Without climbing deep down into the weeds about whether it is racism or tribalism that's natural, I think we can safely say that the hateful parts of racist behavior are learned and reinforced rather than genetic. It is one thing to gravitate toward others who look the same and another to shoot them. Or believe one is justified in shooting them, so making a statement like:

I would say it means that racism isn't a disease, it's a natural sin that we're born into. And therefore, we have to fight it through civilization and through artifice. And by the way, it's one of the reasons, when you have somebody with the gun in a neighborhood, it has to be someone trained--

See, I think it's a disease. And even if it is a natural inclination, what makes Brooks think training would somehow erase a person's racist inclinations? I think that even if it is natural, it is a disease and one that has been incubated and gone viral in this country, unleashed in 2008 with the full blessing of the right-wing politicians in our country.

Speaking of right-wing politicians, let's shift right on over to Haley Barbour, who says Newt Gingrich's comments are wrong but oh, so right.

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In Catholic masses all over this country, priests are injecting politics into their sermons, condemning the Obama administration for the new Health and Human Services regulations that religious institutions must offer contraceptive benefits to its members. It doesn't require members to violate their personal beliefs by taking advantage of the benefit, mind you. But this new regulation acknowledges that there are some who may work in a Catholic hospital who may not have the same stricture against contraceptives and want it to be part of their health services. But that's perhaps a too nuanced view:

The Catholic Church reacted strongly Friday to a White House defense of new rules that will force many religious employers to provide contraception to their workers in government-mandated health insurance plans.

"The White House information about this is a combination of misleading and wrong," said Anthony Picarello, general counsel of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. He said the bishops would "pursue every legal mandate available to them to bring an end to this mandate. That means legislation, litigation and public advocacy. All options are on the table."

The new regulations were announced last month by the Department of Health and Human Services as part of an effort to guarantee that women receive free "preventive" healthcare services, including cervical cancer screening, breast pumps — and contraception. They require employers to include those services in their employee health insurance plans by August.

Religious institutions can qualify for an exemption if the services violate their beliefs, but not if they employ large numbers of people who do not share those beliefs. [..]

In a blog post Wednesday, the White House responded that the new rules won't force anyone to buy contraceptives. Cecilia Muñoz, director of the Domestic Policy Council, wrote: "Over half of Americans already live in the 28 states that require insurance companies [to] cover contraception." These include such large states as California and New York, she said.

The Catholic bishops shot back Friday, saying it was misleading to say that no one would be forced to "buy" contraceptives, because everyone who contributes to an insurance plan will be paying a portion of the subsidy that provides for free contraception.

Alex Castellanos and David Brooks are only too happy to pick up the bishops' mantle and further the meme that this is a solid shot across the bow of religious liberty in Obama's war on religion. How nice of them to legitimize Newt Gingrich that way. Rachel Maddow and Xavier Becerra try gamely to point out that refusing contraceptive benefits in the twenty first century is beyond ridiculous, but of course, host David Gregory gives Alex Castellanos the last word.

Out of curiosity, are the bishops equally against ED drugs like Viagra? Why do I hear no denouncing of working against "God's plan" there? The reality is that despite the church's teachings, as much as 98 percent of Catholics admit to using contraception. Would that the church elders focus their efforts on dealing honestly with issues that are in line with the priorities of their members: poverty and social justice, labor unions, climate change and dealing honestly and ethically with their own sex scandals rather than plunge into politicking within homilies on Bizarro World accusations of violations of religious freedom.

Worth reading: Bishop should not insert politics into Mass

In Friday's New York Times, Bobo writes yet another column praising Santorum -- and lets something slip.

I’m to Rick Santorum’s left on most social issues, like same-sex marriage and abortion. I’m also put off by his Manichaean political rhetoric. He seems to imagine America’s problems can best be described as the result of a culture war between the God-fearing conservatives and the narcissistic liberals.

Like most Americans, including most evangelicals under 40, I find this culture war language absurd. If conservative ideas were that much more virtuous than liberal ideas, then the conservative parts of the country would have fewer social pathologies than the liberal parts of the country. They don’t.

That's true, but it's actually worse than that. You see, those "family values" Red States have higher rates of divorce and teen pregnancy than the godless, librul Blue States.

But it's not just conservative ideas with respect to morality that have failed. The most conservative states in the country are also the poorest.

So when will Bobo admit that the economic policies he's been cheering on for the past 20 years have failed?

I won't hold my breath.

David Brooks is one of the most dishonest conservative columnists going. He's not an idiot, but he can take events that have occurred and craft them into complete nonsense. That does take real talent. Only it's a despicable one. In his latest column in the NY Times, he writes one of the most perfidious pieces of excrement imaginable.

Charles Pierce has an excellent debunking of Brooks' latest travesty in Esquire: David Brooks Does Not Get the Moral Norm of Being Broke

He notices that poor people are having fewer babies, which makes him sad. But, things are looking up! People have stopped using their "bank-issued" credit cards as much. (These would be the cards they used so as to support the overstuffed suburban lifestyle that David Brooks so celebrated in his earlier, funnier work.) This means, to Brooks, "Quietly but decisively, Americans are trying to restore the moral norms that undergird our economic system."

Jesus H. Christ in a fking Volvo, no, it doesn't. It means people are broke. People are broke because the end product of 30 years of economic theorizing and political action that you supported has resulted in a shattered middle-class. People are broke because the Wall Street casino that your politics created and celebrated and enabled finally broke the entire country and took the rest of us down with it. People are broke because you and the rest of your "conservative" pals latched onto a crackpot scheme called supply-side economics, married it to a deregulatory frenzy and free trade, and then pitched it to the Bobos as economic liberty. You got rich. You got important. Now people are not using their credit cards because they can't afford to buy the overpriced, Chinese-made crap that you once proposed as the new staple of American society. That is not a conscious mass moral choice. You've got to be on mushrooms to believe that.
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"Second, Americans are trying to re-establish the link between effort and reward. This was the link that was severed on Wall Street, where so many made so much for work that served no productive purpose. This was the link that was frayed by the bailouts, when people who broke the rules still got rewarded."

Oh, really? What tipped you off, Sherlock? Got two sources for that insight? Have no fear, though. Brooks has lingered as long as he cares to in the general vicinity of the fact that the people his politics enabled and celebrated were grievously amoral in almost everything they did for a decade. He's got workers to bash.

"The auto bailouts mostly worked, but they are unpopular even in the Midwestern states that directly benefited because those who failed in the market still got the gold. Public sector unions are unpopular because of the perception that benefit packages are out of balance."

The prosecution would like an offer of proof on that first sentence, Your Honor. As to the second, and the ironclad "perception" on which it depends, I guess Brooks was watching the Amanda Knox trial and missed all those people standing around on the lawn in Madison last winter, and he's still missing all those folks in Ohio who are kicking John Kasich's nuts through the roof of his mouth.

Ah, but the real brilliance is yet to come.

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Conservative columnist David Brooks of the NY Times finally admitted what most of America already knows.

Yes, I’m a sap.

He tries to turn that statement around in his idiotic op-ed by saying that he always truly believed Obama would do great things, but because of his deficit reduction speech, he's now disillusioned. Does the NY Times really believe the words he's putting down on paper? If they do and he does then I have an old crumbling bridge to sell them.

Yes, I’m a sap. I believed Obama when he said he wanted to move beyond the stale ideological debates that have paralyzed this country. I always believe that Obama is on the verge of breaking out of the conventional categories and embracing one of the many bipartisan reform packages that are floating around.

But remember, I’m a sap. The White House has clearly decided that in a town of intransigent Republicans and mean ideologues, it has to be mean and intransigent too. The president was stung by the liberal charge that he was outmaneuvered during the debt-ceiling fight. So the White House has moved away from the Reasonable Man approach or the centrist Clinton approach.

David, David, David. Your party has been taken over by ideologues that pray to Ayn Rand before they go to bed at night. Don't you even remember your own columns? You admitted that the GOP has changed into Beltway Bandits, Big Government Blowhards, Show Horses and Permanent Campaigners. In other words, a bunch of political lunatics. And you're disillusioned with the one person that tried to negotiate with these people?