The both-sides-do-it bullshit

From Driftglass:

Once upon a time Mr. David Brooks of The New York Times was Mr. David Brooks of The (now defunct) Weekly Standard where he specialized in the "Liberals are idiots/Conservatives are brilliant" genre. 

In fact, it's no exaggeration that Mr. Brooks' effusive praise of George W. Bush...

Competent Conservatives, Reactionary Liberals

by David Brooks

January 15, 2001

We seem to be entering a period of competent conservatism and reactionary liberalism. George W. Bush has put together a cabinet long on management experience and practical skills. But liberal commentators and activists, their imaginations aflame, seem to be caught in a time warp, back in the days when Norman Lear still had hair...

...and his unremitting support of the Iraq War were what landed him a job-for-life at The New York Times.

Then, when the Bush Administration imploded in exactly the way David Brooks swore it never would, Brooks and every other Bush enabler in the media had a sudden and urgent need to find something else to write about. 

An entirely new genre was called for: one in which Conservative hacks like David Brooks had never actually been wrong, and the cherished tradition of punching Liberals---who had been right about the Right all along---was still honored.

Thus did Both Siderism became the official state religion of the Beltway media. And, with very few exceptions, cranking out twice-weekly columns blaming Both Sides has literally been the only thing David Brooks has done at The New York Times for the past 15 years.

As I have written about ad nauseum, making Both Siderism the official state religion of the Beltway has been a disaster for our democracy. It effectively killed honest mainstream political journalism and made the rise of Republican monsters like McConnell and Trump inevitable. 

However one small salutary side-effect of virtually every fucking David Brooks column being the same as every other David Brooks column is that it makes the odious job of reading David Brooks columns much easier...