David Brooks Already Bored With January 6 Committee, Demands We Study This Thing In His Butt

The columnist would prefer we not bicker and argue about who killed who.

Yr Wonkette is of the opinion that pundits should have waited until the January 6 hearings started before declaring them a colossal failure. But political pundits have to be like relief pitchers who blow a save: They put it behind them and get up the next day and go back to work as if nothing happened.

On the other hand, if you're David Brooks and you can make a career out of this cycle and never, ever seem to learn a lesson, why wouldn't you? It beats working for a living.

So it was that before what turned out to be a pretty compelling presentation on Thursday night, Brooks had already written a column blasting the Democrats' alleged goals for the hearings, based on political reporting by the New York Times :

Democrats, they reported, are hoping to use the hearings to show midterm voters how thoroughly Republicans are to blame for what happened that day...The committee members are trying to show how much Donald Trump was involved with efforts to overturn the election, so he is forever discredited.

Okay, first thing, which is that at this point we wouldn't necessarily trust Brooks's colleagues on the Times political desk to accurately report baseball scores. The problems with the Grey Lady's political coverage are well-documented and we're not going to rehash them here.

Sorry, boomers, but this is not the Watergate scandal in which we need an investigation to find out who said what to whom in the Oval Office. The horrors of Jan. 6 were out in public.

Us political nerds may mostly know this. (Giuliani:  Italian satellites changed votes with some sort of vote-changing ray! Sidney Powell:  Kraken! Trump:  Everyone shut the fuck up, I can't hear Hannity!) Is the general public familiar with the details, though? Might there be some info that the committee has uncovered that will turn out to be important that no one had heard yet? Like that congressional Republicans spent the days after January 6 asking Trump for pre-emptive pardons before he left office? That was both new and seems like conscious evidence on the Republicans' part of having done something wrong, no?

Anyway, the horrors of September 11 were out in public also, if we recall correctly. There were still investigations to get the details!

We need a committee that will preserve democracy on Jan. 6, 2025, and Jan. 6, 2029. We need a committee to locate the weaknesses in our democratic system and society and find ways to address them.

One glaring weakness might be how easy it is for a criminal charlatan of a reality-TV host to take over David Brooks's favored political party and get himself elected president. Let's start there.

The core problem is that there are millions of Americans who have three convictions: that the election was stolen, that violence is justified in order to rectify it and that the rules and norms that hold our society together don’t matter...I care more about their present and future activities than about their past. Many of them are running for local office to be in a position to disrupt future elections. I’d like the committee to describe who they are, what motivates them and how much power they already have.

This is where we remind you that David Brooks is technically a journalist, and the work of journalists usually involves finding answers to questions. He could even ask his research assistant to help, assuming she's not busy breaking up his marriage .

We need a committee to explore just how close America is to rampant political violence.

Seems like an odd way to tell your readers you fell into a coma in 2015 and just woke up ten minutes before this column was due, but okay! Why does David Brooks think the Justice Department has spent thousands of hours arresting and prosecuting January 6 participants for the last year and a half? Boredom?

We need a committee to explore what political violence might look like in this country.

It might look like Trump fans shooting up Wal-marts full of the nonwhite people he has spent years demonizing. It might look like a Trump fan mailing bombs to prominent Democrats. Heck, it might look like thousands of Trump fans storming the Capitol building in a desperate bid to force legislators to throw out the legitimate results of a national election. Who can say?

Either way, we need a committee that will be focused not on the specific actions of this or that individual but on the broad social conditions that threaten to bring American democracy to its knees.

Sure, why hold people responsible for their illegal actions that nearly got lawmakers killed when you can blame liberals taking kindergarteners to drag shows or whatever. No harm, no foul!

[ New York Times ]

 Do your Amazon shopping through this link, because reasons .