Like Last Night's Corn-On-The-Cob, This Too Shall Pass.

DAVID Brooks rewrites his blog entry of the day before--did the Times pay for this twice?

When Obama goes to a church infused with James Cone-style liberation theology, when he makes ill-informed comments about working-class voters, when he bowls a 37 for crying out loud, voters are going to wonder if he’s one of them.

So that we note here that the latest in a twelvemonth of bumfucked election pundidiotcy, and the sort of People magazine indicators of electability they espouse in Brooks' "moderate" "Conservative" circles, when they put down the Burke omnibus long enough, has led to David Brooks criticizing another man's athletic ability. Jesus wept.

We might also note that it's emboldened Brooks enough that he's snuck back to the fifth or sixth row of the Republican mob, wherever it is that he needs to stand to make sure those wienie-armed rock tosses of his don't actually hit his own people.

Back in Iowa, Barack Obama promised to be something new — an unconventional leader who would confront unpleasant truths, embrace novel policies and unify the country. If he had knocked Hillary Clinton out in New Hampshire and entered general-election mode early, this enormously thoughtful man would have become that.

But he did not knock her out, and the aura around Obama has changed. Furiously courting Democratic primary voters and apparently exhausted, Obama has emerged as a more conventional politician and a more orthodox liberal.

Wellll...okay. From my perch on the banks of the West Fork of the Mighty White his commercials make him seem a more "orthodox" liberal these days, but I'd suggest that's because the tanking economy has made that a much more comfortable place to operate from. And economic flip-floppery is the most accepted form, so I wouldn't exactly consider that a liability. I just think it's curious that the same people who used to scream about the great levels of diversity in a Republican party that voted en bloc for twenty-five years can't tell the difference between Obama's centrism and liberal "orthodoxy". But maybe that's just me.

So my take (aimai notes Obama acolytes making lemonaide out of Lemon Pledge) is that he might've have knocked Clinton out in January if he'd actually been an "orthodox Liberal", but back then that attitude just got you lectured on how old-timers didn't understand The New Politics. Or not in the way David Brooks did. And had that, or anything else, actually knocked Senator Clinton out of the race last January, whatever it was would now be the subject of Brooks' Obama Is Doomed column today.

I'm almost positive you have more invested in this than I, since I was basically born disappointed, and I can't imagine you'd be checking in here for a pep talk, but here goes: these people have been full of shit all along; today is not different. Obama supporters should have listened, should have been fighting Chris Matthews and Tim Russert instead of Bill and Hillary Clinton, should have been less assured that dummied-up racism was what they were going to face in the general, and a little more concerned with how they were going to answer the charges McCain would make, with an assist from that same Press that so loved Obama a few weeks ago. Finally, at this point, they should have learned that pre-season polls don't mean any more in April than they did in October, and overreaction is worse than no reaction at all. They knew better than the rest of us, and all people who refuse any lesson at all wind up learning the same way.

So, buck up; despite the fact that there are people out there who still say, "These attacks play right into his hands, because it lets him decry his attackers", many of them will be dead come election day, killed by using a fork to extract stuck toast one too many times, and what passes for "reality" will prevail. And it will not be kind to John McCain.