What A Difference A Day Four Years Makes

SHORTER David Brooks: In a remarkable post-Katrina turnaround, Louisiana state officials are now fonts of wisdom, exemplars of preparedness, and paragons of truth!

• You didn't think he could write a Shorter and just leave it at that, did you?

Compare Samuel Langhorn "Sam" Clemens, who once noted how astonished he was, at age 19, to reflect on how much wisdom his father had gained in just three years; note that your modern "conservative" has rejected the notion of linear Time, despite having pretty much skipped all scientific progress (and economic evidence) of the 19th century. The great Jean Piaget observed that by age three children have already rejected the physics of Aristotle, so I suppose it's entirely possible that there's some intuitive wisdom at the heart of the modern "conservative's" ability to treat contradictory evidence as though it never occurred. Then again, to my knowledge, Piaget never compared a child's ability to bullshit with that of the average columnist/political pundit.

• Of course Brooks didn't let George W. Bush off unscathed--this is the difference between being a full-time mouthpiece and having a covert career as one--but he did so in a roundabout fashion which treated Bush's failure as old news, and How the Sadly Misunderstood Republican Party Rebrands as the central question. 2005 was a pretty good year for that sort of thing; it was also his approach to Iraq.

• Connoisseurs of internet idiocy and Lamar Alexander's Jes' Folks impressions will no doubt enjoy the opener from Brooks' September 8, 2005 tree killer:

As a colleague of mine says, every crisis is an opportunity.

The opportunity in that instance being for majority Republicans to remake the modern American urban landscape in their image, specifically by moving the Coloreds into middle-class neighborhoods. (Such is the reality of Compromise that what Brooks' party decided to do instead was to drown what was left of the middle class, so every neighborhood looked the same and the Poor would relax a little, and maybe turn that goddam music down.)

• How interesting, then, that the man-made disasters of financial system meltdown, exponentially-overpriced health care, and environmental enormity are mere opportunities to explain that Government can't fix anything and shouldn't try, although being Government, and under Democratic control (for now), it no doubt will.

• And that the Public, which was so convinced by 2005 that politics required a fundamental change, now clambers for a spot behind Bobby Jindal, and all those other knowledgeable locals who just four months ago were the unreconstructed pimps of offshore drilling. *

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* Though not the only ones, of course.