Concern Troll, David Brooks, Is Concerned

If you don't know David Brook's history, if you haven't come across multiple instances of his naked cynicism and unrepentant partisan hackery, you might have felt something approaching shock, or at least the frisson of surreality overcoming your senses as you listened to the final seconds of NPR's All Things Considered "Week in Politics" segment.  The New York Times columnist and what passes for a big brain in conservative circles tossed off a doozy of a false equivalency between George W. Bush's response to the massive loss of life and property caused by Hurricane Katrina and the forcing of some 5% of the healthcare buying public off their not-really-insurance health insurance plans for better and usually cheaper plans off the healthcare exchanges.

"They both have administrative failures, which is Katrina and Obamacare," said Brooks, tossing this line off at the 6:14 mark of the program as though nobody could ever find it controversial.  Yes, even the smart conservatives have trouble remembering all 7 syllables in "The Affordable Care Act."  Also, ZOMG THIS IDIOT COMPARED PEOPLE DYING OVER A PERIOD OF 4 DAYS WHILE BUSH SHRUGGED TO FREELOADERS HAVING TO PAY FOR THEIR OWN HEALTHCARE!!!

So, that happened.

Thing is, this is unremarkable in Brooks' sordid career.  The man's capacity for mendacity is surpassed only by his unearned arrogance.  Taking this cheap and stupid low-road-of-low-roads shot at the president for what it's worth, I can forgive Brooks.  He's a member of a dying party whose best options for the short term are all long term suicide.  So this idiot lashes out.  This guy writes a moderate conservative column in the New York Times.  Nobody cares what he says.  But neither the longtime segment host, Audie Cornish, nor Washington Post resident librul columnist, EJ Dionne, challenged it.  And that, I have a problem with.

It's a phenomenon I'd never before encountered, comparing The Affordable Care Act to the various failings of our last, hopelessly incompetent, belligerently incurious president.  Apparently, this is a real thing conservatives and their dumb brothers in the Tea Party do.  They take something from the messy and complicated rollout of the law, and they amplify the ever-loving shit out of it for political gain.  Like, comparing President Obama's accurate but oversimplified citation of a complicated clause in the ACA (You CAN keep your plan if you like it...if your insurance company wants to keep offering it, and hasn't changed it since 2010) to Bush's terrible lies leading up to invading a sovereign nation for fun and profit and proxy murdering an estimated 190,000 human beings.  Murder and forcing people to get healthcare insurance that won't dump them when they get sick?  Not the same thing.

But nobody expects much out of the Tea Party, they're idiots.  That's not even up for debate.  And Brooks?  Like I said, the man's a liar with a long documented past full of similar obvious lies.  What I want to know is, where the hell is the press?  Where are the Democrats?  Where is the outrage that the very large and very evil misdeeds of the Bush Administration are being compared on even footing with technical burps and misstatements that don't even rise to the level of white lie?  Is there nobody with a national audience looking for answers who might take 5 minutes to call a hail and hearty BULLSHIT when such incredible lies are told by people who, by the way, have been wrong about everything from tax policy to diplomacy to equal rights for all under the law for the past 58 years?

I want my own land 

Take my hand and come with me 

It's not too late for you 

It's not too late for me 

To find my homeland 

Where a man can stand by another man 

Without an ego flying 

With no man lying 

'n' no one dying by an earthly hand

- Captain Beefheart, "Frownland"