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David Brooks returns to his Rovian reversals this morning. He disdains the Democrats for the following:

1. Not acting with dispatch. That has nothing to do with House Republicans unanimously voting No on Obama’s stimulus package, a vote held within ten days of Obama taking the oath of office, a vote taken after he’d spent days trying to persuade Republicans to be public servants rather than party ideologues.

2. Not acting with deliberation. (But see, item 1, not acting with dispatch.) The bill also contains too much money for "old arrangements", and not enough for new ones. (See also, pre-compromise and Republican obstructionism.)

3. Unleashing “a tidal wave” of money on state governments. Presumably, that’s harder to handle than the sink hole of deficits unleashed on state governments by Bush’s economy, by GOP-mandated tax cuts, and by Bush’s boldly mandating federally-inspired goals while allocating no money to meet them. The line for governors who don’t want more federal money starts on the right.

4. Creating a “muddle” from the foregoing, which assures us of political confrontation. Mr. Brooks proves that he slept through his Philosophy 101 lectures on the difference between concurrence and causation. The unanimous No vote by House Republicans was only a prelude. Mr. Obama faces Republican obstructionism regardless of his initiatives (except for those to the right of Dick Cheney, if there is such a place).

5. Creating huge deficits. Not that Mr. Brooks objected when Mr. Bush did this during a moderately well-performing economy, unlike the depression he bequeaths us. He also admired his Make War, Not Tax Payments sloganeering, and Mr. Cheney’s purportedly Reagan-inspired quip that “deficits don’t matter”.

6. Not properly planning their new spending. Even a blind pig finds an acorn occasionally. All is not lost. Mr. Brooks is relieved to observe that,

Wise heads are now trying to restore structure and safeguards to the enterprise.

Mr. Brooks implies that the former are Republicans and the latter Democrats, which proves that all the mirrors he looks into he must have retrieved from the razed fun house. Mr. Brooks ends with a passage he could have written any time in the last eight years, but which he dredges up for use against a president who has been in office ten days:

This recession is scary and complicated. It’s insane to try to tackle it and dozens of other complicated problems, all in one piece of legislation. Leadership involves prioritizing. Those who try to do everything at once will end up with a sprawling, lobbyist-driven mess that does nothing well.

When the New York Times finally fired Bill Kristol, my fervent hope was that David Brooks would be the next to go. I’m still hoping.