Brooks has a plan so cunning you could give it a water bottle & call it Marco

Thanks to commentarian Origami Isopod for passing along a Brooks column that is so Brooksian in its Brookishness I am surprised it hasn’t taken on a Brookish life of its own and taught itself to read the Nature of Man.

His subject of deploration – Ted Cruz’s harsh, unrelenting Evangelical attitudes and rhetoric.

He’s so MEAN, and his language is so SCARY. Brooks simply cannot understand why Evangelical Christians are attracted to this rough beast.

What’s that?

Oh right. As is typical for him, Brooks conflates two things so he can write a column without hlowering himself to dabble in facts.

Ted Cruz is now running strongly among evangelical voters, especially in Iowa. But in his career and public presentation Cruz is a stranger to most of what would generally be considered the Christian virtues: humility, mercy, compassion and grace.

I think this is the composition fallacy? Or perhaps it is just bullshit.

But Cruz’s speeches are marked by what you might call pagan brutalism. There is not a hint of compassion, gentleness and mercy. Instead, his speeches are marked by a long list of enemies, and vows to crush, shred, destroy, bomb them. When he is speaking in a church the contrast between the setting and the emotional tone he sets is jarring.

Yep, bullshit. What Cruz does is spout bog-standard GOP rhetoric, complete with the blood n’ thunderiest sections of the New Testament and Revelation, as interpreted by the type of people who look at Israel on the map, lick their lips, stroke their model of a Russian nuclear missile and murmur “Sooon. Sooooon.”

In other words, Brooks is once again looking at a mound of raw, red meat and asking why all of these flies are buzzing around the place.

BUT! He is a man of ideas and he has come up with a solution.

True, his ideas make a cunning plan that involves a large turnip seem brilliant by comparison, but he does have an idea that would put Marco Rubio (?!??!) in the nominee spot and thereby stop Cruz (and Trump) from destroying the GOP.

But the donor class could do something. Frankly, the country is filled with state legislators who are Republicans, congressmen, senators, local committeemen, a lot of whom are in panic. And so maybe they should do something about it. Maybe they should have a MoveOn.org-type organization and get some rallying, which the other side has already done, and have a counterweight, so they don’t send the party into suicide.

Hmmm. Fascinating. A number of people with a lot of money could as it were, “pack” a bunch of money into some sort of organization type thing designed to get the political outcome they desire. Thank goodness Brooks is around to think of these things.

And what would the outcome be?

And that might involve, not now, but after New Hampshire, winnowing the field, and donors and other people going and saying, we’re just going to pick this guy. We’re going to pick Rubio. I’m sorry, Jeb, you’re not going to be president. Christie, you can be secretary of treasury, but we’re going to get organized here and we’re not going to go quietly into the night.

The Aristocrats!

I’m not surprised Brooks wants cut voters out of the electoral process. Pious hand wringer is a synonym for Po-faced totalitarian goon. But for Rubio? Wow. Such Brooks.