dawkins writes:

Cool! Another Brooks column to be filed under, "What the fuck is this man talking about?"

Unless I'm completely daft, at the end of his column when Brooks refers to "fine young crusaders," he's talking about… Congressional Republicans!

It's close to impossible to believe that this guy can put words such as these to paper without laughing himself off his own chair and/or shitting himself so completely and thoroughly that his fingertips slip off the keys of his keyboard.

Brooks:

More broadly, this Republican majority is beginning to lose the idealism of youth and settle for the spoils of middle age. John Kasich used to rail against corporate welfare. Has that fire burned out entirely?

If this deal goes through, it will be a sign that all those fine young crusaders who campaign as fearless fighters against the ways of Washington are slowly but corrosively turning into the sort of creatures they despise.

Again: "This Republican majority is beginning to lose the idealism of youth and settle for the spoils of middle age."

Clearly, Brooks is a demented madman. While I applaud the New York Times' effort to lift a sick person off the street and give him an opportunity to earn a living, I think it's time to terminate the experiment.

(I mean, how many of those Wesley Willis albums could you listen to, in uncomfortable giggling awe, before the grotesqueness of his lamentable sickness became unbearable?)

Though is Brooks is a little cagier than we initially give him credit for?

He never says that "all those fine young crusaders" actually fought against "the ways of Washington," only that they campaigned against those "ways."

And when he cites Kasich, he admits that the former Congressman never actually did anything about corporate welfare, only that he "used to rail" against it.

And though his use of the term "young" to refer to Congressional Republicans might strike some as a bit odd, he's actually being consistent with the use of that term among the cohort he describes. (One will recall, of course, Clinton-impeacher Henry Hyde, who acknowledged amidst the Monica-blowjob fallout that his own years of adultery, which he conducted after the age of 40, were a "youthful indiscretion.")

Brooks asks: can it really be that "all those fine young crusaders… are turning into the sort of creatures they despise?"

Can it really be that Hyde and DeLay and Armey and all the other idealistic, crusading young scamps are turning into…

…Clintons!!!!???

It's a little cheap to take shots at Brooks in writing rather than in person. I was about to talk to him, I really was. He was the guy I saw on the subway this morning, screaming "Bitch you!!!" and swatting at a swarm of eight-legged vampire bats swirling around his head. I didn't want to interrupt the creative process.