You are listening to another no fair remembering stuff, the Tuesday True Crime Edition of the Professional Left Podcast, and available wherever you get your podcasts, and at our website, pro-leftpod.com, where you can also contribute to this podcast.

There's a Patreon button at our website, or you can mail as a letter and or contribution at the Professional

Left podcast, P.O. Box 9133, Springfield, Illinois, 62791. And Brooke's particular genre of fiction.

And it is fiction.

Is that like Camelot, once there was a Republican Party,

which for one brief shining moment was fucking awesome.

This is from David Brooks, December 7, 2017. Quote, the Republican Party I grew up with

admired excellence. A lot of good honorable Republicans used to believe there was a safe

middle ground. You didn't have to tie yourself hip-to-hip with Donald Trump, but you didn't have to go

all the way to the other extreme

and commit political suicide like the dissident Jeff Flake either. Yeah, big radical Jeff Flake.

You could sort of float along in the middle and keep your head down until this whole Trump thing passed. Now it's clear

that middle ground doesn't exist, unquote. And you can clearly see that he wanted to keep his

head down until this whole Trump thing passed. Well, yeah. I mean, the existence of Trump

belies everything David Brooks has ever said or written.

And that's very inconvenient when that's literally all you do for a living.

And in December of 2017, the same time, his revisionism was so flagrant that even the late Mark Shields, who was David Brooks's unfailingly affable

partner on the PBS NewsHour since sometime in the late 1870s, Shields had to slap him down.

Brooks insisted that the previous two administrations had squandered their chances to address

income inequality and instead, quote, the Obama

administration decided to spend their entire administration talking about health insurance markets.

And this is Mark Shields, quote, not to be prickly, but I just point out that Barack Obama confronted

...