Every time you think David Brooks is finally learning that the Dark Side of his own party is destroying the country, he returns to the Dark Side to give it a hand. Today’s fact-free column proves Brooks probably can’t escape his destiny.

Like all self-admiring "centrists," Brooks’ thesis is that the crazies in each party destroy the center of each party and thus eventually lead their respective parties into oblivion. Given what the Republican crazies have done to their party, it’s an arguable thesis. But the examples Brooks cites for how the dreaded liberals are wrecking the Democratic Party seem a bit disingeuous.

Brooks thinks the stimulus was bad because it funded the liberal Democrats’ spending wish list and just created deficits. Uh, yeah, and that’s what a fiscal stimulus does: it applies deficit spending to stimulate demand, spending money on lots of stuff that keeps people working doing things that need doing that aren’t otherwise getting done. This will destroy the Democratic Party?

What should be obvious to everyone but Larry Summers is that the stimulus bill would have been even better if it had included even more deficit spending on things to preserve jobs and expand safety nets for those who are being devastated by this near-depression and its anticipated "job-less recovery."

For example, we should spend much more to keep states from laying off teachers and firemen and health-care workers and so on — you know, the kinds of spending liberals want to do. Helping the country like that also helps Democrats.

Brooks argues the stimulus could have been better focused but for the liberals’ wish lists, but somehow he can’t recall that it was the centrist Republicans and the "brave Blue Dogs" he pets who insisted that we direct stimulus away from actual stimulus spending, away from helping states avoid layoffs, to giving tax breaks to people who didn’t need them.

But what tells me Brooks may never emerge from the Dark Side is his description of the polls showing somewhat lower support for Obama’s handling of various reform policies. There is zero evidence that the public doesn’t want to accomplish Obama’s "liberal" goals. None. But it is reasonable to wonder whether the constant lying and scare tactics from Brooks’ Party’s leadership (and other crazies), facilitated by a complicit media, are responsible for those declining poll numbers.

What does any of this have to do with "liberal" ideas? Is he really serious that Nancy Pelosi’s polls are down because she got SCHIP health care for 4 million more children, or might it have something to do with the demonizing by Brooks’ crazy buddies who claimed this proved she was a socialist?

Earth to Brooks: it’s not liberals who are destroying any public support for sensible reforms in health care, the economy, energy, or anything else. It’s the same crazies in the Republican Party, and the selfish Blue Dogs who sit in the Party’s laps, who are still destroying the country — anyone seen California lately? — no matter which party is nominally in power.

If David Brooks wants to stop the crazies from destroying the country, he needs to stop carrying their water. Otherwise, he’s just one of them.

More:
One of Brook’s courageous Blue Dogs, Mike Ross, as viewed by his local newpaper.

Earlofhuntingdon has the gory details.

One more thing, David: ask someone Dean Baker to explain the difference between average tax rates and marginal tax rates. No one will be paying "more than 55 percent of earnings" in taxes.