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| White mochi with macha filling, via Uncut Recipes. |
So Jordan was wondering over in the comments how David Brooks might have reacted to the Clinton impeachment 20 years ago, and I found something kind of—unsurprising might be the right word, from David Nyhan writing for the Boston Globe in January 1999, who watched a Brooks appearance on PBS looking back at the failure of the Senate trial, and, spoiler, no, he didn't talk about how Gingrich's House ought to have been working on infrastructure bills instead:
"This is a Great Lost Cause," he enthused of the Republican drive to snuff out the Clinton presidency. "We fought for truth, for justice," he said. That notion was novel to me. This whole thing has looked like a down-and-dirty political ambush from the word go, to me and to most Americans. I could never buy the William Bennett Moral Crusade; I always suspected that was a book-tour con.
But Brooks found what he gamely phrased "a kernel of romance" for Republicans in this yearlong dive into the cesspool of semen-stained dresses, cigars in the wrong places, sneaky tapes of a ditzy young intern by a repulsive Republican operative (can anyone defend the taxpayers still paying $90,000 a year to Linda Tripp for her no-show Pentagon job?), and the greasy pawing-over of tapes, transcripts, appointment logs, Secret Service records, and other detritus of the 60,000-page House impeachment probe.
Brooks looked ahead to the Republican National Convention of 2000 and through the mist of the future, saw Henry Hyde, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, being summoned to the podium to accept the plaudits of a grateful party, with the crowd roaring for Hyde and his fellow impeachers: "They stood for principles against the polls."
It strikes me that there's more to this than simple hypocrisy, a simple double standard for Republicans vs. Democrats; or maybe I should say it's a motivated double standard.
