A day late

"[Scrooge] had been quite familiar with one old ghost, in a white waistcoat, with a monstrous iron safe attached to its ankle, who cried piteously at being unable to assist a wretched woman with an infant...The misery with them all was, clearly, that they sought to interfere, for good, in human affairs and had lost the power for ever."

Probably no one else thought of that bit of Dickens when reading Lisa Miller's interview with David Brooks in New York Magazine.  Brooks has been pontificating for the New York Times longer than anyone, and entire blogs are devoted to pricking the balloon animals of his self-regard, whose theme is "Gimme That Old-Time Republican Religion."  Usually I don't bother with him or his detractors -- read one, read them all -- but sometimes it's just...Look, if he teaches a course at Yale in Burke, Niebuhr and himself, serves you right for enrolling.  If he wants to be the last NeverTrumper standing in the rubble of "his" party (which it hasn't been since Goldwater), give the man a tattered ensign to wave.  But when he rubs his chin ruminatively and opines, "Maybe racial injustice is at the core of everything.  I've had that thought," I plug my ears so I can't hear myself screaming, "Where the Emmett Till have you been for the last fifty years?  Maybe?"  And what does the old ghost in the white waistcoat intend doing about it?  Why didn't he have this epiphany during the eight years when Barack Obama was trying to do something about it?  Now that racism is official policy again, it's time to whisper "No"?

Congratulations on having "that thought."  Please resume talking to the other ghosts.