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(Photoshop via Doug Ross)

How much of a tool is New York Times columnist David Brooks?

This much: On the PBS NewsHour last night, Brooks admitted that President Obama told him a year ago that he knew that the “shovel-ready project” propaganda he employed to pass the massive porkulus bill was a steaming load of bullcrap.

Brooks’ New York Times colleague Peter Baker reported the newsworthy admission in an upcoming Sunday magazine piece. It’s an admission that received much deserved attention here in the blogosphere this week and that invited much deserved derision from Republican critics of the stimulus boondoggle.

Why didn’t Brooks report Obama’s damning admission sooner? In another serving of steaming bullcrap, he claims it’s because Baker was more skilled at getting Obama to talk on the record. Seems to me the real reason Brooks didn’t report it is because he had his nose so far up his bromance love object’s you-know-what that he didn’t see the scoop dropped right in his lap.

Transcript:

JIM LEHRER: Speaking of President Obama, there is this big piece in your newspaper’s Sunday magazine that’s already been read by everybody, at least anybody who has got an advanced company and who is interested in politics, about President Obama.

What do you think of piece?

…MARK SHIELDS: He didn’t have to do this. What he is doing, a retrospective before the election.

I mean, we have gone from perhaps the least introspective president to the most introspective president. I mean, he sits there and talks about what it means to him and all this. For goodness’ sakes, he’s got a responsibility to his party.

How would you like to be a Democratic member of the House fighting for your life right now, getting hit over the head for having voted for the stimulus bill, and have the president say in The New York Times Sunday magazine, there’s no such thing as a shovel-ready project?

JIM LEHRER: Yes. That was — that’s the piece that’s been — that particular quote has really been drawing the flies — the fleas, has it not?

DAVID BROOKS: Yes. Well, I shouldn’t have confessed this. He said this to me off the record about a year ago. But it hasn’t…

JIM LEHRER: Off the record? So, then you can’t talk about it.

(LAUGHTER)

DAVID BROOKS: Yes, because Peter Baker is a better than I am, because I couldn’t get him to go on the record with that thing.

(LAUGHTER)

JIM LEHRER: He said this to you a year ago?

DAVID BROOKS: It was obvious. I mean, you are trying to build a stimulus package. And when they were trying to build it, believe me, they would have loved to have filled it with infrastructure jobs. But the projects just didn’t exist. They couldn’t do it. They couldn’t find them.

Here’s the video if you have the stomach to watch these yammering chuckleheads make excuses for themselves and for Obama on taxpayer-funded public television:

The Wreckovery aftermath: Entirely, utterly predictable.

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