Now Wait a Minute.

So, this morning Jonah Goldberg wrote that while he didn't expect the US to kill Assange the fact that it wasn't going to kill Assange was evidence of the false view many have of the hydra-headed and all-too-lethal CIA.  Or as one of Goldberg's interlocutors put it

Oh, wait, I get it. Goldberg isn’t actually, seriously, soberly advocating the extrajudicial assassination of a journalist for publishing material in contravention of a direct order from the state. He’s just having fun with the discontinuity between “left-wing accounts of the intelligence community,” which tend to portray spooks as hyper-efficient bloodthirsty killers, and the curious fact of Assange’s continued purchase on life. See! Liberals are stupid, because they think spies are bad, but look—Assange isn’t “a greasy stain on the autobahn already,” so liberals are wrong, spies aren’t bad, therefore liberals are stupid. Q.E.D.

And concludes:

Anyway, this game of Jonah’s is fun, so back to our opening question: Why hasn’t he been punched, hard, in the face yet today? After all, he upsets liberals, and we all know that liberals are violent thugs, right? “The left” routinely justifies the “glorification of violence” and “gangsterism” of “black riot ideology” and wants to kill all white people as badly as Hitler wanted to kill all Jews. Liberals engage in a “symphony of violence” and, as Goldberg astutely points out in his book, are fascists. So how come some angry liberal hasn’t decked him yet today, fascistically? Just asking. We don’t think, by the way, that anyone should physically assault Goldberg. That would be illegal.

Goldberg responds by, as is his wont, getting the whole argument wrong

Sigh. . . .  if he thinks I need to be punched in the face, I invite him to give it a whirl himself. If memory serves, it could lead to a fun few minutes for me. Oh, and he might bother actually characterizing my book correctly. 

The Gawker guy is clearly kidding and kiddingly kids Goldberg in the same vein.  Goldberg is, it seems, upset that he serious point, whatever it might have been, wasn't taken seriously.

Later that same day, someone else takes Goldberg seriously and he complains that he may have been too "glib," which was the Gawker guy's point, but he wasn't serious.

The column, then, must have been too serious to be accused of being glib while being to glib to be accused of being serious, which is to say it ought not to have been written.