Oh God

Jonah Goldberg has a new book coming out next month. In it, allegedly, he dismantles Liberalism with his own special brand logic chopping, lies, and bullshit:

According to Jonah Goldberg, if the greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist, the greatest trick liberals ever pulled was convincing themselves that they’re not ideological.

Today, “objective” journalists, academics and “moderate” politicians peddle some of the most radical arguments by hiding them in homespun aphorisms.  Barack Obama casts himself as a disciple of reason and sticks to one refrain above all others: he’s a pragmatist, opposed to the ideology and dogma of the right, solely concerned with “what works.” And today’s liberals follow his lead, spouting countless clichés such as:

 

• One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter: Sure, if the other man is an idiot. Was Martin Luther King Jr. a terrorist? Was Bin Laden a freedom fighter?
• Violence never solves anything: Really? It solved our problems with the British empire and ended slavery.
• Better ten guilty men go free than one innocent man suffer: So you won’t mind if those ten guilty men move next door to you?
• Diversity is strength: Cool.The NBA should have a quota for midgets and one-legged point guards!
• We need complete separation of church and state: In other words all expressions of faith should be barred from politics …except when they support liberal programs.
  

With humor and passion, Goldberg dismantles these and many other Trojan Horses that liberals use to cheat in the war of ideas. He shows that the grand Progressive tradition of denying an ideological agenda while pursuing it vigorously under the false-flag of reasonableness is alive and well.  And he reveals how this dangerous game may lead us further down the path of self-destruction.

  Goldberg's career built as it is on nepotism, ignorance, and willingness to lie shamelessly in the service of earning a buck is the reason, or one of the reasons, this country doesn't have nice things.

Jonah Goldberg Still Dumb

So the other day Jonah Goldberg made with the wisecracks about kids and their stupidity because they rely on Wikipedia. He argued that with Wikipedia down for the SOPA/PIPA disaster that

[t]omorrow you should go up to a 20-something and tell them things like “the fern is the world’s most popular carnivorous plant” and “Henry VIII invented the internal combustion engine, but kept it secret to protect the environment” and they will have no choice but to believe you as they will have no idea how to use, never mind find, a “reference book.”

Those kids with their stupid stupidity. Well guess what? Today he admitted that.

the term is “shot caller” as in “he who calls the shots.” I’ve always heard “shock caller” when watching such shows as Sons of Anarchy. The term made vague sense to me in that it seems like the “shock collars” were the folks who took care of things on the inside of prison when it was time to pull some the leash on someone or some such. Before I wrote that last night I even googled “gang” and “shock collar.” There were enough results that I figured I could move on. But this morning, after being corrected by readers, I went and re-checked. I was wrong.

Some people lack all self-consciousness of their own tendency toward projection.

Lawlessness And Disorder Conservatives

In a recent speech, Joe Biden made the point that as the number of police went down, because of the collapsed economy, crimes went up, and he used this fact, for fact it seems to be, to support the jobs bill, which the Republicans refused to debate and Conservatives excoriated,  because it would have kept many more cops on the beat.  Whether or not the correlations between fewer cops and more crime is evidence of causation is, it seems to me, open to debate. But surely the notion that an increased police presence and its ability, which is to say reduced civil liberties protection via Constitutional originalism, to deal with crimes large and small has been a key bullet in the arsenal of Right's creation of the security/police state. Biden's use of their argument has enraged the Right and, because argument making is hard, they take to burbling nonsense, which is too say Jonah Goldberg is still dumb:

 What I find amazing about this, is that Biden had the numbers [of increased rapes and murders] ready. That means this is no gaffe, but this is a staff-prepared talking point. Unless of course you think Joe Biden just happened to have the crimes stats for Flint at his fingertips for totally unrelated reasons.

 Why yes, it is shocking and laughable that when explaining the content of a jobs bill that has significant funding for police, fire, and other municipal workers, that Biden would make a speech pointing out the benefits society accrues from the police, fire, and other municipal services.

Small wonder the world sucks.

Jonah Goldberg Still Dumb and Wrong

Jonah Goldberg writes that

[i]t’s already a cliché among liberals to describe [Perry] as the sort of cartoonish, ignorant cowboy they thought George W. Bush was (though to date, nobody feels the need to apologize to Bush for misinterpreting him).

We watched:



Or this



Or this



And so forth

Jonah Goldberg Still Wrong

He writes an impassioned screed about how no one is calling out the characterization of the Tea Party and Republicans more generally as terrorists and hostage takers is evidence of liberal bias. TPM, which is a biased liberal media outlet, publishes a long piece making the very point that lots of people, who complained re Giffords, are using wholly "uncivil" discourse.

Jonah Goldberg: Still Dumb

There is an old phrase: death before dishonor. It means all manner of things specifically but in general it means that to live because you blotted your copybook you'd be better off dead. Or, more specifically, better, for example, to be killed by the Nazis than to live by collaboration. Recently it has become impossible to ignore the general cupidity and criminality of Rupert Murdoch's media empire. Many who work for his media empire violate laws, suborn politicians, and generally lie like there is no tomorrow. One newspaper chose death before dishonor and Goldberg, who is reliably dumb, casts a puzzled eye at anyone who would rather do something else than work for the devil. Dolt.

Jonah Goldberg: Dumb and Vicous Or

a modern Conservative. Not surprisingly, when confronting the costs of the war on drugs and the excess rate of incarceration, Goldberg decides that the most appealing solution is to "bring back the lash." What is with these people? It's bad enough that they want to repeal the whole of the 20th century's humanizing legislation in order to bring back the 19th century, now they want to repeal the Enlightenment in order to bring back the Medieval period. What's next? Try and repeal evolution in order to bring back Neanderthals?

Jonah Goldberg: Still Dumb

Jonah Goldberg complains that Obama was too quick to tell the world of Osama's death because by so doing he ruined the "actionable" intelligence. He compares the information that the Navy Seals gathered to a stolen NFL playbook and suggests that by admitting to Osama's death Obama alerted our opponents to the fact that we have the playbook. The analogy holds true only if we add that Green Bay stole the Jets' playbook by flying into Rex Ryan's back yard and shooting him in the head in front of family and associates and then dumping the body in the sea.

I mean really, does Goldberg actually think that Osama's associates, on hearing that he had been assassinated, didn't know that whatever information Osama had on any pending or other operations was compromised? I understand, as of course, that Goldberg and the rest of the Conservative punditocracy cannot allow Obama even so much as a smidgen of credit for Osama's murder but still this is the weakest of weak and lamest of lame attempts. It is, in other words, a nearly perfect encapsulation of Jonah Goldberg's continuing argument against nepotism.

Jonah Goldberg Asks Another Question

Jonah Goldberg wants to know why, if Conservatives are right about everything, Liberal ideas and ideals are spread. He makes a variety of nonsensical attempts at answering the question: migration, Conservatives can't indoctrinate their kiddie winks, etc. The question is easy to answer: Conservatives are mostly wrong about the best way to organized humanity in a social situation and Social Conservatives are small-minded bigots, whose desperate lies about the dangers of full equality have, time and again, been shown to be small-minded bigotry.

When Birds of a Feather Flocking Together Means Considerable Less Than Jonah Goldberg Thinks It Does

Jonah Goldberg likes to point out that important Progressives thought Eugenics was important.  Recently, he repeated this dodge as it relates to J. M. Keynes and others. Here's a fact, belief in Eugenics as the way forward cut across political ideologies (on page 69 a Socialist worked with Conservatives on the very Eugenics organization on which Keynes sat). Imagine a Bruce Springstein appreciation society meeting at which you could find Chris Christie, Jon Stewart, Ronald Reagan and me.  Or ask your self if a belief in Eugenics is central to Keynes' economic theory by considering the fact that contemporary Keynesians have to accept Eugenics, hint Paul Krugman.  If you want to know if you ought trust Keynes on race the answer is no; does this fact delegitimate  Keynes economic theory? The answer is, again, no. Oh, and as by the way, Robert Heinlein was a sci-fi writer, Glibertarianl, and he promoted Eugenics in the Lazarus Long novels and short stories, does that prove that sci-fi and Glibertarianism are beyond the pale?

Consider, as by the way, Bertram Russel.  He was a brilliant logician and made seminal contributions to logic; he was also a cad and bounder in his private romantic life.  Does the latter tell against the former?  No. Bringing the latter up to erode the former is a nearly perfect example of the ad hominem fallacy. The same is true of Keynes and Eugenics or Progressives and Eugenics.  Most, which is to say all the non Eugenical, desires of Progressives did not and do not hinge on Eugenics. Even more worser, the Catholic Church denied that the earth moved round the sun and condemn as heresy those, like Galileo, who said it did. Will Goldberg declare war on the church? And what about witchcraft trials? Protestants and Catholics murdered innocents they declared witches.  Sure, few of either confession would today do the same, but still the historical record is clear.  Will he reject Christianity?  It's beyond boobocracy.

Consider, as by the way, Teddy Roosevelt, Progressive in chief.  He believed, among other hateful things, in American Execeptionalism, Conservationism, and Imperialism.  Must contemporary Conservatives reject AE because TR wanted to protect wet lands and created bird sanctuaries?  The question answers itself.

Goldberg has his head up his fundament because he doesn't understand that no one is always right, except God and me.

Representing Interests

One of the points Bernie Sanders is making is that far too much of what the Congress does takes from lower and middle class Americans and gives to the wealthiest among us and that the taxes code is skewed in favor of the rich and the Republicans are making things worse for the vast majority of America.  Jonah Goldberg, in his reliable wrong way, insists that one support for the middle class isn't socialism, as he understands it -- which is a round about way of saying he hasn't got a clue of what Sanders' Democratic Socialism is,  and two, following Burke, that legislators owe us their judgment.

In terms of two,  Sanders' correct judgment is that the current system is screwing working and middle class Americans, that is the vast majority of Americans, and legislating in the interests of a wealthy and powerful minority and the American congress needs to stop doing this.  Instead of making a coherent, let alone intelligent, argument about how this position is wrong, hint: it's not, Goldberg makes a series of non-sequitors that serve to illuminate his inability to understand an argument.

After nearly 30 years of neo-Liberals like Goldberg and Yglesisas, and the rest ruining this country you would think that at the very least they would be able to make a coherent argument in favor of the policies that have crippled America.

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.

Jonah Goldberg Hates America

America is as much a state of mind as it is a state.  For the longest time, America, as a state of mind, meant things like rule of law, fair play, politeness, and related whatnotery.  Recently, Jonah Goldberg decided that to be authentically American meant not just rejecting all those fundamentally American state of mind dealios but developing a new mindset that more closely reflects the false allegations about Lucrezia Borgia.  To wit:

So again, I ask: Why wasn’t Assange garroted in his hotel room years ago?
It’s a serious question.

He concludes that Assange's death is, unfortunately, unlikely because

it’s the law. Ultimately, I don’t expect the U.S. government to kill Assange, but I do expect them to try to stop him. Alas, as of now, the plan seems to be to do nothing at all.

 What, I wonder, does he expect America to do? And, I ask, why does Jonah Goldberg hate America?

Two Things

Recently Jonah Goldberg made a series of errors relative to an NYTimes online round table about Conservative hatred toward Woodrow Wilson.  He acknowledged one error in an update to the initial post: the historians weren't defending WW but rather trying to explain Conservative hatred of WW.  This was on October 11.  In an online piece dated October 25, Goldberg wrote, concerning Liberal defenses of WW that

[m]ost of the defensive operations are really more of a counter-attack (I addressed the last wave).

In other words, he still gets the point of the round table wrong.  He is, in short, not only reliably wrong but he is the exception that proves the rule of the self-correcting blogosphere.

Conservatives Explained

This has been making the rounds and with the point that the guy's trashing of the woman is kinda of creepy, and it is. Watch:



What is creepier, I think, is Goldberg's belly laugh when the prematurely aged begins to make sleazy allegations about his ex. Even odder is the description he provides of the woman's ideas. Finally, Goldberg is an editor?


UPDATE:
Apparently the guy wrote a blog post explaining how he wasn't a creep. Oddly enough, yesterday I could access his blog and today? Restricted access. One wonders why.

Jonah Goldberg: Reliably Wrong

The NYT has a discussion about Conservative "hate" toward Woodrow Wilson and blame it on Glenn Beck. Importantly, Goldberg refuses to understand the issue under consideration.  It's not the exact origin of WW hatred. Even more importantly, Goldberg didn't start Conservative hatred toward WW. Still he get's all petulant.

But there are some chicken-and-egg problems with that. Beck got on the anti-Wilson train largely because of my book. And I started Liberal Fascism long before  I — or pretty much anyone — had ever heard of Barack Obama.

He also mocks the debate because unnamed some one was dumb enough to try "to make [Beck] into a mouthpiece for Leo Strauss (no, really)"

In the first and possibly second instances Goldberg refers to Georg Nash.  Here's what Nash wrote.

At one level, the phenomenon owes much to Glenn Beck. But Beck is not sui generis. In considerable measure he is popularizing the perspective of a school of conservative scholars associated with the Claremont Review of Books -- a group sometimes labeled the Claremont or West Coast Straussians, since many of them have been influenced by Leo Strauss and his student, Harry Jaffa.

Can you turn that into the claims that Goldberg made? Me neither.

Not content to be wrong once, he asserts that

John Milton Cooper — a great and revered historian — says that the chief problem with the right’s indictment of Woodrow Wilson is not that it is wrong on the merits, but that it’s too selective? In other words, the substance of the attack is fine, it’s just not inclusive enough. I’ll take that any day.

Goldberg then performs, what I believe to be called, a "take down" of Cooper's tragic error concerning TR.  He, of course, misses the point of Cooper's argument.

Cooper is actually discussing the ebbing and flowing of historical reputations and changes in the ideological makeup of political parties.. His first paragraph lets you know that, because he writes that

The barrage of denunciation of Woodrow Wilson from the right, most loudly but not exclusively from Glenn Beck, is not as surprising as it seems. True, most previous excoriation of him has come from the left, from those who have deplored him for abetting an attempt to segregate the federal workplace, for taking the country into World War I, and for overseeing repression of radicals and dissenters after we entered the war. He continues by making the point that these "detracters" failed to give Wilson his full due because they relied on a skewed understanding of WW's accomplishments.

Cooper goes on to point out that

That is a measure of how much our political culture has undergone a sea change in the last century. Nowhere has that sea change been greater than in the Republican party, which was born of the Civil War and proudly exalted federal supremacy. Devotion to state rights and limited government was the property of conservative Democrats such as Grover Cleveland and Southern "bourbons." First, William Jennings Bryan and then Wilson turned the Democrats decisively in a more centralized and interventionist direction.

Even a cursory reading of Cooper's text shows that he is not interested in condemning WW but defending him and that he is make a larger point by playing up some ironies of history.

Concerning his next victim, he

truly laughed out loud at Harvard historian Jill Lepore’s opening salvo. She writes:

Conservatives wish to turn the word “progressive” into an insult, in much the same way that the word “liberal” became a smear during the 1988 presidential campaign. Liberals are bad at labeling things, not least themselves, their political opponents, and their policies; conservatives are good at it.

Riiiiiight.

The rest isn’t much more persuasive.

While sparing us his misreading of Lepore, here is what she actually argues 1) nobody really likes WW consequently he is easy to demonize;  2) Wilson and Obama are similar in many ways; 3) if you are going to go after Progressives WW was, in fact, a Progressive and 4) Beck is a populist and

[p]opulism looks to a past thought to be better than the present; it therefore needs a “before”; its argument will always go like this: before X, all was well; since X, everything’s gone to hell. If X weren’t Wilson, X would simply be someone else.

Next up Micheal Lind, who Goldberg mocks as he thinks Beck is Strauss. Much like Nash, Lind doesn't think that at all. He writes that

[t]he recent elevation by the American right of Woodrow Wilson as the central villain in American history is itself something of a historical accident. That accident is the result of the publicity given by Glenn Beck and Jonah Goldberg to the views of a small number of conservative scholars, including Ronald J. Pestritto, William Voegeli and Thomas G. West. These so-called “Straussians,” or followers of the German political theorist Leo Strauss, argue that Wilson’s brand of progressivism marked a radical break with the older tradition of American politics based on natural rights and the idea of a social contract.

Goldberg reads him as providing

condescension . . . typical of Lind. You see, he’s here to tell everyone what conservatives are supposed to believe, and conservatives are supposed to start with the New Deal or the Great Society, not Wilson.

Oddly enough, Lind is giving Goldberg the credit he so badly wants, kinda. Lind's argument is that this Conservative version of America's  from greatness is only one among many.

Mark Lawrence concludes his contribution by noting that

The problem with the conservative view of Wilson is not that it is entirely wrong but that it is grossly incomplete. It makes almost no effort to view Wilson within the context of an era when most Americans eagerly welcomed the growth of government power.

And it ignores the obvious point that Wilson shares as many traits in common with the latter-day right as with liberals. After all, Wilson’s initiatives during the World War I resemble little in American history so much as the 2001 Patriot Act championed by the Bush administration. And Wilson’s notoriously moralizing, self-righteous personality would fit right in among the conservative punditry so eager to condemn him.

Goldberg complains that

I can’t speak for Beck too authoritatively here since I’ve hardly followed his every statement on Wilson, but Lawrence gets me just plain wrong. One of the central points of my entire argument about the progressive era (and fascism) is that these ideas were popular. They were in the water, on both sides of the Atlantic.

As for Lawrence’s bit about the Patriot Act, that really is hilarious. Who is lacking in historical context now? Whatever the flaws or excesses of the Patriot Act may have been, to compare it to what happened under Wilson is not only absurd, it reveals Lawrence’s political blinders. Indeed, the civil rights abuses under FDR, starting with the internment of the Japanese, but also including the harassment of political enemies, were far worse than anything that happened under Bush. And, they were a natural, if diluted, continuation of what happened under FDR’s old boss, Woodrow Wilson. But discussing that would be too inconvenient.

Lawrence isn't arguing about action but rather intentions and world views.

Goldberg in each case either misstates or misunderstands the texts he claims to have read.

Jonah Goldberg Still Dumb

Recently, Goldberg attempts to make sense of the relationship between Liberalism and the failure of American Education.  He claims that

[i]n 2008-2009, the  District of Columbia spent $1.3 billion dollars on 45,858 students. That is slightly less than the entire GDP of Belize. In 2007, 8 percent of DC eighth graders were able to do math at the eighth grade level. Clearly what’s needed is more money!

According to this

 the DC Public Schools gross budget for fiscal year 2008 as of October 1, 2007

was $949,087,062. Goldberg doesn't provide a link for his claim so  maybe there is another number out there, but he appears to have misplaced a decimal or so.

He continues

Yes, yes, the horrid state of American education is an American problem, and to that extent we’re all to blame in some abstract sort of way. But is there another major area of American public policy that is more screwed up and more completely the fault of one ideological side? 

 In 1980 Milwaukee began an experiment with charter schools, vouchers and all that right wing gobbledygook. The system created redundant schools, drained funding from the public schools, and more generally, sought to use market-based reforms to fix something that isn't a market.  The net result? Vouchers and the rest don't work.  How many school districts have had to deal with this kind of nonsense day after day? How much of the Conservative rage about education has funneled itself into this specific set of policy prescriptions? All of it.  The news that vouchers et alia didn't work led long timer supporter, Diane Ravich, of vouchers and similar reforms to conclude that these kinds of reforms don't work and are actually undermining successful reform efforts.

Ravich also argues that

Teachers feel, with justification, that they are being scapegoated and blamed whenever test scores don't go up. My book appeared at a time when there was only one narrative about school reform, which privileged the views of businessmen, lawyers, politicians, foundation executives, and government officials who are imposing their ideas without regard to the wisdom and experience of those who must implement them.

While Goldberg frets that 

[i]n the last few presidential elections I’ve heard more from Democrats — by far — complaining about leaky school roofs, cracking paint, and the need for more computers in the classroom than I’ve heard about the fact it’s easier to find and train a brontosaurus than it is to fire a horrible teacher.

It really is all the teachers fault and we need more market based solutions.

He then fumes that

I’m sure not that many people follow the DC education controversy, but in a nutshell: Mayor Adrian Fenty lost his reelection bid in large part because he tried, through Michelle Rhee the education chancellor, to fix the schools over the objections of the teachers’ unions. Fenty’s opponent and the liberal black establishment turned it into a racial issue (surprise!) and now education reform in DC is seriously in doubt. 

Rhee's favored solution was firing teachers.  The Teacher's Union, indeed any union, has as one of its main priorities protecting its members from being fired.  Goldberg seems not to have paid attention to the past 30 years of American history, during which the lessons of PATCO went unlearned by "centrists" while movement conservatives sought to destroy more unions, deregulate more industries, and, in the end, succeeded in screwing up the country.

He concludes with anguished cry over the unfairness of it all.  Because  if

you listen to these endless seminars and interviews on NBC and its various platforms, I never seem to hear Matt Lauer or David Gregory ask “Isn’t the education crisis a failure of liberalism?” After all, liberals insist all social problems can be reduced to root causes. Well, they’ve been in charge of the roots for generations and look at the mess they’ve made. Look at it.
Largely because of the Iraq war,  Katrina and Bush’s unpopularity,  a host of liberal intellectuals pronounced conservatism to be dead. The decrepit state of American education is a far more sweeping, profound and lasting indictment of the very heart of liberalism and yet the response from everyone is “Let’s give these guys another try!”

Actually, no. The problems we face today are  the result of the Neoliberal, Reaganite, Glibbertarian, and Thatcherite crap that has dominated policy making for the past 30 years. Starve the state of revenue, destroy unions, blame workers, traduce the state's ability to do what it has been doing successfully for since at least 1933, and deregulate.  What has this led to?  Look out your window.

In a sign of their seriousness about tackling education reform, when a recent study came out that showed that Head Start made little or no difference in academic achievement, Conservative demanded its immediate dismantlement and used as a stick to beat the stupid Liberals and the Liberal Liberalness.  Of course, they missed the fact that individuals who had the pleasure of Head Start did better by other measure, time in jail, etc, than their peers who did not benefit.


Can we all do better in the process of continuing to reform our educational system?  Yes we can.  Does this require jettisoning Neoliberal, Reaganite, Glibbertarian, and Thatcherite critiques of a by and large successful system?  Yes, it does.  We cannot afford to let these flying monkeys back into power. No, we can't

And as a bonus, remember that Yglesias wants the same market-based, Olive-Gardenesque reforms and thinks that firing teachers is the first step to nirvana.  It ain't.


UPDATE:
Goldberg's claim about 8% is in error.  In their self assessment DC schools have a 48% in "elementary math" on a nationally administered test they have, for 2008-09, 11%.  They did, it's true, have 8% on the nation test in 2007-08, but they improved their scores.

Remember "Good ideas do not need lots of lies told about them in order to gain public acceptance"

Jonah Goldberg is Consistant

Today Goldberg wrote

Rep. Charlie Rangel said of the 1994 Republican platform: “Hitler wasn’t even talking about doing these things.”

It's a line of which he is proud.

Jonah Goldberg Still Dumb

In the LA Times, and for all I know elsewhere, Jonah Goldberg argues that news of a civil war in the Republican Party is overblown although

[t]ime will tell which side will lose that debate [on the wisdom of running crazy people for office], but one thing is already clear: The tea parties won

the non-existent civil war, I think he means because the debate isn't yet settled. Furthermore

[i]t takes two to tango, and it takes two to fight a civil war. What seems lost on a remarkably diverse group of observers and political combatants, on the left and the right, is that there are no worthy Republican opponents to the tea parties.

Why is this the case you ask? When Tea Partiers like

Rubio and Toomey chased moderates like Charlie Crist and Arlen Specter clear out of the Republican Party. And now Miller has pretty much done the same with Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski, who in a sad attempt to cling to power announced that she will run as a write-in candidate come November. Mitch McConnell, the Senate Republican leader, immediately moved to excommunicate Murkowski, stripping her of all her seniority and leadership positions.

In all three cases the "establishment" has said to the moderates, "Don't let the door hit you on the way out." And how have they responded to the allegedly barbaric, uncouth, tea-fueled hordes storming the Beltway castle? "Lower the drawbridge!"

See?  It isn't a civil war between crazy people and "moderates" in the Republican Party, the Tea Party domination is really just the last episode in a purge of the Republican Party of rational people by crazy people, which is entirely different.

UPDATE:
As per usual Goldberg is wrong, Murkowski was not stripped of her leadership position.

[link added]

Jonah Goldberg on Journalism

Searching for hard evidence of the upcoming Republican victory, Goldberg dons his investigative reporter's hat, which comes with a pipe and magnifying glass if you send in three extra box tops, and all reporterlylike reports that

[l]ast night I attended a book party for Young Guns. While there, I heard an interesting tidbit from a couple people I trust. Apparently the Judiciary Committee’s majority staff approached the minority staff with a seemingly gracious offer: Why don’t we refurbish the digs for the minority staff? They look a bit rundown.

This was welcome news since the minority staff (i.e., the Republicans) has been asking for a spruce-up for four years but got nothing from the Dems. But now, suddenly, the Democrats are very concerned about the quality of the digs they will have to use if they lose the majority. I’m sure that’s just a coincidence and it was all out of the goodness of their hearts.

One person I talked to said that they heard something about another committee where a similar offer was made, but I couldn’t confirm it.

It's journalism 101: If you hear something from two or more people at a partisan event concerning the coming defeat and general mendacity of your shared opponents: it is a confirmed fact; however, if you hear it from only one person at a partisan event concerning the coming defeat and general mendacity of your shared opponents:  it is an unconfirmed but still comforting fact. Both are facts just  like the missing Ws and general trashing narrative concerning the Clinton/Bush transition was a fact.


UPDATE:
I just reread the Salon article and its simply amazing how the trashing narrative and its dissemination are a nearly perfect microcosm for the whole of Bush administration's notion of the truth. That was published in May of 2001, and yet the press corps as a whole seems to have not internalized its meaning.

And there is this stunning little nugget:

To its credit, Fox acknowledged on . . . the same day the GAO report became public -- that there had been little evidence to support its vandalism claims. Later "Fox News Sunday" host Tony Snow went even further, apologizing to former Clinton staffers for his error. "OK, I'm sorry," Snow said on the program. "The ex-president's pals have a legitimate beef."