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.

End College Sports Now

Via we learn of a college football coach who was a serial child rapists and of an athletic director, and president who covered it up. This is beyond disgusting and, it seems to me, evidence of the immoral nature of both college sports and the administrators who use it to foster a "brand." I am done with college sports and, to be honest about it, think that this is further evidence of the fundamental corrupt nature of our professional administrators who are if not sociopaths, moral morons who do not care about anyone or anything beyond their obscene salaries.

Sure you can argue that not all administrators coverup the child rapists in their midst; but, find me a case, outside of Chicago way back when, that recognizes the essential corrupt nature of big-time college sports and does something about like, I don't know, disbanding the athletic department and using the money to hire professors to actually teach.

And, as by the way, IOZ has a post up in which he blames education of turning all of our bright you things into drones. He is, to be blunt, full of thus and so. It's not education that creates worker bees; it is the refusal of students to take education seriously because of a larger cultural rejection of the notion of "egg heads" and learning to think aided and abetted by their own desire to root for the home team and drink like fish. Corey Robin makes the point that

what our most acute observers have long understood about the American scene: however much coercive power the state wields–and it’s considerable—it’s not, in the end, where and how many, perhaps even most, people in the United States have historically experienced the raw end of politically repressive power. Even force and violence: just think of black slaves and their descendants, confronting slaveholders, overseers, slave catchers, Klansmen, chain gangs, and more; or women confronting the violence of their husbands and supervisors; or workers confronting the Pinkertons and other private armies of capital.

His point is that conformity isn't solely or even primarily the result of state action but rather of a private citizens and employers enforcing norms of their own creation. So its the the folks who coverup for the child rapists and the weak sisters at NPR and NYT who fire people for commitment no crime who aid and abet the thuggish Koch Brothers. And its the students who mock the hard working students and dream of the day when they go to college to drink like fish that turn bright kids into zombies.

It is a fiction of the right and the left that there are eager college professor indoctrinating students to be either communists revolutionaries or men in grey suits living in little houses made of ticky tacky. With few exceptions, the enforced conformity comes for your fellows.

Enlightenment: German Edition

One of the enduring myths of old regime Prussia was the White Lady. Allegedly when a Prussian monarch was slated for death the White Lady appeared on a stair case. German speaking enlighteners hoped upon hope that proving there was no such thing as ghosts despaired of their failure to purge this mythic vision from the popular imagination. They didn't, however, quit trying to purge this mythic vision from the popular imagination because, they correctly thought, that purging this mythic, which is to say incorrect, vision from the popular imagination would benefit the population at large in two ways. The first would be the specific falsehood and the second would be the general. It was an optimistic  assessment of humanities ability to learn the difference between fact and fiction. Despite the specific failure, humanistic optimist like me support this kind of action. Fictions need to be shown to be fictions.

Today President Obama released his "long form" birth dealio proving he is an actual American citizen. Many on the Intertubes and its related nets are baffled by this decision. Their argument is, essentially, that these birther yahoos can never be satisfied and, therefore, Obama was wrong to try and show that their fictions were, in fact, fictions.

For me, Obama's decision was one more of the many ultimately successful attempts of making facts more powerful than fictions. So, I say, well done young pirate and way to continue the endless and necessary commitment to truth's triumph over lies.

David Brooks: Fibber Magee

In today's NYT Book Review's Inside the List sidebar there is a description of David Brooks blather about his book on some tv talk show or another. He told the story of watching some social scientist's experiment in which waiting to eat something led to getting twice as much. Brooks insisted that in watching the video in which Oreo cookies were the food of choice, one of the children open the cookie and ate the filling in the hopes of fooling the scientists.  That boy, Brooks claimed, is now a senator.  That story, I now claim, is bullshit, in the Frankfurtian sense of bullshit.

Economics Still Not a Discipline

The other day I mentioned that there was a spirited round of debate about anxious to rescue a way to stop thinking Matthew Yglesias and others insisted that it was so because economists agree on so much that the disagreements are really just some form of noise or so. Not, as it turns out, so.

Paul Krugman writes of the Real Business Cycle, don't ask, that he

know[s] that RBC exists; I know how it works; I just think it’s wrong.

So he understands that other economists explain the economy in way that is wrong. They don't, in other words, agree about a fundamentally important aspect of their discipline's purpose, which -- I assume -- is explaining the way the economy works.  He goes on to argue that

is that it’s OK to consider other economists, even a whole school of thought, wrong; what’s not OK is to be so closed-minded that you aren’t even aware that there are not obviously stupid people who disagree with you.

In the post he mentions that Bradford DeLong, a really odious example of Neoliberalism, takes the same bunch to task and offers them remediation.  DeLong suggests that

[t]here were a lot of things that economists like Frederic Bastiat, Jean-Baptiste Say, and John Stuart Mill knew in 1830 about the origins of aggregate demand shortfalls and the usefulness of expansionary fiscal policy in a downturn that modern Chicago never bothered to read, never bothered to learn, or have long forgotten.

I don't know maybe the insights of folks who had no clue of what capitalism was going to become have useful insights into how to "manage" the economy; but it strikes me odd that in a debate about who is right in matters dogmatic the solution is to turn our attention to people dead lo these many years. It similar to arguing in a debate about, say, the Earth's age we need to go back and read Charles Lyell because he got it just right.

DeLong's quotes also make the point that none of the "freshwater" economists read Krugman because they think he is wrong about everything.

More Errors of Fact

Jay Nordlinger asks:

Are members of public-employee unions willing to give a little?

His answer is clearly no. Why? Because they have protested against the repeal of  their right to bargain and not beg.  It's called political action.  More or as importantly prior to the last minuet senate rejection of the Doyle contracts

Unions had then agreed to concessions totaling $100 million.

It's a question of workers' right to organize and bargain not greedy greed heads greedily greed heading.

History is a Discipline

I realize that this might get tedious but this misuse of history really has to stop

history upended Mr. Mubarak and in the end, which came as suddenly and surprisingly as his unlikely elevation to the presidency, he was forced to resign.

History isn't a disembodied force upending icons and stability nor yet is it a diverse group of actors demanding the same thing.  History is some guy or gal in the archives long after the event under consideration occurred trying to piece together a plausible analysis based on an accurate narrative using primary and secondary sources. The folks standing together and demanding the same thing are motivated by diverse impulses and interests and if the journalists and pundits continue on blurring this reality by appeal to some non-existent entity, history as the agent of historical change, all that they accomplish is misinforming folks about what is going on.

Never Let the Facts Get in the Way of a Good Narrative

Just now Anderson Cooper was on CNN touting the Army as the good guys on the establishment side of the ledger in Egypt.  Maybe, but than again, maybe not:

The Egyptian military has secretly detained hundreds and possibly thousands of suspected government opponents since mass protests against President Hosni Mubarak began, and at least some of these detainees have been tortured, according to testimony gathered by the Guardian.

It'd be nice if Cooper and his cohort would spend more time dealing in the facts of the matter and less time making stuff up. An idle dream, I realize.

Egypt Isn't 18th Century France

Yesterday via a variety of sites I went to this site and read this, number 11 of 20 dealios that explain Egypt:

To amplify: I can't find the quote but one of the historians of the French Revolution of 1789 wrote that it was not the product of poor people but of poor lawyers. You can have political/economic setups that disappoint the poor for generations - but if lawyers, teachers and doctors are sitting in their garrets freezing and starving you get revolution. Now, in their garrets, they have a laptop and broadband connection.

I don't know which historian he has in mind but the poor lawyers characterization is most likely some garbled version of Burke's prediction, in the Reflections, that provincial lawyers with no experience in governance would seize control over the Revolution with disastrous results. Presumably we're meant to think of Robespierre and the Terror. However, if you think about the Revolution as it occurred the key event would have been the alliance of members of the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd Estates walked out of the Estates General, when voting by head instead of Estate was rejected, created the National Assembly, and agreed to the Tennis Court Oath. It is simply not true that lawyers, of whatever economic class, made up the men who created this diverse group of dedicated reformers.  "Radicalization" and Robespierre's domination of the Revolution's course waited on the King reneging on the agreement to make a constitutional monarch, his flight, and clear desire to wage war on the France with his fellow absolutists, which led to his trial and execution and Jacobean domination.  It's not even vaguely correct to associated the Jacobeans with poor or provincial lawyers.

The French Revolution was more about the desire of reformers to reform France through the expansion of, what Hirschman called, voice, understood here to mean effective participation in France's governance. Reducing the event to poverty among the "middle class" and then insisting on a rough parallel between then and now misleads on both revolutions and will have the unpleasant result of distorting response to the Egyptians' demands. It is, after all, difficult to fit the Google guy into the category of poor lawyers and he is not the only one of his "class" taking part in the multivocal revolt against tyranny and despotism, is he? Personally, I've always thought the notion of "excess men" overblown as a causal explanation for revolution at whatever point in history or geography.

The "arguments" he makes about 19th century France are equally vapid and superficial; cafes weren't like raves for example.

On economic success, Egyptian history and the Revolution see also, too.

Stagnation as Misinformation

Alerted to a "bravura performance by one of the most interesting thinkers out there" on the cause of the current economic mess, I rushed, metaphorically speaking, to the Kindle store and spent 4 dollars on Tyler Cowen's How The Great Stagnation: How America Ate All The Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History,Got Sick, and Will (Eventually) Feel Better. This is fairly awful book. Cowen's tone is condescending; his use of history is superficial, his notion of the cause odd, and his notions of how to get better depressing.

On causation. Cowen blames overconfidence. "[R]ealtors" are not to blame because "[t]he financial crisis was not fundamentaly about the bursting othe real estate bubble" (706-17)  Okay, but then, one thinks, those who used various chicanery to spin bad loans into huge profit for no socially beneficial purpose bear the bulk of the blame. Nope: "The financial crisis is not even fundamentally about mistakes in the banking sector, although such mistakes were made" (717-28). Note the passive voice.  Well then who might be responsible oh most interesting of thinkers out there? "We were all, more or less, overconfident.  It gets increasingly harder," he argues, "to escape the conclusion that many millions of people were complicit, whether intentionally or not." He then illuminates this, apparently inescapable, conclusion by recourse to a museum director planing building expansion(718-30 to 730-40). Innovative thinking indeed.

On condescension: The title is one example. His invocation of the "fun" of the internet working to limit a sober understanding of economies' general crappiness is another (746-57 to 757-67). This bit, from his conclusion, [t]hese days, you can read the latest scientific papers, whether or not you are based at Harvard or Princeton" (797-808) ignores the fact that disseminating the latest findings in all manner of disciplines predates Jstor. Darnton's work on the Encyclopedia is one example; Francis Bacon's Novum Organon published by Society For The Diffusion Of Useful Knowledge, which yet another example of making cutting edge thought available to the masses, another. It is also an example that leads to a discussion of his use or, more precisely, abuse of history.


On roads and their history.  He makes much of the notion of "core" versus "optional" state functions. Using the example of investments on infrastructure, he argues that [w]e're valuing dollars spent on highway extensions as if they were worth as much as the dollars we spent on building the core roads that link major cities" (267-78 to 278-88). This characterization of the roads in American history is misleading in two ways.  In the first instance, he ignores the origins of the Good Road Movement, which arose from a combination of commercial and leisure interests. Cyclists intent on increasing the pleasures of live had long advocated for improved roads while agricultural and extractive commercial interests wanted to ease the movement from productive to markets. Railroads already connected "major" cities, the Interstate system came rather later and its designers had rather more in mind than linking major cities. Does this really matter, you might ask. Well, yes. The push for good roads was as much about pleasure as commerce and trying to reading the former out of the equation transforms state infrastructure investment into an activity solely dedicated to matters economic, which conveniently ignores the fact that there is more to life than making money. 


The Central Theme or Metaphor: Cowen makes much of his notion of the fact that 

the American economy has enjoyed lots of low-hanging fruit since at least the seventeenth century, whether it be free land, lots of immigrant labor, or powerful new technologies.  Yet during the last forty years, that low-hanging fruit started disappearing, and we started pretending it was still there.  We have failed to recognize that we are at a technological plateau and the trees are more bare than we would like to think.  That's it.  That is what has gone wrong.(60-71)

He accepts that some of this stuff was "not completely new"; however, he insists they "expanded rapidly" in the period under consideration effectively "tying together the world economy." Although there was a "somewhat longer time frame, agriculture" underwent a similar process.  What was, he suggests, "fundamentally new to human history" was the "gains . . . from playing out the idea of advanced machines combined with powerful fossil fuels" (81-81).

And to be clear, when he discusses low-hanging fruit he doesn't mean the fruits you ate first:

Have you ever walked into a cherry orchard? There are plenty of cherries right there for the  picking. Imagine a tropical island where the citrus and banannas hang from trees.  Low-hanging literal fruit-- you don't even have to cook the stuff (60-71).

It's helpful to ask if we didn't have to cook the stuff that, literally and metaphorically, hung so low. Take, as one example, access to America's wide-open lands.  If you ignore the long history of the "Age of Exploration" or, if you want to consider things from the opposite perspective, the "Age of Conquest" leading up to the seizure of lands from the pre-existing inhabitants, then yes easy peasy.  Did you know that over 50% of the conquistadors perished either during the trip over or on first landing?[2] Or that the technological changes, financial support, and religious justification of the Portuguese expansion and colonization came from the state?  It's true.The longer time frame for the agricultural sector? Depending on how you want to think about it, agricultural revolution's time frame is rather longer.

You can do the same thing for each and every low-hanging fruit Cowen mentions.  They didn't just appear all of sudden when needed for the economic exploitation of this or that resource but rather they came about through the intersection of state and society seeking to improve the condition of men even on this earth and individuals more concerned with lining their own pockets then anything else. The American Transcontinental railroad is a nearly perfect example of the inter-mixture of state, society, cupidity, and charity, in is ancient meaning. What I think Cowen actually means is if you ignore the actual history of the picking of the fruit, it hung very low indeed.


On the state of technological breakthroughs he argues that "[t]he period from 1880 to 1945 brought numerous major technological advances into our lives"; he then lists the usual suspects and argues that "life [now] in broad material terms isn't so different from what it was in 1953" (81-91).[1] His pessimism on the future of innovation relies, in part, on the work of Charles I. Jones, who "has 'disassembled' American economic growth into component parts" and "[l]ooking at 1950-1993. . . found that 80 percent of the growth . . . came from he application of previously discovered ideas . . . with heavy additional investment in education and research, in a manner that cannot be easily repeated for the future" (177-88).  Cowen also reproduces the work of Jonathan Huebner which shows that current rates of "innovation" are nearly medieval (188-93); Huebner suggests that we will out do the medievals in our lack of inventiveness by 2024.

It would be nice to know why we can't  repeat investments in education and research. It would also be nice to know why figuring out how to use the technology we have right now to improve the conditions of humanity without regard to ever expanding profits is, apparently, off the table.

This brings me to Cowen's cure for what ails us. He argues that one "favorable trend" is his expectation that "[o]ver time, we can expect" China and India "to assume a greater role as innovators" and that "their manufacturing and services efforts" will "free up a lot of our time and energy for innovation."  He is, of course, unclear as to why the Chinese and Indians will be able to that which he has ruled out for us; although, to be fair, Cowen waves his hands toward markets.(787-96 to 797-808) Secondly, the "internet may do more for revenue generation in the future." (ibid.) See, the way out of the current bubble induced crises is a new  bubble. He likes the various market-based solutions to the "crisis" in America's educational system, despite the evidence that they don't work. (808-19). And, improve the "status" of science by adopting "one point that Ayn Rand . . . got right, namely that we should all revere creators and scientific innovators (830-42 to 841-52). Want a better economy?  All Hail John Galt lest Galt go.

Taken in the round, this is a remarkable passive response to the current malaise for such an interesting thinker; given that the take-away seems to be that we can't do much except wait for the system that failed so spectacularly to fix itself except train ourselves to revere our Galtian overlords.



[1] This last has set off a enormously contentious discussion of kitchen utensils.

[2] Here some stuff on one of them, Cabaza de Vaca, who is actually worth googling.

Empiricism in Matters Big and Little

Getting the facts of the matter straight before making a judgment is a really, really good idea.  Ignoring, altering, making up, or garbling the facts of the matter tends toward creating unsustainable judgments, which is another of saying you'll be wrong.

Today, Jonah Goldberg, whose ability to ignore the facts of the matter in big matters is a matter of record, also ignored them in small matters with the same result.  He watched "Top Chef" last night and is upset by

[t]he real self-indulgence seemed to come from Tom Colicchio. Basically all of his personal preferences trumped other considerations. He thinks risotto must be cooked a certain way (I actually agree with him) and that’s all we need to know. I respect his judgment but, did a dish of steamed mussels really deserve to win? According to Colicchio the dish was great because it reminded him of his childhood. Well, that’s touching. But I think Fabio was absolutely right that it wasn’t even an Italian dish.

So, he's wrong, it seemed to me.  I know that as a matter of fact, Italian risotto is soupy and I was pretty sure that fennel and mussels is an Italian dish. Because the internet is such a marvel for finding things out.  I looked and, sure enough, Italian cooks cook mussels and fennel in Italy. But wait, there's more. Anthony Bourdain writes about TC every week he describes

the aforementioned steamed mussels with white wine and fennel with garlic bread from Antonia that, at very least, got the mood and the expectations of her clients exactly right. A big, steaming bowl of properly cooked mussels, with crusty, strongly-garlicked bread. (Fabio later complained that fennel is "French." I suggest he visit Sicily.).

Eric Ripert goes further and denies the Frenchness of the dish altogether.Colicchio argues that the dish is Italian-American cooking and therefore perfectly okay. And everyone involved agrees that real risotto is soupy.

Because he got his facts wrong, his conclusion concerning Colicchio domination of the judging process is wrong. Colicchio on the judging:

When I was growing up, chicken cacciatore was one of my mother's staples. She made it every two weeks or so and she made a good one. Fabio did, too. The flavors were great. That said, Antonia's dish was simply better. So much so, in fact, that it was the unanimous choice, not just of the judges, but of every single person at the table. Everything about it came together perfectly, and it was great. Truth be told, I don't even care that much for mussels. They're OK, but I have never been a big fan. And yet, that said, I felt definitively that Antonia's dish was the best of the evening. Anyone who writes to challenge the decision clearly did not taste the dish. Not only was Antonia's dish executed beautifully, but it also captured the spirit of the challenge of evoking family at the table in a simple and unforced way.

Why would you want to be factually inaccurate?  Especially when you want to accuse some one or some group of malfeasance, surely the grasp of the facts affects the accuracy of your conclusions.

Blood Libel

As I mentioned Sarah Palin's invocation of the the blood libel trope was wildly inappropriate.  Since then, Conservatives and others have been busy defending and justifying the comment and generally looking like buffoons.  Jeffrey Goldberg, who admits that Palin's usage was "gross," suggests that Palin's misuse of the term will create a teachable moment.  This is singularly and fantastically wrong. Any discussion that surrounds Palin functions like a blackhole into which facts fall and never emerge.  It's not just that she is a walking fact-free zone, it is that her defenders have no interest in facts; for if they did, they wouldn't defend her.  It's a fact.

I Never Watch Keith Olberman's Talk Show

And I think his sport commenting stick is tedious.  However, unlike the Sanchez and Williams firings, Olberman's indefinite suspension is absurd on its face.

More on the First Amendment

Christine O'Donnell, who embarrassed herself concerning the Constitution and the separation of church and state, now claims that she won the debate on the 1st Amendment because Coons didn't name the five freedoms it protects. During the debate, however, she was asked a question concerning specific constitutional amendments and she said:

I didn’t bring my Constitution with me. Fortunately, senators don’t have to memorize the Constitution,” Christine O’Donnell, Delaware’s Republican Senate nominee, declared at the forum, held in the moot courtroom of Widener University.

She won the debate because when she said senators didn't need to memorize the constitution she meant the opposite when it concerns Democratic candidates.  See also.

Read the Damn Book II

Recently, Christine O'Donnell made herself ridiculous because she doesn't understand that the Constitution's sixth artilcle and the Bill of Rights' 1st amendment mandate the separation of church and state.

The 1st Amendment says, in part, that

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof

The state is forbidden from promoting, retarding, or meddling with religious beliefs or practices.

Article Six says, in part,  that

[t]he Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the members of the several state legislatures, and all executive and judicial officers, both of the United States and of the several states, shall be bound by oath or affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.

The argument here is that the only commitment required of anyone working for the state is to protect and defend the Constitution and that no set of religious beliefs or practices are or can be required of state officials.

The Constitution, in other words, creates a secular government that is indifferent to religious matters and denies any religious group the right to meddle in participation in the machinery of government.

Why is it that Constitutional Conservative have so little understanding of the text's plain meaning? Could it be that they are unaware of the problem of state interference in religious beliefs and practices? Could it be that they are unaware of the dangers of religious interference in who is or isn't a citizen and participation in government?  Might it be that they know little or nothing about history?  I'm going to go out on a limb and argue yes on all counts.


Here is a long version of the exchange:



Here's the shorter version.

NRO Gets it Wrong Again.

On Wednesday Michelle Obama said that

Obama needs allies in Washington like [Alexi] Giannoulias and supporters like those at the fundraiser.
"I told you that you had to have my husband's back ... I told you that if I were giving him up, you had to have his back because my husband can't do this alone. He can't do it alone. He needs leaders like Alexi right by his side," she said.

On Thursday, which is today, the NRO's Katheryn Jean Lopez turned that into evidence for the claim that

[t]he Obamas are not about inspiring you to hope and change anymore. They’re about shaming you.

I’m perplexed at the current FLOTUS tour. Last night, for instance, she announced: “I told you that you had to have my husband’s back … I told you that if I were giving him up, you had to have his back because my husband can’t do this alone. He can’t do it alone.”

Insulting your base’s sticktoitiveness may just leave you a base that’s increasingly frustrated with you.

Obviously, Obama was asking for supporters to send another Democratic candidate to DC.  Lopez, who conveniently doesn't provide a link, misrepresents the content of the First Lady's speech in order to insult both the First Lady, the President, and their supporters. Comments like these are like the "polite" version of this billboard.

Too Few Choices

For the longest time, Conservatives and Neoliberals have argued for more testing and greater choice, through charter schools and vouchers.  Recent studies suggest that none of this works. When confronted with these facts of the matter, the intellectually honest thing to do would be stop rooting from them.  Ross Douthat, however, thinks the thing to is repeat old and discredited canards, "incompetent teachers" cause low performance among students, and double down on choice, vouchers, and other even yet more idiotic solutions, "fund students" and allow the magic of the market place to sort it all out. About one sensible point made in this column is that testing doesn't provide the evidence necessary to find the answer to the question "is our children learning," which comes because testing delegitimatizes Douthat's preferred solution: choice. 

When it comes to education reform, Conservatives really do suffer from a dearth of choice.

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.

The New York Times: Readers and Editors

A letter to this past Sunday's NYTimes' Sports Section concludes that

Let us cheer Halladay for his accomplishment, but we should not compare his to another, greater accomplishment.

He means Larson's perfect game.  How did he arrive at this conclusion?  As is clear from his use of a compartive term, he compared the two events and found one greater than another.  He means, no doubt, equate.  Is this nitpicking.  No it really isn't; if you spend the time necessary to write a letter and make a comparative argument, it makes little sense to dismiss as comparison illegitimate.

There were yet even more comparatively  worser problems in the book review. Let's assume that a books review's purpose is to present in an honest way information about the book under review that will either encourage or discourage a reader from reading the book.  Let's further assume that there are only some many words allowed in an NYTRoB.  Neither proposition seems unlikely.  Yet today in a review by

Steven Heller, the former art director of the Book Review, writes the Visuals column[.]

We read that

In his enlightening introduction to this hefty two-volume collection, the editor, Art Spiegelman, notes it was only a few decades ago that extended comics, published in book format with actual spines instead of staples, started being referred to as graphic novels.“The ungainly neologism seems to have stuck since Will Eisner, creator of the voraciously inventive ‘Spirit’ comic book of the 1940s, first used it on the cover of his 1978 collection of comics stories for adults, ‘A Contract With God,’ ” Spiegelman writes. “It was a way to distance himself from the popular prejudices against the medium.”

Is there anything wrong here. Well yes, there is. Is Spiegelman the editor or an editor or its editor?  Does the knowledge that Heller thinks the book hefty illuminate the book's content in any way?  Is that sentence ungainly?  It's its, no, and yes.

In the his introduction to this interesting and important collection, its editor, Art Spiegelman, argues that what we now call graphic novels are a recent invention. “The ungainly neologism seems to have stuck since Will Eisner, creator of the voraciously inventive ‘Spirit’ comic book of the 1940s, first used it on the cover of his 1978 collection of comics stories for adults, ‘A Contract With God,’ ” Spiegelman writes. “It was a way to distance himself from the popular prejudices against the medium.”

Are there other more substantive problems with the review?  Well, yes.  Heller writes that

[i]n large part owing to the continued success of Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “Maus,” about his parents’ experiences at Auschwitz, graphic novels are now widely accepted.

 Does Maus I and II most salient theme concern Spiegelman's parents and Auschwitz? No.  It's much more about the surviving parent and the son.  Are graphic novels "widely accepted"? As what? By whom? Here's a site listing the best selling graphic novels by month and year.  Last years best seller?  The Watchmen. The rest of the list seems to be a bunch of comic books tarted up. Are these widely accepted by people who don't read them as legitimate because of Maus I and II?  Not really.  Are there occasional really good graphic novels?  Sure. Am I being a nitpicker, no not really.  This kind of confused writing and sloppy thinking allows folks to make unsubstantiated if not false claims, it's bad practice whatever the issue under consideration might be.

Hollywoodland

Lots of people are complaining, lauding, and generally talking about the fictional aspects of the film Social Network.  Here's the thing, no hollywoodland film about an actual event approaches fact. Remember  Guadalcanal Diary  from 1943 when there were still folks around who lived through it?  Anthony Quinn runs without opposition until some dastardly Japanese flings a knife into his back. Think that was accurate? Gentleman Jim Corbett was no more like Errol Flynn than was George Armstrong Custer was like Errol Flynn or Queen Elizabeth like Bette Davis and Essex like Errol Flynn.  They were fictional movies; Social Network is a fictional movie. People who want to argue about the accuracy of fictional films are like people who read a novel about WWI and think that they have learned something about WWI. Dopes, in short.  One reason there is so much hub bub, bub, might be because lots of people thought that Sorkin's West Wing was a documentary.  It wasn't.  No really it wasn't.  It was a melodrama parading as a mirror of princes.  You want the true story Facebook's development?  Wait a while and some historian or another will take up the task. Want to know what Aaron Sorkin thinks about humanity's vanity and related whatnotery, go see the movie.