To Meet Brother Monkey

Is Jonah Goldberg really a disingenuous twit?

Sadly, yes. My riff on why he is treated with such derision slouched to his heavy-lidded attention ('cause I was posting at Eschaton), rousing him from his pastoral torpor sufficiently for him to bleat out this plaintive rejoinder:

Someone at Eschaton chimes in and says that people are so derisive towards me because I'm the sort of conservative who says global warming is fake and there was a link between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. This, again, sort of proves my point. I don't think I've ever said there was a connection between Saddam and al Qaeda — even when I suspected their might be one, I don't think I ever wrote it. And I've never said that global warming is fake. I've said that the alarmism is over done, a view that is hardly unique to conservatives.

There are, um, certain problems here. First, broadly, as Tom pointed out in comments here, and as Brad notes at Sadly No, and as is glaringly obvious to people capable of breathing, Jonah is allegedly completing a book entitled Liberal Fascism: The Totalitarian Temptation from Mussolini to Hillary Clinton. And he is also wondering why liberals hold him in contempt. Maybe it will come to him in time.

But as to specifics (and this gets progressively more ludicrous as we go on, I'll warn you):

1. As I noted over at Eschaton, and as was clear in the original post, I identified two issues on which self-described conservatives are batshit loony -- global warming and significant connections between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein -- because Jonah's fellow NRO idiot Cliff May had identified these specific issues in a specific article. In other words, Jonah mischaracterized the post he was responding to. An inauspicious beginning. It gets worse.

2. Jonah is pathetically disingenuous with his claims about what he's written about global warming and AQ/Saddam. On GW, his defense is "I've never said that global warming is fake. I've said that the alarmism is over done, a view that is hardly unique to conservatives." 

Oy, where to begin? Well, first, yes, the idea that the "alarmism" is "overdone" is, in fact, pretty much confined to conservatives, with the exception perhaps of industry-funded researchers. Hell, the term "alarmism" is movement-conservative code for "global warming is fake." Go ahead, Google it. I'll even help.

Moving on to what Jonah's actually written about global warming:

Now, it's true that Earth has gotten warmer — one degree since the 19th century — and it will probably get warmer still. And it's probably true that human activity plays a significant part in all that.

Which would support his sniveling about how he's always been open-minded about the issue, were the rest of the article not filled with gems like the following (or indeed the ignorant sneer about "one degree"):

But it's also true that we don't have a clear picture of what's happening now, never mind what will happen.

Meet Al Gore, scaremonger.... Today, he is at the forefront of a "green scare" about global warming intended to terrify Americans into submitting to his environmental policies.

A one- or two-degree-per-century rise in average global temperatures may have unpleasant consequences — with some pleasant ones as well.

This is just a small taste of the millenarian battiness running through the green scare.

Goldberg doesn't engage with Gore's movie (or book) at all here, which does have actual sciencey-stuff in it. No, Jonah's content with a snarky smear of Gore as a "green scaremonger." That's it. That's the whole point of the article. My point stands: on the subject of global warming, all Goldberg has to offer is garden-variety wingnut bullshit, which amounts to the insinuation that the quite serious claims made about it and its consequences are "fake."

3. On Al Qaeda/Saddam, and Jonah's shocked, shocked pleading: "I don't think I've ever said there was a connection between Saddam and al Qaeda — even when I suspected their might be one, I don't think I ever wrote it"... well, Dr. Atta J. Turk took care of this a while ago over at Eschaton.  So that's that.

4. Here's where the real Fun comes in. Last night Jonah was Highly Offended that anyone would assert that he was so foolish as to believe "that there were significant ties between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein," which is what I actually wrote. Apparently, overnight, JG was bombarded with innumerable e-mails berating him for his wanton transgression of wingnut orthodoxy on this point. So he put together this whiny ex-post-facto excuse note:

I should have been more clear last night. In my dyspeptic jihad against some of my critics (now that I've slept on it, you won't be seeing a lot more of that sort of thing, btw) I said, essentially, that I didn't believe there was any connection between Saddam and al Qaeda. What I should have said was that I didn't believe — and never said — that Saddam had any connection to 9/11. That was the implied charge in that lefty's complaint and that's what I was referring to.

Hee hee. No, you nitwit, that was not the "implied charge." The quite literal charge was that "conservatives" believe as an article of faith (or Feith) that AQ and Saddam had a working relationship, a notion that, as I said, does not rise above the level of a conspiracy theory.

In other words, Jonah tried his damndest to come across as a Genuine Thinker and not as a Nut, but was forced to recant and re-Nut himself after his fan base reminded him of who, if you will, in fact truly owns the Nuts in that particular relationship.

And this is precisely why  Jonah will never be taken seriously by anyone who is themselves serious. He needs to make peace with his Inner Hack and stop whining to the grownups that he deserves to sit at the big people's table. He doesn't, and never will, no matter how badly he wants it both ways.

(Thanks to Righteous Bubba for the Attaturk/Eschaton link)

 

Comments

[RT]

Sweet. Absolutely, wondrously sweet. Especially the whole bit about re-Nutting.

[Righteous Bubba]

Thanks for the generous name-dropping. I may one day deserve such notice.

[mrs. ibrahim al-jafaari]

he held the Nuts flush? or his audience had the Nuts straight flush? a wingnut's Nuts says what?

[Tom Hilton]

Beautiful (your post) and breathtaking (his...whatever it is).

On the plus side, you won't be seeing much more of him lashing out (ignorantly, or disingenuously, or ignorenuously) at his critics. He said so, so it must be true.

Snort. Chuckle. Oh, I do crack myself up sometimes.

[stevesh]

"...stop whining to the grownups that he deserves to sit at the big people's table."

So. There's that.

Then digg this:

"Merely, that Phila exhibits, inevitably, a lamentable misapprehension of the ontological res ipsa of the conservative Weltanschung, perpetrating a lachrymose conflation of the ineffable, foundational values of the national genesis with an ahistorical, anachronistic hothouse exhibition of contemporary mores, producing in extremis, naught but jejune animadversions upon the essence of the contemporary genus of the American l'homme naturel; and, more is the pity, Phila is also indelibly guilty of a disgusting liberal inability to accord Mexicans all due contempt, especially the gay ones."

With the Foucault/Ashes, upper-case T, Theory patter link to BouPhon.
(Which was kind of funny, Sokal-esquely.)

Which all started with this:

"To Meet Brother Monkey"

And given this:

http://www.ntoddblog.org/photos/atriots/nymarythers.html

Alarmist post-Nut conspiracy? Bergeronistic unSingularity?:

A capo in the J. Poulos gang might algorithmyze that, at the former Triple Cities College of Syracuse University, there exists a trans-human entity with the hem of it's skirt pulled up showing some schandenankle in the mirror, and re: the i.d. of that t-h:

Thers=Jonah
____________________________

The moral:

"...never be taken seriously by anyone who is themselves serious."

Or, who think they is.

[va]

You know conservatives invented "alarmism" because at the lowest semantic stratum, it makes no sense.

[Bas-O-Matic]

You know conservatives invented "alarmism" because at the lowest semantic stratum, it makes no sense.

See also, victimology, cult of.

Where in a sane world this would mean that there was some charismatic criminologist leading people out in the woods to play bongos until the people Jack the Ripper killed return on comet Sv-2294, for conservatives it somewhow means that black people are just being whiners. Oh, and Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson are race pimps and hustlers. Which is not at all racist to say PC POLICEMAN, SHEESH!

Go figure.

[rachel]

I remember seeing a chart showing that the earth's average temperature had only risen from -.5 to +.5 degrees in the last century... It doesn't seem like much until you realize that the measurements are in Celsius units, and 0 degrees is the freezing point of water. The earth's average temperature has gone from below freezing to above freezing. It's a critical change, any thinking person would agree.

[Whet Moser]

"A one- or two-degree-per-century rise in average global temperatures may have unpleasant consequences — with some pleasant ones as well."

He's got a point. On one hand, coastal cities will face a mass exodus that will make New Orleans look like a tiny blip in human history. On the other, my heating bills here in the upper Midwest will go down like five dollars a month. Plus other parts of the country will get their turn to be coastal cities, too.

[rea]

To be completely fair to the man, he hasn't actually written a book called Liberal Fascism, and shows very little sign of doing so in the future . . .

[aimai]

I.Think.I'm.In.Love.

"de-nutting and re-nutting" must be put in the general lexicon *today!*.

aimai

[LJ/Aquaria]

And this is precisely why Jonah will never be taken seriously by anyone who is themselves serious.

I'm not always serious, but I've never taken Goldberg seriously. Surely that doesn't mean I have to take him seriously sometimes! I'm being serious about this. Seriously!

[LJ/Aquaria]

To be completely fair to the man, he hasn't actually written a book called Liberal Fascism, and shows very little sign of doing so in the future ...

Anyone else would have been sued for breach of contract, long ago.

I guess Lucianne has "the pictures."

[Batocchio]

Great analysis!

[Batocchio]

Great analysis!

Basically, Jonah can't be a scholar and have his friends too when all his buddies are loons who don't like those pesky things called facts and rational, logical thought.