Whiskey Fire

The Overpaid Army

I suppose it's self-evident that the Supreme Court Senate nominating process is an excellent illustration of Bourdieu's notion of "censorship," that is, of how rare it is to ever see anyone ever say anything other than what they are authorized to say according to the prevailing politics of the field in which they are playing. Like, duh. Or are we supposed to believe that anyone really gives a shit about the "wise Latina" crap? Sotomayor is a very moderate, if slightly "liberal" judge, and everyone knows it, but we must have the theater! Just like we did with Alito and Roberts.

The difference with Alito and Roberts, though, is that there was a concerted wingnut attempt to pretend they were moderates, though they're pretty far right. With Sotomayor, there is a concerted wingnut attempt to pretend she's radical, though she's not all too far to the left. That both sets of attempts equal in intensity what they exhibit in ludicrousness tells us a lot about our polity, which is, namely, that it's stupid, because I have to say, the media and the administration show lots of buy-in for the wingnut frame. Just saying. 

On another issue, just to make clear, yeah, Jonah Goldberg really does believe he isn't a joke. For instance:

I can’t begin to tell you how edifying it is to hear stories, almost on a daily basis, about how the book is being included in college courses. I’ve spoken to university seminars on it. College kids are constantly writing me for papers they’re doing, and civics teachers are incorporating stuff from the book. That feels so much more concrete to me than bestseller lists and blog spats.

He doesn't even know he's a mark. Impressive, really.

Goldberg Special: Barack Obama Prepares the Way for a New Holocaust

I'd forgotten that Jonah Goldberg has a blog specifically devoted to "Liberal Fascism," which he uses to deposit random items that he runs across and that he imagines proves his thesis, much in the same way that he would stick his gum under his desk "for later." Anyway I imagine that everyone else also forgot he had this little hidey-hole, or this well-chewed gooey wad of stupid might have gotten more noticed at the time it was hocked up.

Lebensunwertes Leben   

From the LA Times:

Reporting from Washington — President Obama suggested at a town hall event Wednesday night that one way to shave medical costs is to stop expensive and ultimately futile procedures performed on people who are about to die and don't stand to gain from the extra care.

In a nationally televised event at the White House, Obama said families need better information so they don't unthinkingly approve "additional tests or additional drugs that the evidence shows is not necessarily going to improve care."

He added: "Maybe you're better off not having the surgery, but taking the painkiller."

There's an interesting contradiction here. According to the pro-choice perspective, it's outrageous for the state to interfere in a woman's decision to terminate a pregnancy. But it's pragmatic and reasonable for the state to consider terminating a person, if some money can be saved.

This logic is nothing new.

The link of course goes to a Wikipedia entry about Nazis and mass killings.

Anyway, there's no "contradiction" here, since he's talking about families making better informed decisions, not "the state" forbidding old people from having surgery to save money. So the principle is the same, that health decisions should be left to the person or people most directly involved.

More to the point, the dilemma Obama is talking about is one that families of people with terminal diseases have to face all the time. And, yes, obviously there are lots of cases where people have had risky, grueling, expensive surgeries, when they really would have been better off taking the painkiller. And that can be a damn hard thing to watch.

But I don't suppose the sort of people who went nuts over Terri Schiavo, or the people who would look at Obama's statement and think Buchenwald, actually give a rat's ass about the realities facing families in such situations, either because they're actual sociopaths or just pretending to be for fun & profit.

Anyhow it's good to remember now and again that while Jonah Goldberg sometimes comes across as a hilarious doofus, he really is at bottom a horrible little shit.

Strictly Comedy

Funny.

Well, I’d say what disappointed me the most was the Left’s reaction to it. With very, very, few exceptions, the Left decided that it was vital to destroy the book, unread and unexamined. It’s almost a constant theme of the liberal and left-wing reviews of Liberal Fascism: Do Not Read This Book.

Hilarious. Jonah Goldberg defends his book against the relentless probing questions of K-Lo. Yuck. Anyhoo, I fucking read it, and it really, really sucks. (To be fair, it's not the sort of book that one reads, in the sense that a kidney stone is not the sort of thing one excretes.) Also, please don't think nobody's tracking the weaseling; I am!

This, though, is just pathetic:

One of the points of Liberal Fascism isn’t to simply say “I know you are but what am I?” to the Left (though that’s definitely in there), it’s to point out that because we’ve made fascism into this cartoon villain we’ve allowed truly fascistic (or if you prefer, statist or progressive) assumptions to suffuse modern life on both the right and the left.

This, you will note, is the chief reason the book is stupid: a ridiculous conflation of "statism," "progressivism," and "fascism." (Or, hell, Jacobinism. Or veganism. Or your grandma saying eat your vegetables.) He has never addressed this point, because he's an imbecile.

And this is sad.

Also, I can’t begin to tell you how edifying it is to hear stories, almost on a daily basis, about how the book is being included in college courses. I’ve spoken to university seminars on it. College kids are constantly writing me for papers they’re doing, and civics teachers are incorporating stuff from the book. That feels so much more concrete to me than bestseller lists and blog spats.

It's still not scholarship, and you can't fart magic pixie dust on it and make it so. It's like that, and that's the way it is.

Fat Black Gas Exudes. Still!

Jonah Goldberg, perhaps under the impression that nobody is paying attention, as they shouldn't be, to be sure, except for those of us who for their spare-time literary activities fathom hell, or at least heck, for reasons obscure to even themselves, tries a pretty entertaining weasel-move, what a dope. For the shits, the giggles:

Let's start with some intellectual history. One of the central arguments of the book is that American Progressivism was essentially a European import, with American characteristics — though American Progressives also had a serious influence on Europe as well.  In the book, I call it an international "fascist moment" but if you want to call it a "statist moment" instead, that's fine with me.

This is not a particularly controversial statement.

No, it isn't, in the sense that the proposition "parking meters burble and Scooby-Doo the escutcheon" is not usually argued, at least in polite circles. In civilized precincts the fudging of "fascism" and "statism" is precisely why Jonah's book is so godawful fucking stupid. Or, since it's my blog, what I said.

Bloop-dee-do, fart fart burp, statism fascism, smatism flashism, blorg blorg fart.

Personally I think there is no point in using terms like "statism" or (for fuck's sake "classical liberalism") if we're going to be going over this shit on the Internet, of all places (as I've said many times before, if someone sincerely announces online that they are a "classical liberal," what they mean is, "hi, I'm a dick") but the basic point stands: Goldberg is making shit up. Feh.

MORE. Frickin' Noon.

FINALLY. Meant to say: thanks, fellow Ringsend cowpoke.

An Ugly Unwanted Stray

Jonah Goldberg defends tea-bagging from liberals. And comedy ensues, not least because Jonah for rather obvious reasons chooses to invent liberal reactions to the tea-bagging as opposed to looking stuff up. He cleverly avoids any accusations of straw-man argument, however, through the deft use of italics. Because if you stuff straw man argument into italics, it magically becomes not a load of straw-man shit, but the purest home-shat gold. 

Shazam! See, I just turned you into a chicken. Through the magic of italics. Zap! Now I have restored you to your familiar red-snouted disgrace of a carcass. No need to thank me, this was merely a demonstration. But behave, dammit. Squawk!

Moving on. Observe that Jonah omits the most common liberal response to the tea-bagging, namely, laughter. Why does he do this? Because he's a fucking moron, that's why. Christ, even with the italics, the guy decisively loses his straw man tussles. For openers:

1. All of this tyranny talk is overheated and idiotic.

So, there is a lot of "tyranny talk," and it's stupid. What "tyranny talk," Jonah, and how was it rebutted? Oh, who gives a rat's ass. The man isn't being paid for research, but for farting up field-methane.

According to that Reason video I posted below, Americans work an average of 103 days a year just to pay their taxes. If you had to work 365 days a year to pay your taxes, that would be a kind of slavery or indentured servitude, because all of your productive labor would be going to the government. You would have no resources of your own to provide for the life you wanted. Instead the government would provide you not with what you want, but what the government decides you need.

This actually gets us someplace important. Weasel it any way one likes, but Obama decisively won an election as open and honest as our nation can manage to put together. Also, the Democratic party won a very significant number of seats in both legislative bodies: all the Republicans have going for them is an ability to use a counter-majoritarian parliamentary maneuver in what is clearly our least democratic electoral body, the ridiculous Senate.

And Obama won the election with what is really unprecedented grassroots support -- and that support and activity mattered a lot. And still does. A LOT of Americans feel a sense of ownership in Obama's win. Sneer at that if you must, but (1) these people vastly outnumber the tea-baggers, and (2) they quite rightly believe that they have meaningfully participated in our democracy. And they have!

Goldberg's claim only makes sense if you have an a priori concept of the American governent as utterly incapable of reflecting the will of the majority. There is no room in this tiny little smelly ill-lit garret for the idea that maybe a majority of Americans have decided, on the merits, to go with a particular guy and his clearly stated policies. However, that is what happened, and most Americans are cool with it so far. And are they morons? Not any more than they were in the 1980s, frankly. I think less so, but then, I would.

L'etat, c'est nous. I'm not ready to surrender that, but Goldberg is. Now that his team lost, anyhow. Raise your hand if you think Jonah Goldberg-class thinkers would ever be able to accept, say, a majority of the nation deciding that taxes could maybe go a little bit higher. What a wacky scenario! Does this point even need more flogging...?

2. The original tea parties were about taxation without representation, today's spending is the result of Democrats winning elections, so it's taxation with representation.

This is self-evidently stupid: observe the lamest wriggle ever.

today's spending is being achieved under false pretenses. Obama says he's spending this money to fix a crisis, but much of his spending has nothing to do with the crisis but with shopworn liberal action items. However, since Obama campaigned on many of these items, I don't think it amounts to taxation without representation. But it does seem like the sort of duplicity worth a protest or two.

HI-KEEBA! Non-duplicitous duplicity is the very worst kind of duplicity. At this point the flinging of garbage ought to commence...

3. These protests are unpatriotic astroturfing by plutocrats.

Oh Lord, garbage!

I find it sort of amazing that when groups like ANSWER, a Mos Eisley cantina of America-hating nut cases, take to the streets it's a full-flowering of democracy in action. When ACORN pays their ragamuffins to protest, or when Rainbow/PUSH shakes down businesses through racial extortion, it's the sort of direct democratic action Thomas Paine dreamed of. And when labor unions pay people to protest, it's populist. But when a bunch of independent Americans, talk-show hosts, and email campaigners organize hundreds of protests around the country, it's astroturfing.

ANSWER organized the 2002-3 anti-war rallies. So? Only a very small percentage of the marchers at those rallies knew, or cared, who ANSWER was. It was anyhow a ludicrously smaller percentage than the number of teabaggers who could identify, say, Sean Hannity. ANSWER is going to get that many people on the streets now, how, exactly? They have no constituency, while loads of Americans have always hated the stupid Bushite Iraq war.

Goldberg is free to deny that a major TV "news" network did not go all out to support the teabagging, and he is free to pretend that the opposite somehow pertained to the anti-war stuff. He is free to be stupid. But those peace marches really did represent Americans with stifled voices and heralded an incipient national consensus; the tea-parties represent the loony rumblings of a defeated and deeply confused rump. And that's all she wrote.

4. Republicans are hypocrites for suddenly caring about deficits.

The actual complaint from our side is that Republicans are deluded schmucks or total liars. "I don't get it. Republicans didn't care enough about the deficit when it went up a 'little' under Bush (to pay for a war), therefore they can't complain when Obama sends it through the stratosphere (to pay for socialized medicine)? How does that work?"

Gah. The "a little" is fun enough. But the rest is good too. If you thought, correctly, the war was a rotten idea, that was all pissed-away money. And even if you liked the war, how much of that money was deftly spent? And was "the war" the only reason for the ballooning deficit? What about the preposterous tax package? 

And the deficit spending now is in response to a financial crisis caused by conservatives. That's how it works! Not hard to grasp, actually.

5. The populist anger out there is the real face of America's homegrown fascism.

This is much fun -- he just made this up! But to field the fungo:

Sigh. While I think Rick Perry's secession talk is idiotic and unfortunate (even accounting for Texas's unique history), I am at a loss as to how any of this stuff smacks of fascism. Even Perry is talking in the context of the federal government doing too much, taking away too much liberty, getting too involved in local communities, and interfering too much with the individual.

How do I say this so people will understand? Fascism isn't a libertarian doctrine! It just isn't, never will be, and it can't be cast as one. Anarchism, secessionism, extreme localism, or rampant individualism may be bad, evil, wrong, stupid, selfish, and all sorts of other things (though not by my lights). But they have nothing to do with a totalitarian vision of the state where individuals and institutions alike must march in step and take orders from the government.

Fascism flourishes when "intellectuals" preach about the pointlessness of ordinary democratic modalities, figure duly elected officials as illegitimate, nurse inexplicable grievances, encourage xenophobia, appeal to a "nation" supernal to a political system, exploit economic crises, cheer on the crazies, apologize for stuff like state-sanctioned torture, deliberately fuck with established law, and generally make shit up and fart around with accountability-free shitheaded opinionizing.

But if you think you'd be more "free" under a Liberated Texas under President Perry, say, well, that's a fate you richly deserve, and I almost feel bad you won't ever get your wish, you crazy fucks.

Refuse Endlessly

Apparently Mr. Limbaugh has Mr. Goldberg's balls in his possession. Shit happens. Wolcott has some fun with the situation, but I am going to have to disagree with him for reasons that are very good.

(Note: post written in Earnest Sophomore Antiqua. Had it set there.)

(Ahem)

Gerry Wolcott seems to be of the opinion and to think that Jonah Goldberg should take the bold route and bravely take on Rush Limbaugh full-speed-ahead.  However, In this essay I will show that Wolcott is wrong when he says that Jonah Goldberg should act bravely. I express that Jonah Goldberg should Elect the Way of the Coward.

The first reason James Wolcott is wrong to say Jonah Goldberg should be acting brave is in this sentence that I quote:

Don't be go hiding behind your workload just because you're reluctant to risk direct confrontation with Rush, whose grotesque ego has become a major artery-clog that threatens to destroy post-Buckley conservatism unless you, Jonah, unleash the Fletcher Christian within and lead a mutiny against this dogmatic despot, chucking him overboard and letting him bob to shore until he is but a round dot in a distant hue.

This makes it seem like, you know, doing things, and that would be a lot of work. I agree that doing things is a lot of work. If I am Jonah Goldberg, I fell asleep before the first comma. Therefore James Wolcott is wrong and Jonah wins because how can Jonah even be expected to read that entire sentence? Jonah should act like a coward because paying attention is hard work and nobody likes hard work I don't.

The second reason James Wolcott is wrong to say Jonah Goldberg should be acting brave is in this sentence that I quote:

By reprimanding you on the air he's reminding you and everybody that he's top dog, number one, Frank Sinatra and Tony Soprano rolled into one big boss-man ball of pizza dough.

Again, the cowardice path is the best one for Jonah Goldberg. If Rush brings pizza, where is the debate? I like pizza! Frankly I do not think John Wolcott has thought this one through. He should not get any pizza.

The third reason James Wolcott is wrong to say Jonah Goldberg should be brave is in this sentence that I quote:

Rise from your swivel chair, brush the bread crumbs off your lap, and warrior up.

This is so stupid and an insult to Jonah as it implies he does not have a Wii. Jonah Goldberg can "warrior up" without even brushing off breadcrumbs! Get with the times old man.

So, in conclusion, David Wolcott is wrong when he says that Jonah Goldberg should act bravely. I believe that Jonah Goldberg should Elect the Way of the Coward. It's like that old saying from the TV show Lawrence, why go out for hotdogs when you have Steak-Umms at home? Or maybe that was Heyek.

I do hope that they rouse Jonah sufficiently to let him know how all this turns out.

A Sempiternal Man

The Corner has lapped itself. And thereby given itself a canker sore.

Surprise in October?   [Jonah Goldberg]

Drudge: "WASH TIMES Friday: Obama secretly tried to sway Iraqi government to ignore Bush deal on keeping troops in Iraq... Developing... "

Update: Reader reax:

Surely you don't think that a presidential candidate conspiring with a foreign government in an effort to subvert U.S. policy would be as serious as, say, a state official fired being "improperly fired" for being unresponsive in dealing with a berserk state trooper who threatened a governor's family.

Update II: Yes, I know there was a similar story from Amir Taheri last month. It just doesn't sound like the Washington Times would recycle that without something new.  But who knows?

You know what it's like right now for me? It's like playing some video game right after you got infinity extra lives.

This One Is Better Than Ever

Shorter -- no, verbatim Jonah Goldberg. The set-up:

It seems a lot of folks beat me to this, though I confess it came  to my mind the second I saw the Obama "O" salute. The Obama salute appears in the Star Trek episode The Way to Eden. I suppose National Review is Herbert.

Annnnnnnnd, the pratfall:

Update: A couple of leftwing emailers are claiming the whole salute thing is a joke. Maybe that'll turn out to be true. But, these folks might ponder why the "joke" seems so completely and utterly plausible.

OK, I've pondered it, and I'm going with "it seems plausible to you because you're a gullible moron."

This was also a joke, one observes, and yet it did not occur to Jonah to ponder why he thought it was completely and utterly plausible. Huh.

UPDATE: Please, please, geniuses who would shell out money for an NRO fundraiser, do as Jonah suggests here. It will be literally the most hilarious thing ever.

MORE: Althouse weighs in.

Why is anyone paying any attention to this self-promotion by some lame Los Angeles "creative agency"?

Well, myself, I'm paying attention to it only insofar as Jonah Goldberg is making an ass of himself over it. Althouse, of course, is paying attention to it so she can expound her theories about fast food vaginas.

That's a reference to my old onion rings post — more here — where I said "the 'O' of an onion ring is a vagina symbol." Which is why I'm saying now that the salute looks like it means "fuck me." It's a way to say "here's my vagina," just like the upraised middle finger means "here's my penis."

Will someone please stop feeding sugary cereal to the tiny hamster that powers the wheels of Althouse's mind? It makes him hyper and bouncy.

My Next Free Cheese

Oy, Jonah Goldberg, on his beautiful book:

Though the evidence is as much anecdotal as anything else, I think the book has made a lasting mark on the culture, despite the best efforts of the lefty blogs and the liberal establishment to close ranks in a concerted effort to discredit it and/or me.

Even the skidmark it has made on the culture will wash out, soon enough. But this is really rather sad -- did he entertain hopes that this book would be taken seriously, as like, a work of "scholarship"? Well, yes:

About a dozen or so professors have told me that they've incorporated (or will next semester)  the book into their classes.

Cringe-worthy, really. And again:

Anyway, I think the book will have enduring legs on the merits.

This suggests that nobody has been more profoundly suckered by Liberal Fascism than Jonah Goldberg.  Poor dope. 

Anyway, there's not really a "concerted effort" on the "lefty blogs" to "discredit" (snicker) Jonah Goldberg. And there never was -- a lot of people wanted to laugh at him and his silly book, is all. Because of the deliberately and moronically snide title, for one thing, but also because of just how generally flatulent the whole production turned out to be. 

As for why I'm even bothering with Jonah now: he is merely the most consistently entertaining creature in the wingnut menagerie, for the time being. The stuff about Obama's birth certificate was comical but burnt out fast; Jesse Helms can only die so many times, more's the pity.

Nothing illustrates the extent to which "conservatives" have so much absolute nothing going on nowadays is how hard it's gotten to make fun of them.

Even Townhall is just plain boring nowadays. I mean, here's Kathleen "I Like Big Fuzzy Balls" Parker talking about... Wimbledon (sigh), straining manfully (or the lexical equivalent) to infuse the proceedings with sufficient priapism to make the case that Western Culture has fallen dreadfully from the civilized heights it enjoyed back in the days when we made Oscar Wilde pick oakum for fucking rent boys:

At a time when adults bemoan the paucity of role models, Wimbledon provided a banquet of riches. Tennis has always been a gentleman's (and lady's) game, though in recent years standards have sagged. Manners aren't as fashionable or as rigorously enforced as once upon a time.

Though you have to admire the imagery here:

Throughout, both men were mesmerizingly fierce and yet imperturbably calm. At crucial points they were like gladiators playing chess.

Hackneyed, sure. But then again there's nothing quite like a cliche wearing slightly new clothes when it comes to sports commentary, which tends often enough as it is towards a very K-Parkerian pecksniffery. Shit. Give her three hours in the wee hours on Fox Sports Radio! She would be like a water pistol in the desert, I'm telling you.

Anyway, wingnuts got nothing. I wish one of them would just point out already that they're in the shitter because of the war based on lies, the social issues based on hate, the environmental policy based on greed, and the economic policy based on, uh, greed, as well. Because watching that poor bastard get tossed on the barbecue would at least make the whole crowd of them fun again just like they used to be, back when they were pretending full-blast that George W. Bush ever knew what the hell he was doing.

In the meantime, we'll always have Goldberg.

Slopes of Big Ugly

One of the most glaring problems with Movement Conservatism is that they let Jonah Goldberg belong to it. A worse problem is that they let him speak. To compound this error, they give him something of a prominent platform.

In today's episode of Jonah Goldberg being an ass, here he is denying that Jesse Helms was a racist sonofabitch.

From a reader:

It would be refreshing if the National Review took the occasion of Jesse Helms' death to reflect on American conservatism's historical complicity with racism, rather than to make jokes about fringe left definitions of racism.  All I have seen on the Corner are breathless eulogizations of Jesse Helms.  If you really wanted Americans outside of your base to take people like Ward Connerly seriously, you would call a spade a spade, and denounce Jesse Helms' racist legacy as a stain on conservatism.

Me: I have no problem with reflecting on conservatism and race. But I find these sorts of finger-wags tiresome. The gist seems to be: "Agree with my unfair stereotype of conservatism or be guilty of conforming to my unfair stereotype of conservatism." If conservatives are the racists he suggests they are, why aren't NRO writers celebrating Helms' alleged racism rather than denying it? Maybe folks around here don't think the liberal line is true (in whole or in part)? And as such, throwing Helms under the bus to appease the fingerwaggers would be nothing more than an act of cowardice.

If the reader could break out of the Corner and read some of the pieces we have posted on the homepage, he might at least contemplate that Helms' career is more complicated than the mean-spirited and agenda driven mainstream media obits have suggested.

One of the most important differences between principled liberalism and the deeply muddled "conservatism" of Jonah Goldberg and the moral morons he speaks for is that for liberals, the "oh yes, he was a racist, sure... BUT" style arguments cut no ice. Especially when the racist (and homophobe!) in question was (a) egregiously bigoted, (b) politically powerful, (c) unrepentant, and (d) lauded on his expiration as some sort of a "hero" by a soi-disant "intellectual movement."

Recent discussions of "conservative" v. "liberal" views of patriotism and so forth really just boil down to where you stand on the end of Jesse Helms, and I for one am content to let matters there so rest. I mean -- it's Jesse Helms, for the love of fuck...

UPDATE. Jonah Goldberg links to this to explain why "conservatives" are not clueless douchebags on the issue of race. The first few sentences are a positive delight.

On April 4, 2008, mourners gathered at St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York to memorialize William F. Buckley, Jr., who had died five weeks earlier. That same Friday, mourners one thousand miles away gathered at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis to memorialize Martin Luther King, Jr., who had been murdered there exactly 40 years before.

The coincidence resonates. Drawing on exceptional rhetorical talents without ever being elected to public office, each man transformed the terrain where mere politicians clash.

The sheer bloody cheek. More tomorrow. (But for now, nobody at the fucking NR has any goddamn business talking static to Pravda. No shit.)