Whiskey Fire

Teaser

Projected date of Goldberg review: Wednesday next.

Teaser:

People who sincerely like this book are as passionate about it as are devotees of tentacle porn, only on aggregate they offer less added value to Critical Inquiry. Fans of tentacle porn are quite likely to have read/watched/masturbated-to tentacle porn. Fans of Goldberg's book probably haven't read it. This includes the blurb-furnishers.

Early review orders will receive hand-laminated blog posts published in the finest beeswax vellum rubbed clean and sparkly with the pureed livers of purebred mallard ducks culled from the great wild duck herds of the Duke of Mallard his own bad quacky self. Only $1500 a pop. Visa/Master Card preferred. 

 

Jonah Goldberg Is a Colossal Asshole

"Generational politics" isn't a gimmick when you're on the one hand browbeaten into going to college to "get a job" and on the other browbeaten into debt slavery because you went to college and there are no jobs.

You fucker.

...

This shreds.

 

Fat Black Gas Exudes, Boogaloo Too, Preliminaries

It Isn't Quite Ready, It's Only 5:30. One may be forgiven for supposing that nothing good could ever result from the emanation of a Jonah Goldberg "book." But one would be wrong.

As it happens, there exists an entire universe of activities that are "not reading a Jonah Goldberg book," and the overwhelming majority of these activities might be classified as "far preferable to reading a Jonah Goldberg book." And, remarkably, one of these activities includes "productive work."

BELIEVE IT OR NOT.

It's remarkable. The Internet by and large owes its success to its unsurpassed capacity to act as a Huge Distracting Thing, but put a Jonah Goldberg book anywhere near it, and Good Lord, suddenly you'd rather do quadratic equations, or use 1980s vintage encyclopedias to figure out upon what sea Albania verges, the chief features of its topography, and what its principal mineral resource just might constitute.*

You'd almost rather... work.

I know! Wild!

So, Jonah Goldberg could end procrastination as we know it. Huzzah!

But then, here we are.

I mean, in the interests of Having a Real Argument (we'll get to this, interminably), and To Be Fair (same thing), I will concede that the universe of activities preferable to "reading a Jonah Goldberg book" also includes "violently sticking a shrimp fork up your nostril."

And yeah, that often comes in second to working. By a nose. Hahahahaha.

What I mean is, kill me, I am going to read a Jonah Goldberg book.

Like, personally, this is akin to being handed a Sorcerous Object that informs you I open at the close....

Ugh, too geeky.

More butchly, for those about to mock, but are taking their time about it, we excuse you. Have a wee drinky drink, thanks awfully, don't mind if I do...

The colossus crawls. See, while I am procrastinating, I am going to read and review the whole frightful mess; this blog exists for the purpose of performing suchlike unholy enterprises, after all.

But I'm not proposing to buy the fucking thing.

I'm going to wait until it shows up at the local Barnes & Noble, read it there, sneeze on it, and then put it back on the shelf. It hasn't shown up yet. Checked yesterday. When it does, I will duly read n' sneeze.

So, then...

... uh...

... specifically, what, the perceptive reader may axe (and by "perceptive reader" I certainly don't mean you, redsnout), are you, Thers, procrastinating over, precisely, if it is not reading this Jonah Goldberg "book"?

Well, that is a good question, if posed rather rudely, and by the way, it is pronounced "ask," not "axe," you disgusting ill-educated filth-talker, your mother was a saint for not having you drowned at birth as a hopeless ill-spoken misfortunate.

Sorry. Lashing out.

I'm balking at an exploration of the Notices Thus Far, the appalling tedium of which ought to render my hasitency completely explicable.

The trouble I see....

A very heavy load. Oh Sweet Lord, is there ever so much hurting, it is deadly....

There's already so much tedious crap out there -- Goldberg's ponderously stupid disaster of an NPR interview, and the reviews -- where there is much hilarity. The sad git actually links to a glowing notice at something called The New York Journal of Books, which is kind of like bragging about the $4000 Swiss Watch you were shrewd enough to swindle a Bowery street vendor out of for twelve bucks and the rest of your hot dog.

The "New York Journal of Books."

I can't believe that exists, but it does. How can you even satirize these people?

HOW!

Next time you get sick you'll know. Well, it is Jonah Goldberg, the Laziest Man on Earth, whose Martian counterpart, Dropo, is filled with shame at the undignified comparison.

Here is (I shit you not) Jonah responding to even the mildest of criticisms:

I’ll get around to responding to his response when I have a second to catch my breath. I am underwhelmed.

I’m sorry for the quick rapid fire links, but I am quite simply exhausted. Also the Goldberg household is a depressing place at the moment as both my wife and daughter have been felled by terrible colds.

Aram Bakshian is mostly pleased with my effort, but there are few digs in there as well. I’ll take it.

When less exhausted and less pressed for time, I will probably respond.

"Dear National Review. My son Jonah's Very Serious Book just appeared. He is allergic to knowing what is in his books so please don't ask him questions that are hard or he will have hives. He has a Doctor's Note. Please excuse him from phys ed classes and give him a stipend."

BORED NOW. Goldberg wanks like no one else. Holy God.

*"Albania, Albania, you border on the Adriatic/ Your land is mostly mountainous/ Your main export is chrome."

Good Timing There, Fella

Signs that you are dealing with a dingaling: approving use of the terms "brokered convention," "bully pulpit," "classical liberal," or "federalism."

"Written by Jonah Goldberg" is also a bit of a clue.

Federalism — the process whereby you push most political questions to the lowest democratic level possible — has been ripe on the right for years now.

"Ripe" is precisely the right adjective.

The main advantage of federalism is more fundamental than the “laboratories of democracy” idea. Federalism is simply the best political system ever conceived of for maximizing human happiness. A one-size-fits-all policy imposed at the national level has the potential to make very large numbers of citizens unhappy, even if it was arrived at democratically. In a pure democracy, I always say, 51 percent of the people can vote to pee in the cornflakes of 49 percent of the people.

Fuck your cornflakes.

Politics doesn't get more vicious than at the local level. (O'Brien doesn't carry off Faustus Kelly, but the premise, selling your soul to the devil to win a by-election, remains inspired.)

To the broader point, do we really want very happy local communities -- say, ones in Florida -- to be making crazy laws about who can shoot whom?

Not only does that mean more people will be happy, but the moral legitimacy of political decisions will be greater.

Lynching, for example -- what better proof do we have of how well "federalism" guarantees the "moral legitimacy" of decisions taken at the local level that make local individuals happy?

The problem for conservative and libertarian federalists is that whenever we talk about federalism, the Left hears “states’ rights” — which is then immediately, and unfairly, translated into, “Bring back Bull Connor.”

Right. Unfair. Gotcha.

The rest of Goldberg's piece is a reasoned, concise analysis of what would happen if a local community in say Detroit were to declare Sharia Law.

Ha! Fooled you! No, it's just more wanking.

A Left-Right federalist compromise would make America a happier, freer, more prosperous and interesting country.

Sort of like Somalia!

Snakes on a Whinge

As it turns out, a sideshow freak squirt-gun-pee fight is not as entertaining as it sounds, so I'm not much following the GOP idiocy this evening. So here is Jonah Goldberg being a tit. About snakes.

As you may have heard, invasive Burmese pythons have nearly wiped out populations of white tail deer, raccoons and other mammals in the Florida everglades. Now I am not an absolutist when it comes invasive species. I like wild horses and tumbleweeds, for instance. But I am biased against giant frick’n snakes that can eat small children and large dogs illegally sneaking into our country.

Why doesn't Jonah Goldberg want big snakes to eat illegal alien dogs? Because his particples dangle.

And that's not all that's out there oddly flapping, in this post. Jonah Goldberg is Taking a Jocular Tone because he is going to recommend that the government actually do something about a genuine problem the Free Market can't solve, and he dimly senses that in the idiot universe he inhabits, this is Heterodox Treason, and might get him burned at the stake, or worse, forced to get a job. Hence... Comedy!

I’ll go one further: I think it is the right and proper role of government to protect us from giant alien snakes that are destroying our environment, threatening our children and pets. If you want to call me a RINO for that, go for it. I can do without the cowboy poetry festivals, but invasive giant snake genocide: mark me down for a yes.

If Jonah Goldberg knows anything, it's his audience. They won't cotton to no socialist snake-removin' gubmint communism! It's a trick! First they came for the pythons, then for the credit default swaps, and then for my coldeadhands.

But then again, Burmese ("furrin!") Pythons in America is not exactly a problem that can be saved by cutting taxes, though if you think the Florida GOP is not nuts enough to suggest otherwise, hahahaha. (Also, Fidel Castro sent all the snakes over during the boatlift. It is known, Marisleysis (the Cuban translation of "khaleesi")).

So if the Free Market won't rid the Everglades of the bad snakes, and you can't just wonder "aren't the Marines at kind of loose ends right now?" because that would mean Government Action, and you're as idiotically compromised as Jonah Goldberg, you'd go and Get Big Stupid.

The Hell, I say: We nearly wiped out the buffalo in this country because a bunch of guys made money off of buffalo hides. Thousands of years before that, mankind eradicated the woolly mammoth with spears. Spears! Give me five thousand Ted Nugent fans and all the weapons they can carry and the waters of the everglades will run red with Burmese snake blood.

5,000 Ted Nugent fans? The waters of the Everglades will run red with the blood of 4,999 dead Ted Nugent fans and one elderly toothless scrawny meth addict triumphantly, if brainlessly, waving around a shotgun and a well-perforated bicycle tire. The snakes will look on in snaky bemusement.

You see, I don’t think we need a vast new government bureaucracy to kill snakes. Heck I think if we created a vast new bureaucracy to kill snakes we would very quickly end up subsidizing people to raise snakes to kill them. But, are you telling me that during a time when unemployment is outrageously high, the government can’t put a bounty on snakes and get results? I don’t know what the right number is but for the sake of argument if we had a hunting season in which you could bring in unlimited number of Burmese pythons for $50 per pound, my hunch is Burmese pythons would be erecting memorials to the great snake genocide of 2012.

Yup. That's exactly what the Everglades needs, hordes of desperate but well-armed morons in a fragile ecosystem blasting away at anything that slithers.

The whole reason the pythons are in the Everglades is that jackass human beings with more money than sense threw them there because they just didn't give a shit after they learned that it takes effort to care for an exotic animal, and BO-RING.

I kind of suspect that Jonah Goldberg knows he's talking crap here, but that he's too into his idiot paycheck to know he can't talk anything but glib shit. Or maybe I'm wrong and he really is that much of a shit. Not that it matters.

I've no problem with anyone who knows what they are doing going out into the Everglades and killing pythons, but this has to be a government project, because, well WTF? Aren't the Marines supposed to be The Shit, protecting America, and all? I could never figure out what the fuck they were doing in Iraq, but if they want to get their asses to the Everglades and fight pythons, fine. As long as they know what they are doing.

And Jonah Goldberg doesn't capitalize "Everglades" because he is a tit.

Idiot Empire

In these dark, uncertain, scabic times it is good to know that we can always count on Jonah Goldberg to supply the nation with noisome bullshit.

And so it ends. The United States is leaving Iraq.

We're leaving Iraq now. It's in our eyes. There' no disguising it. It really comes as no surprise to find that Obama planned it all along. And now, sure as the sun has crossed the sky, this lie is over. Lost, like the tears that used to tide us over. Etc.

I'm solidly in the camp that sees this as a strategic blunder.

Whatever camp you're in, man, you're solidly there. Nobody ever said otherwise.

Still, there's an upside. Obama's decision to leave Iraq should deal a staggering blow to America's critics at home and abroad.

After all, what kind of empire does this sort of thing?

That's actually a rather good question.

My thesis about the True Reasons for why the Iraqi Adventure was launched has for a long time been that they did it because they were a gang of demented ideologues. Yes: they wanted the oil. But they also wanted to Prove Melodiously Triumphant a cacophany of horrendously ludicrous wingnut theses about how the world might be brought into sweet sweet music. It never ocurred to them that they were sub-kazoo class incompetents. But they were! Jonah is still trying to get an A-flat out of a Gowanus Trombone...

In many quarters of the Middle East, the war on terror is cast as a religiously inspired front for crusader-imperialism. This nonsense overlooks the fact that America has gone to war to save Muslim lives more often than any modern Muslim country has. Under Democrats and Republicans we've fought to help Muslims in Somalia, Kosovo, Bosnia, Kuwait, Afghanistan, Iraq and now Libya. We've sought the conversion of no one and -- with the exception of Kuwait -- we've never presented a bill. When asked to leave, we've done so.

When asked to stay home, we haven't, also too. "Thank you for the invasion! Also the drone bombs."

What sort of an empire are we?

Invasions did not make us popular amongst the invaded. Ingrates. Weird!

She Might Rub Her Legs

Shorter Jonah Goldberg, briefly shocked rudely awake by Occupy Wall Street:

Snort, snort, shzznxx, phew... what?

... Oh thank God, red-baiting, that's easy!

(Lowers ponderous head softly back into bowl of Cheez-Doodles he passed out into in 1998. Resumes snoring, farting.)

Shorter Dennis Prager, displaying leaky Depends:

Goldman Sachs = the unfairly maligned "niggers" of the new century.

‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard. We are aware of all Internet traditions. Attribution stolen from SN. But you knew that.

Jonah!

Jonah Goldberg informs us that MSNBC is "dumb," because liberal ideological conformity is not remunerative, while on the other hand, conservatives all saying the same bullshit, as on Fox, makes one rich, and so that is just sound business practice.

Damn. I don't even have to make a joke here. Thanks, Jonah.

MAS. This is a wonderful Goldbagerism:

Liberals might respond that Fox does the same thing, except it really doesn’t. They always have at least one Democrat or liberal, particularly for something like a Democratic debate. MSNBC couldn’t even rustle up Joe Scarborough?  But even if Fox did, so what?

Only goes point Vassar undergraduates Hitler burp.

Jonah Goldberg Tells a Funny Joke

So, uh, hurricanes and so forth. In other news, Jonah Goldberg has said something on the Internet... and it is dumb!

As I am something of a fan of Internet Humor, please allow me to demonstrate why this Jonah Goldberg column is a Funny Joke. Below, I provide a set of direct quotes: Jonah's Setups, and then His Punchline.

You will laugh!

Texas governor Rick Perry is the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination now, at least in the national polls. Undoubtedly that’s the main reason so many East Coast pundits and Beltway wags are making fun of him. He likes guns! He’s from Texas! He talks funny! He’s a — gird yourself now — Christian!

SETUP.

Rick Perry’s overt Christianity horrifies many of his liberal critics. Bill Keller, the outgoing editor of the New York Times, agonized recently that “Rick Perry, Michele Bachmann and Rick Santorum are all affiliated with fervid subsets of evangelical Christianity.

SETUP.

Perry’s twang offends liberals who think everyone should talk like Barack Obama, a man of cosmopolitan and learned diction.

SETUP.

Obama’s gaffes earn no traction the way, say, the last president’s “Bushisms” did. Nor do they cause bowel-stewing panic at MSNBC the way Sarah Palin’s flavorful patois does.

SETUP.

And don’t even get me started on Joe Biden.

SETUP.

A lot of people on the East and West coasts are bigots and snobs about “flyover types.” They equate funny accents with stupidity, and they automatically assume someone who went to Texas A&M must be dumber than someone who went to Yale. Overt displays of religion trigger their fight-or-flight instincts, causing them to lash out irrationally.

AND THE HILARIOUS PUNCHLINE...

... HE ACTUALLY SAYS THIS:

Conservatism is starting to have an identity-politics problem all its own.

!

 

 

 

Not a Parody Either

Jonah Goldberg sips the surly blobs of snot, or else, snorts a Twinkie. (Note: it's not funnier if you imagine Jonah burbling this sitting with his thumb up his ass. It's just more mimetic.)

Anyway, Jonah finds it amusing that someone with the same last name as his isn't half as dumb as he is.

I just knew Republicans were somehow to blame for a liberal journalist on a liberal TV show on a liberal television network calling the liberal president of the United States a “d*ck.” I just couldn’t figure out why until Michelle explained it to me.

I just knew Jonah was so fucking cretinous as to call Halperin "liberal," much less Joe Scarborough.

And I love — love — this part: Obama, whose greatest fault in office has been a misplaced faith in the GOP’s capacity for reasonableness…

And she thinks the DC pundit class lives in a bubble.

Let he who pretends Michele Bachmann isn't insane huff the first fart. Or something.