GOLDBERG SKOOLS APPLEBAUM FARRRRRT! I hate to make it Goldberg Week, but he's in rare form. After a stint gazing through the window at a Times seminar on Woodrow Wilson, slugging Mountain Dew and telling passers-by how he could lick them perfessers even with this bucket stuck on his foot, Goldberg hobbles over to the Washington Post, where he notices a column by Anne Applebaum.

Applebaum looks at the Tea Party types' condemnation of top-college graduates as elitists, and wonders why they're complaining. For one thing, Applebaum says, the elite is less elite than once it was, since "the most elite American universities have in the past two decades made the greatest effort to broaden their student bodies" with children of the lower classes. For another, many of the conservatives yelling about elites are pretty damn elite themselves. Her unremarkable conclusion is that the elitism charge "often means nothing more than 'a person whose politics I don't like' or even 'a person who is snobby,'" and is unlikely to lead to more responsive leadership.

Here's how Goldberg reads it:

Borrowing from Daniel Bell (and I suspect, Hannah Arendt), Applebaum argues that the current tide of resentment at “elites” boils down to envy.

Sigh, now we have to suffer through grafs of Goldberg missing the point. Not that it isn't entertaining in its own way:

Now, I do believe envy plays a serious and under-appreciated role in politics. But Applebaum’s theory of the sources and contours of that envy strike me as not merely wrong but actually silly.

Come on, Goldberg, show this Yale bitch that Goucher College grads know how to argumentate!

For Applebaum, the fact that the elite graduated from top-tier schools is all the proof she needs that these people deserve to be in charge. Indeed, Applebaum — without a moment’s pause to cite any evidence — insists that universities have diversified without dropping standards at all. (But I don’t want to have an argument about quotas and all that, because it’s a distraction from my real objection).

Wow -- even after misrepresenting Applebaum's point, it only takes Goldberg three steps to get his other foot in a bucket. At the Ivies admissions are about as competitive as they've every been, yet they still have high enough minority representation that Goldberg's fellow yahoos, such as Glenn Harlan Reynolds, are forever bitching about it. Simple shame wouldn't keep Goldberg from trying to argue that more black people means worse education, so I have to assume someone warned him he was headed for a trap. (I wonder which of the interns drew this terrible assignment. The one they're trying to get rid of, probably.)

Applebaum doesn’t seem to comprehend that it is not status-class anxiety that is driving the main critique of the elite. It is that this particular elite is hellbent on bossing the country around that will make America less meritocratic.

No one ever taught Goldberg about the folly of argument from italicization.

No one begrudges kids who’ve made good from tough backgrounds. What bothers lots of Americans is when those kids then think they are entitled to cajole, nudge, command and denigrate the rest of America.

Thankfully these patriots have access to thesauruses!

To date, I’ve seen not one instance of Tea Partiers denouncing engineers, physicists, cardiologists, accountants, biologist, archeologists or a thousand other professions who’ve emerged from elite schools. Because those people aren’t bossing anybody around.

Also not mentioned by Goldberg and his TP pals: Investment bankers. Because they never boss anybody around. At least not so's you'd notice. And I hear Carl Paladino is a real sweetheart behind the mask of psychosis he puts on to win votes.

In the inevitable follow-up inspired by "reader mail," I expect to see added in evidence those obnoxious brats from the Yale Drama School who go on to Hollyweird, become stars, and boss around their personal shoppers and assistants. Who will later write to National Review, "That's exactly right, and that's why this lifelong-Democrat personal assistant will vote Republican for the first time in his/her life!"

The rest is all flailing to get the buckets off his feet, in the course of which Goldberg lets slip something real:

Fair or not, to the extent the Ivy League comes up it is as a codeword or symbol for the agenda of progressives.

Which is almost exactly what Applebaum was saying. Well, it's better than when they were using "Jew" and "nigger-lover."

Maybe he drinks in the morning. I know it's a longshot, but as a Christian I'd like to find one thing I can admire about him.

UPDATE. In comments, Whetstone banks one I could kick myself for not seeing:

So when Jonah whines about the smarty-pantses bossing him around while pining for whatever scraps of intellectual approval they'll toss his way (or, barring that, whatever he can misread to make himself feel smart), I consider the possibility that yes, he's been "bossed around," if that means "being edited" or "not getting jobs that writers with a better grasp of language got."