Wednesday, May 27, 2015

...UNTIL GOLDBERG WRITES SOMETHING ELSE.

Jonah Goldberg:
Huckabee’s Anachronistic Brand of Progressivism
We could shorter this "farrt" and call it a day, but let me  give you the gist: Because he wants the state to meddle in people's business, as has every Bible-beater since time immemorial, Huckabee is actually a "right-wing populist-progressive." Sure, why not -- Goldberg already told us liberals are fascists so why can't right-wingers be progressive? The explanation is, as usual, that William Jennings Bryan and Woodrow Wilson did racist or repressive things, therefore progressives are racist and repressive.

You can catch some of Goldberg's related argumentation in a remarkable Twitter debate with Jamelle Bouie; Goldberg leans heavily on the assertion that he didn't mean anything bad by "ideologue" because it just means somebody who has an ideology -- you know, like when your smartass friend in middle school told that Jewish kid he was anti-Semitic because he didn't like Arafat. Some Goldberg highlights: "Hey, I don't have a huge gripe with you. But the idea you're not a liberal ideologue because you say you're not is...unpersuasive" (this is known to rhetoricians as the argumentum ad ellipsis) and "the term 'ideologue' was largely invented by Napoleon and Marx to do exactly the kind of thing you're trying to do to me."

The column ends with Goldberg saying even though Huckabee is bad because he's a progressive, he's not as bad as those progressive-progressives because he believes in God. If nothing else, it proves the wisdom of this old saw.

148 comments:

  1. Wow, Joey Pantload lectures about self-awareness.

    https://twitter.com/IFThunder/status/603616109607186432
    ~

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  2. agorabum1:46 PM

    God is the immemorial refuge of the incompetent, the helpless, the miserable. They find not only sanctuary in His arms, but also a kind of superiority, soothing to their macerated egos: He will set them above their betters.
    — H L Mencken

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  3. The best thing you can say about this kind of argument is that if it's not false, it may well be true.


    That conservatives are the real progressives is Newt Gingrich's idea, and presumably the source of Jonah's single idea that liberals are the real fascists, derived by elementary transformation. Gingrich is to Goldberg kind of as Doritos are to Cheetos, obnoxious but at least somewhat original.

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  4. The explanation is, as usual, that William Jennings Bryan and Woodrow Wilson did racist or repressive things, therefore progressives are racist and repressive.

    The explanation is, as usual, Huckabee is unequivocally supporting a child molester, therefore he needs to be re-branded as a liberal.

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  5. coozledad1:56 PM

    The new preachers in the pulpit are public-health activists and social-justice warriors imbued with religious fervor sans religion.

    I would rather have a zealot stick a 2 liter bottle of coke up my ass than let some godless liberal keep my kids from smoking.

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  6. tigrismus1:59 PM

    Likewise, if I were to call Jonah a crank, it is merely because he has an arm.

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  7. coozledad2:10 PM

    I'll say. This was the poster family for not only "The New Arkansas" but a backbone of god-fearin proselytizers for the Republican Party, taking pictures with all the candidates wearing a shit-eating grin. I'm willing to bet it's not just the Arkansas party that's rotten with this trash, and this story gets bigger, meaner and nastier every day.


    Jim-Bob Duggar's buddy!

    http://jezebel.com/court-records-reveal-heinous-child-porn-tastes-of-the-d-1707192733

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  8. OT: The ALICUBLOG MEET-UP

    A reminder that the first ever Alicurati meet-up is set for noon on Saturday at Pho Vietnam restaurant in Danbury, CT. If you're planning on coming and haven't already contacted, me, please do so:

    BennForum at gmail dot com

    Thanks! And see you there!

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  9. Jonah's Jottings

    Liberals are the real fascists.
    Conservatives are the real progressives.
    National Review cruises are the real explorers.
    Flatulence is the real vox populi.
    Being mocked by sentient people is real power.
    Helping mommy fish around in the president’s pants is the real path to political pundit prowess.

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  10. I read Jonah's piece, all the way through. At first, I thought it was just more of the same Jonanism, random disjointed facts linked together with the sort of flimsy non-arguments you might hear in the pot-smoking dorm at 2:30 AM. Then he got to the very last line:

    I certainly don’t want robed priests dictating how America should define life, death, and everything in between (including marriage), but I’m at a loss as to why having robed lawyers (i.e., judges) make such decisions is such an obvious improvement.
    At first glance, it might just look like another bit of faux-witty "eat it libs" posturing from a man not familiar with the history of his own publication (switch "marriage" for "civil rights" and it's the good ol' days again). But there's actually more here. What we're seeing is Jonah finalizing his descent into post-modernism.
    It may seem like the height of absurdity for a man who has spent years trying to build an amazingly specific definition of "progressive" to now broaden that to include basically everyone but himself. But really, he's just making a point about the nature of political labels - and even labels as a concept. For you see, political ideology is not a binary, nor a spectrum, or even a two-axis plot. Rather, it is an endless sea of opinions, undifferentiated and blurring into each other, for which mere words are grotesquely inadequate to give description. Hence, titles mean whatever we want them to mean. So yes, you can have right-wing progressives and stand them alongside belligerent pacifists and drunken teetotalers, because what do words really mean when you break it down?
    Anyone got another blunt? This is starting to make sense.

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  11. C'mon--Lincoln freed the slaves, so Republicans get a free pass on all the racist stuff they're doing now and will do in the future. Passing around that email with the picture of Obama as a witch-doctor or the White House serving fried chicken and watermelon is most definitely NOT AT ALL racist.

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  12. Jonah’s Jottings

    Liberals are the real fascists.
    Conservatives are the real progressives.
    National Review cruises are the real explorers.
    Flatulence is the real vox populi.
    Being mocked by sentient people is real power.
    Helping Mommy fish around in the president’s pants is the
    real path to political pundit prowess.

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  13. Actually, it's about ethics in cigarette smoking.

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  14. runsinbackground2:21 PM

    How the hell did "social-justice warrior" move from being a frequent thread topic on 4chan to an acceptable shorthand used by respectable conservative columnists?

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  15. All of this makes me think about those "Purity Balls" at which young Christian girls pledge their virginity to the fathers. But I guess that wanting to sleep with your daughter is straight out of the Bible, so it's okay.

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  16. Same reason they all started throwing around the term "beta males" - the absorption of MRAs and similar groups into the greater Wingnuttosphere. By the time the election season proper rolls around, you'll have your butcher wingnuts asking liberals if they lift.

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  17. mortimer20002:34 PM

    Where the fuck does Goldberg get the idea that Napolean invented the word ideologue? Not to mention that his version also has shades of a Python routine:
    JOHN CLEESE VOICE: Take the word "Ideologue" — first invented by Napolean in 1803, and then again, 34 years later, by Karl Marx.

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  18. whetstone2:35 PM

    The main reason Huckabee is placed on the right side of the
    political spectrum today is that liberals have largely jettisoned the
    Christian rationalizations for government activism.




    Either our Jonah is learning, or an editor had to stick that in.

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  19. LoadPants equates "populist" with "Liberal". Hitler was a populist! Case closed!

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  20. coozledad2:41 PM

    This from the state where the Republicans circled the wagons for the shitstick who rehomed his foster child with a rapist.


    Someone's going to have to turn that state upside down like an old dry turd and try and dig up the worms, but the Republicans will shelve any investigations until the statute of limitations expires. Asa Hutchinson has gone to bat for these childfuckers so often you've got to wonder if he isn't part of the ring.

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  21. Next time one of these people screeks about "Think of the children!", the only appropriate response is, "We liberals DO think of the children--just not as sexual toys the way Bible-thumping conservatives do."

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  22. I want to go three on a match with this comment.

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  23. Except he ends his piece with that crack about "robed lawyers," which sure sounds like a call to populism to me. I think we're all giving Jonah entirely too much credit that he's thought any of this through.

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  24. Helmut Monotreme2:48 PM

    It is a continuing source of wonder to me how Jonah's Dadaist political glurge can pass for commentary, that people will pay to print.

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  25. Napoleon's neologism was first documented by Jonah's research assistant, the famous Prof. Otto Yerass.

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  26. ohsopolite2:49 PM

    'When I use a word,' Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, 'it means just what I choose
    it to mean — neither more nor less.'



    I'm sure this quote has come up previously in discussions of Jonah's peculiar use of language, but this seems a particularly apt moment to bring it up again. I think there is some deep significance to the fact that "Jonah Goldberg" and "Humpty Dumpty" have the same number of syllables.

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  27. Megalon2:52 PM

    Inhaling noxious fumes every day is going to have an effect on you. He's sort of a modern Oracle of Delphi who needs to change underwear frequently.

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  28. DN Nation2:52 PM

    "I certainly don’t want robed priests dictating how America should define life, death, and everything in between (including marriage), but I’m at a loss as to why having robed lawyers (i.e., judges) make such decisions is such an obvious improvement."


    What if the Pantload actually thinks the only issue here is robe-wearing? I wouldn't put it past him.

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  29. Turning Huckabee into a liberal/progressive is consistent with their prevailing reasoning. After all, it is us liberals who want to impose Sharia law, end free speech, and force everyone to gay marry and then have gay abortions.

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  30. Ted the slacker2:54 PM

    So from the list of issues Jonah could have with Huckabee, he settles on, "won't go Galt".
    Even a Pantload needs to have priorities, I guess.

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  31. DN Nation2:57 PM

    "Against this backdrop, Huckabee is an anachronism — again, not for his statist meliorism, but for his openly religious motivations. And while I have as little use for a nanny state anointed by Jesus as I do for a nanny state anointed by bureaucrats, Huckabee has more of my sympathy. He can at least point to something outside and better than himself — i.e., God — as his lodestar. He can also invoke traditions grounded in how people want to live. The meddling busybodies of the left only have their own innate sense of superiority to guide them. Huckabee recently earned a lot of criticism for denouncing the “false god of judicial supremacy” in the context of the Supreme Court’s ever-growing role as the all-wise shepherd of our society. His grasp of the legal niceties no doubt leaves something to be desired. But he has a point."


    There's all sorts of herpa derpa doo here, starting with "Huck's brand of asshole is better because he has God while you libs are arrogant fffrrrrrrt," but I'd like to break this down to its very essence of J-Dawg lazy, waffling bullshit:


    "Huckabee is bad thing, which might be good thing, as he's bad thing while good thing while liberals are bad thing while bad thing. But he was bad thing, but he was good thing with having bad thing."



    I mean, fucking A. The next iron-clad, USDA Grade-A, fully believed, snap-into-a-Slim-Jim opinion this bloated doofus lands on will be his first.

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  32. Ted the slacker2:57 PM

    The puke funnel works in predictable ways. What assholes say eventually percolates upward to wingnut bigwigs.

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  33. I just emailed you. Sorry, time is right there (noon)

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  34. BigHank532:58 PM

    Well, if you take a close look at the demographics of the GOP base, you'll realize that in a decade a substantial percentage of them will be very dead, a condition which makes it very difficult to get their votes. (Which also explains why the right is so keen on keeping as many brown people from voting, eh?) So right now they'll take anyone, no matter how loathsome they are.

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  35. Jay B.3:01 PM

    It's so fucking anachronistic that it pre-dates Progressivism by a couple of millennia.

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  36. Ted the slacker3:01 PM

    This is deep man... have we found proof that Jonah's farts are post-modern?

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  37. bekabot3:22 PM

    Goldberg finds the notion that Jamelle Bouie's not an ideologue because he says he's not unpersuasive? That's cool, because I find the notion that Napoleon and Marx were contemporaries unpersuasive too.


    (Maybe in Goldberg's world they were a comedy team.)

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  38. bekabot3:25 PM

    "We do think of the children...only not in that way."

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  39. The Orifice of Delphi?

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  40. Downpup E3:33 PM

    William Jennings Bryan was the dashboard saint of Progressives?!

    A face you don't want looking at you as you drive! As always when he's thinking deep thoughts, Jonah's writing sounds like Mr. H. Dumpty as recorded by A. Dodgson.

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  41. bekabot3:35 PM

    The Heidelbergian who wrote a 10-volume summa definitively proving results were the cause of their causes. (Don't laugh. Žižek and Badiou swear by him.)

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  42. tigrismus3:41 PM

    Responding to more than one comment here, but JESUS. Those liberals and robed judges have something outside of and better than themselves, too, called THE LAW, which invokes long traditions of how a majority of people have voted that they want to live, rather than how some meddling busybody religious authority figure tells them an imaginary being wants them to live. Does Jonah REALLY not see a difference between rule of law in a democracy and something like Shari'a?

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  43. DocAmazing3:46 PM

    I guess he's not preaching to the choir.

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  44. DN Nation3:48 PM

    "It can certainly be said that judges with robes are different than priests with robes because judges rely on iron-clad laws while priests rely on what comes into their head, but this is central to my point. The fact is, both of them rely on something that isn't them, and it's conservatives who want you to rely on you while liberals are the real ____________ who don't want you to live on your own terms."


    Ta daaaaa!

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  45. DocAmazing3:48 PM

    Would a synopsis of a Jonah column be a "sharter"?

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  46. DocAmazing3:54 PM

    I don't care if they're dumb or lyin'
    Long as I got my Jennings Bryan
    Riding on the dashboard of my car
    He can be a wingnut at the Scopes trial
    or quote Jesus in the mopes' style
    Riding on the dashboard of my car...

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  47. DocAmazing3:55 PM

    Wow. Mail that to Jonah, and you've got that intern gig sewn up.

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  48. DN Nation3:59 PM

    Are there any relevant conservative columnists left who *don't* sound like someone spouting NO U and rants about girls on 4chan/Reddit/etc.?

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  49. Ellis_Weiner4:11 PM

    I want to snap into a Slim Jim and play herpa-derpa-doo with this comment until the cows come home, assuming there are cows, and that they're coming home.

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  50. Fucking no goddamn knowledge of Progressive (1850) vs. Progressive (2015). FUCKING HISTORY HOW DOES IT WORK

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  51. I don't whine an I don't moan-ah
    Long's I gots mah plastic Jonah
    tossed out the window of mah car

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  52. statist meliorism


    /Navin Johnson: "The new THESAURUS is here! The new THESAURUS is here!"

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  53. ColBatGuano4:22 PM

    He can at least point to something outside and better than himself — i.e., God — as his lodestar.


    "And I can point to my ass as the source of my opinions." - Jonah

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  54. Would YOU come home if you knew Jonah was there?

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  55. You got to this first. As soon as I read this post by Roy, a few hours ago, I wanted to come on and say that Jonah must have been bitten by a radioactive humpty dumpty when he was a child.

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  56. The literary equivalent of getting hit with your own fists.

    "Stop hitting yourself! Stop hitting yourself!"

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  57. Ted the slacker4:24 PM

    Always.

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  58. Man--you really areamazing!

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  59. One-Armed Bandit Derpmonger

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  60. #NotAllNickO'Teens

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  61. Well, these are the maroons who think that the Nazis were Socialists 'cause it's in their name (to which I respond, "some Democracy they got there in North Korea, eh?")

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  62. montag24:33 PM

    Lessee, Marx also said that capitalism held within it the seeds of its own destruction, and that what history first presented as tragedy was repeated as farce.


    Just mulling over what Der Pantload means with regard to the very capitalist-defending The National Review and the ultimately tragically hubristic William F. Buckley.


    The only glimmer of humor in all this is that Buckley did, indeed, live to see his reactionary flagship finally commanded by the inevitably nepotistic end result of his efforts to preserve and protect America's privileged aristocracy. I suspect the realization must have been similar to that of Col. Nicholson at the conclusion of "The Bridge on the River Kwai."

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  63. I don't know... I can see putting something like this on my dashboard, just to make people wonder:

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  64. I can hear the steel guitars playing accompaniment.

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  65. Upvoted for "maroons."

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  66. Smurch5:01 PM

    Based on recent photos, more like the Orca of Delphi.

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  67. Bitter Scribe5:02 PM

    Yes, the religious people who are constantly telling others how to live have never suffered from an "innate sense of superiority."

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  68. Shorter Bryan: "OW! FUCK! MY HAND!"

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  69. a condition which makes it very difficult to get their votes

    That only works if you're a Democrat in Chicago! HA HA I MAKE WINGNUT JOKE HA HRM.

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  70. PersonaAuGratin5:32 PM

    I've never seen him looking so kempt.

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  71. PersonaAuGratin5:37 PM

    Idea for NR spinoff magazine: Farter's Digest

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  72. still looks like a maroon, though.

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  73. I think that is an actual Jonah pull-quote.


    Isn't it?


    Fuck, I really can't tell.

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  74. I must say that I resemble that remark...

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  75. The term "bowdlerized" always did have a faint whiff of a messy caboose.

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  76. redoubtagain6:16 PM

    Except he ends his piece with that crack about "robed lawyers,"


    Roberts, Scalia, Alito, Thomas? Oh, I'm sorry, I thought he said robed robbers.

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  77. redoubtagain6:21 PM

    The cows aren't coming home; they've heard about Jonah's methane issue and know they're too underpowered to beat that.

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  78. redoubtagain6:36 PM

    (Instructive to remember that Bryan spent his last years eating too much and hustling Florida real estate.)

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  79. M. Krebs6:50 PM

    The Orifice of DC? No wait, that's Maureen Dowd.

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  80. "That coat you're wearing. That's a really violent shade of beige."

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  81. M. Krebs6:52 PM

    They're certainly deconstructed ... something.


    (Lame punchline ad ellipses)

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  82. M. Krebs6:56 PM

    I have never met Napoleon, but I plan to find the time.

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  83. Lurking Canadian6:56 PM

    Strictly speaking, NK is a republic. Dear Leader is not a king.

    It is NOT, however, a Democratic Republic, despite what it says on the tin.

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  84. M. Krebs6:59 PM

    Or maybe Humpty Dumpty was his REAL FATHER.

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  85. J Neo Marvin6:59 PM

    I missed the story of Napoleon and Marx as collaborating idea men. I'd love to hear how that conversation went.

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  86. M. Krebs7:06 PM

    Fucking WORDS, how do they work?

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  87. montag27:11 PM

    Worth the upvote for "glurge" alone.

    One does wonder, though, if Der Pantload's true goal is to raise diffidence, shoulder-shrugging and autocontrarianism to the level of an art form. I suspect that he imagines himself to be slyly subversive, but, because his level of self-awareness is microscopic, he's wholly ignorant of the reality he presents to the world, that he's deeply dull and too perishingly precious for words.

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  88. Chris Anderson7:49 PM

    He can at least point to something outside and better than himself — i.e., God — as his lodestar.


    Reminds me of the last Dreher tract that Rod blogged about. Look, I can be reasonable: if people want to make these kind of statements, I'd just like them to acknowledge that sometimes* this type of appeal to divine authority is obvious bullshit, a means of putting forth one's opinions and preferences as inviolable holy writ? God always speaks through these guys, or they are the proper interpreters of his words and will. We all know that happens, right?


    *I think it's "always," but as I said, I'm not asking for much out of the gate ... There's just this conspicuous shortage of people who believe that God wants them (not others) to be inconvenienced or worse. Such people have existed, and I don't care to glorify them, but I think they believe(d) in ways that Dreher, say, can't really fathom.

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  89. BigHank537:50 PM

    Man, you're overthinking this. See, there are some word-symbols that mean good things, like freedom and hope and choc-o-mut ice cream*, and then there are word-symbols that mean bad things, like evil and fascist and progressive and liberal. Jonah wants to mash all the bad word-symbols together and then all the other word-symbols will be good. You can decide for yourself whether it's the crassest sort of propaganda, or if Jonah believes in sympathetic magic, and that the repeated assertion that the right's racist, sexist, and classist policies are good things will, eventually, make them good.

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  90. Chris Anderson8:03 PM

    I can't find the quotes that informed my views, but I don't believe ideology is necessarily neutral. I don't think it's even noteworthy in a person until it rises to a certain, dangerous level. That level is the point at which an ideologue is ready to argue that some abstract idea or another is so important that another person must suffer or die so that the idea may be promoted (or suppressed, for that matter).


    I think this is never the case. Not even the noblest, most universal idea is worthy of anything but logical and/or rhetorical defenses. While those battles (and none others) are waged, we should behave ourselves ... it's hard to define how, but not as ideologues, not as I have come to know them.

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  91. I'm not sure you can always trust the sharter, though.

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  92. Because these conservative columnists are the same people posting on 4chan. Angry white boys pissed because they have to share their toys.

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  93. tigrismus8:19 PM

    Would explain the physical resemblance, too.

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  94. coozledad9:02 PM

    You've almost got to pity Jonah. A no-writing sack of shit assigned a 3000 word essay on why the rule of law is bad.


    Almost. He's a living proof for Hannah Arendt's thesis.

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  95. Chris Anderson9:03 PM

    Humans are the vectors of ideas of all kinds, but in this capacity they are intractable, unpredictable; the ideas mutate as they pass from vessel to vessel. This state of affairs is intolerable to control-freaks, who by definition have more trouble with autonomous beings than with their favored objects, abstractions, and representations.


    People must then suffer, fail to flourish, or die, so that ideas may "suffer," etc. or "thrive" in the absence of troublesome vectors. A fatal weakness of this approach being that the best idea-vectors are not subjects, supine, unquestioning, etc. The positive modes of transmission, then, becomes weak and (to put it mildy) off-putting. The negative modes are at once resisted by the most vital portions of the real, living and material forces: people who think and care ...

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  96. javamanphil9:05 PM

    I hope this comment thread isn't on adultfriendfinder because otherwise I am going to have a lot of explaining to do to my wife.

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  97. coozledad9:09 PM

    Napoleon was one of them Frenches. He come in after the Frenches cut off the nice people's heads. A ideologue is what Napoleon called a Austrian, until he banged one cause his girl ain't got no teeth, and she a ho.


    You can hurt yourself trying to get in these peoples' arguments.

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  98. Chris Anderson9:16 PM

    I hope they woulda had a damn fine conversation. Can't say I know whether Napoleon was into that sort of thing, which is not to impugn his mental powers. Marx for his part might not have fared well if thrust into the role of military genius. They both had charisma, that's for sure.

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  99. coozledad9:23 PM

    America just happened to replace Ireland as the sow that eats its farrow.
    If they'd known how much better protestants devour themselves, they'd probably have converted.

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  100. Father Ted: Yes well, I just wanted to clear things up; I'm not a fascist, I'm a priest. Fascists dress in black and go around telling people what to do, whereas... priests... More drink!All: Hooray!

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  101. coozledad10:01 PM

    Napoleon had his century's habit of compartmentalization. He actually got to look at the messes he created. He was gangster.


    I don't know if Hitler would have blanched at the aftermath of Austerlitz, but apparently Himmler crumpled and vomited at Auschwitz.


    But Hitler was like a lot of lower echelon troops who find their happiness in the process of eating shit.

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  102. Meanie-meanie, tickle a person10:06 PM

    ...UNTIL GOLDBERG WRITES SOMETHING ELSE.


    The actual date of which is a known known.

    ♫And that's a long, long time...♫

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  103. Well, the statute of limitations may have already run out. According to Wonkette, the SOL for child molestation runs until at the victims are at least 18, unless you report it to law enforcement. Then the clock starts running, and it's 3 years.

    Which would mean that Jim Bob's reporting it to Pedo Trooper in 2003 started the clock running, which is why they pretty much had to close the investigation in 2006, when Oprah brought down the hammer on them.

    Mind you, Pedo Trooper now says that he was only told of one incident, and he figured he could handle a one-time thing. But nevertheless, the 2006 investigation constitutes a report, so at most we get to 2009. Unless he continued after 2006, but I think they started shoving him out of the house more by then.

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  104. AGoodQuestion10:18 PM

    Let's take a look at William Jennings Bryan, one of the auld tyme progressives with whom Johah compares Huckabee. If ever there were a man in American politics who said what he meant and meant what he said, Bryan was that man. He was achingly sincere in wanting looser fiscal policies for farmers. So too in his opposition to the gunboat diplomacy of McKinley, TR, and Taft. So much so that he left his job as Secretary of State when fellow Democrat Woodrow Wilson let America be drawn into the Great War.


    Bryan was equally sincere in opposing the teaching of Darwin's theories in school, something not mentioned in the link. You can say he was backward and intolerant in the matter--many progressives of his own time did say that, contra Jona--but he was entirely true to himself.


    I somehow doubt that Huckabee will be remembered in the same way. We haven't seen much evidence that he won't pander to the nuts in his party's base regardless of the cost. Jonah should really like him more than he claims to.

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  105. AGoodQuestion10:21 PM

    The explanation is, as usual, that Huckabee is unequivocally supporting a child molester, therefore he needs to be re-branded as a liberal.
    It's a dumb job, calling for a dumb writer.

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  106. AGoodQuestion10:33 PM

    Jeez, I hope that's not a premonition of the Great Recount Battle of 2016.

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  107. Don't forget Huckabee's hucksterism- peddling dubious diabetes "cures" to gullible oldsters isn't exactly conducive to being remembered kindly by history.

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  108. AGoodQuestion10:35 PM

    Certainly not. He's a charlatan through and through.

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  109. Meanie-meanie, tickle a person10:36 PM

    I say we organize a collection, call it the "No-Hedge Fund", and offer it to Jonah if he'll write a post, average length, and actually make a point. One point, no hedging.
    Her can't do it, my friends...

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  110. AGoodQuestion10:44 PM

    It helps that we've been Defining Respectability Down.

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  111. liberals have largely jettisoned the Christian rationalizations for government activism child molestation.No, I'm not letting that go anytime soon.

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  112. He likes his oatmeal lumpy.

    https://youtu.be/cj9_yW8tZxs

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  113. "Tweedle-Wan never told you what happened to your father."

    "He told me enough! He told me you fell off a wall onto him!"

    "No, I am your father."

    "No. No! That's not true! That's impossible!"


    "And you haven't had breakfast yet, so there are five more to go."

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  114. Tehanu11:13 PM

    Very appropriate, since pretzel logic is the only kind Jonah ever uses.

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  115. Awesome GIF, great job!

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  116. Oh, come on, Huckabee is only in favor of half of the things on that list ... publicly.

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  117. "Next time, on Xena: Warrior Princess ..."

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  118. AngryWarthogBreath2:41 AM

    And I can point to something outside and better than myself that guides my traditions: Mordigaunt, True Heir to All the Great Lands of the Universe. He told me "fuck Huckabee, man, but not in that way".


    I ain't sayin' God don't exist; I don't believe God exists, but I'm not a reliable source. I am saying Huckabee's reliability on saying that God wants exactly what Huckabee says he wants is down there with, uh, stupid person's reliability on smart stuff.

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  119. Shalimar3:31 AM

    What the fuck? Goldberg is like the complete randomness of an idiot playing Password coupled with such a short attention span that he would never remember the word after the second clue.


    "The word was jelly. What the hell does that have to do with aircraft carrier?"

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  120. redoubtagain7:47 AM

    This is Arkansas, where the statute of limitations on other things is, shall we say, flexible.

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  121. mommadillo7:58 AM

    The Wayne DuMond affair always seemed the perfect example of the sort of morality espoused by the Huckster. When he was Governor of Arkansas, Huck supported parole for DuMond. It was a right-wing trope at the time that DuMond had been railroaded into prison and refused parole because the teenage girl he raped was a distant cousin of Bill Clinton.


    After DuMond's release and subsequent arrest in Missouri for rape and murder, Huckabee ludicrously claimed it was (wait for it) . . . Bill Clinton's fault that DuMond was paroled.


    So if you believed Huckabee, Slick was responsible both for railroading DuMond into prison AND having him released to rape again. Seems a little counterproductive, but whoever said right-wing delusions had to make sense?

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  122. mgmonklewis8:11 AM

    A true mountebank.

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  123. mgmonklewis8:13 AM

    Except the Enlightenment also "largely jettisoned the Christian rationalizations for government activism." Oh, sure, I'm nit-picking. What's a few centuries when Jonah is making an important point? (In fact, I suspect the anachronism is central to his point.)

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  124. Helmut Monotreme8:54 AM

    Given that the person doing the pointing is the Mike "defender of child rapist Josh Duggar" Huckabee, potted plants would be an example of something outside and better than himself so I'm not really going to give him that much credit for that.

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  125. FlipYrWhig9:10 AM

    Maybe he thought it was robot priests and judges.

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  126. Jonah's career should have been over a long time ago.

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  127. Upvote for Bugs! Always upvote for Bugs!

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  128. The Great Recount Battle of 2016, in which the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that votes cast for Democratic candidates do not count. This led to the first election in U.S. history in which the candidate for president won with 100% of the vote.

    Republican candidates continued to win with unanimous votes until America plunged into its present "Dark Ages" in the year 2040 when all of the country's infrastructure collapsed. Without electricity, running water, working sewers, and no roads or bridges, the country was unable to repair anything. After the mass die-off of 2044, the Libertarian Paradise was ushered in. Today, each of us lives in complete freedom, with each surviving family having its own yurt and using advanced flint-napping technology to protect itself against marauding bands of union members and teachers.

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  129. Marion in Savannah10:12 AM

    Damn — sounds like a realistic projection. I'm glad I'm an old fart and probably will be killed off in the first wave of looting since, being a gawdless librul dirty stinking hippy, I'm not armed to the teeth with assault weapons.

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  130. Marx praised Lincoln, Lincoln was a Republican, ergo all Republicans are Marxists. Argumentum ad pantloadum


    "Sir:

    We congratulate the American people upon your re-election by a large majority. If resistance to the Slave Power was the reserved watchword of your first election, the triumphant war cry of your re-election is Death to Slavery.

    From the commencement of the titanic American strife the workingmen of Europe felt instinctively that the star-spangled banner carried the destiny of their class. The contest for the territories which opened the dire epopee, was it not to decide whether the virgin soil of immense tracts should be wedded to the labor of the emigrant or prostituted by the tramp of the slave driver?

    When an oligarchy of 300,000 slaveholders dared to inscribe, for the first time in the annals of the world, "slavery" on the banner of Armed Revolt, when on the very spots where hardly a century ago the idea of one great Democratic Republic had first sprung up, whence the first Declaration of the Rights of Man was issued, and the first impulse given to the European revolution of the eighteenth century; when on those very spots counterrevolution, with systematic thoroughness, gloried in rescinding "the ideas entertained at the time of the formation of the old constitution", and maintained slavery to be "a beneficent institution", indeed, the old solution of the great problem of "the relation of capital to labor", and cynically proclaimed property in man "the cornerstone of the new edifice" — then the working classes of Europe understood at once, even before the fanatic partisanship of the upper classes for the Confederate gentry had given its dismal warning, that the slaveholders' rebellion was to sound the tocsin for a general holy crusade of property against labor, and that for the men of labor, with their hopes for the future, even their past conquests were at stake in that tremendous conflict on the other side of the Atlantic. Everywhere they bore therefore patiently the hardships imposed upon them by the cotton crisis, opposed enthusiastically the proslavery intervention of their betters — and, from most parts of Europe, contributed their quota of blood to the good cause.

    While the workingmen, the true political powers of the North, allowed slavery to defile their own republic, while before the Negro, mastered and sold without his concurrence, they boasted it the highest prerogative of the white-skinned laborer to sell himself and choose his own master, they were unable to attain the true freedom of labor, or to support their European brethren in their struggle for emancipation; but this barrier to progress has been swept off by the red sea of civil war.

    The workingmen of Europe feel sure that, as the American War of Independence initiated a new era of ascendancy for the middle class, so the American Antislavery War will do for the working classes. They consider it an earnest of the epoch to come that it fell to the lot of Abraham Lincoln, the single-minded son of the working class, to lead his country through the matchless struggle for the rescue of an enchained race and the reconstruction of a social world. [B]

    Signed on behalf of the International Workingmen's Association, the Central Council: Karl Marx

    https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/iwma/documents/1864/lincoln-letter.htm

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  131. Halloween_Jack10:26 AM

    All he needs is a chrome skull in the middle of that crown of thorns and he'd be set for Mad Max: Fury Road. You're not crucifying anyone on a cross of gold if everything is SHINY AND CHROME.

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  132. Halloween_Jack10:29 AM

    I have as little use for a nanny state anointed by Jesus as I do for a nanny state anointed by bureaucrats


    He has quite a lot of use for both, seeing as how he uses both for grist for his columns, and god-botherers are still a reliable part of the GOP core, the whining of Dreher and his ilk for the Benedict Option notwithstanding.

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  133. BigHank5310:29 AM

    2040 my ass. The current leadership of the GOP (War everywhere! No taxes for the rich! Or businesses! Nothing for the poors! Default on the national debt!) would have this country upside-down in the ditch in less than five years.

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  134. realinterrobang10:33 AM

    WTF is "choc-o-mut ice cream," anyway?

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  135. F'crissake, don't ask Jonah.

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  136. BigHank5310:35 AM

    Oh, that's just Jonah's clever rhetoric. "As little use" just means they're equivalent--it's the same as "as much use", really. And Jonah demonstrably doesn't care who enforces the rules he imagines would be good for us. Could be Jesus, the Federal Dep't. of Mental Hygiene, or Barney the Fuckin' Dinosaur, as long as we all behave the way he wants.

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  137. BigHank5310:38 AM

    Eh, it's not that hard to find people who believe that God wanted them to be inconvenienced. In Dreher's faith they're traditionally called "monks" and "nuns". Lots of them have taken vows of humility and silence, too...which explains why that option got crossed off Dreher's list

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  138. BigHank5310:41 AM

    Shorthand for observing the past with rose-colored glasses.

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  139. And it will be Democrats' fault for not stopping them. Or so they'll be telling the remaining Fox News reporters.

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  140. Perhaps they will revere the old as repositories of history. The same way other pre-literate societies do.

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  141. billcinsd10:50 AM

    A woman is the favorite for the Democratic nomination for President, so the Republicans need to pivot to misogyny

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  142. billcinsd11:02 AM

    I think that might have been an episode of Steve Allen's Meeting of the Minds. Although the only episode with Marx I could find had Marie Antoinette, Ulysses S. Grant and Thomas More, which sounds interesting but not quite up to Atilla the Hun, Gallileo, Emily Dickinson and Charles Darwin

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  143. realinterrobang11:03 AM

    Well, up until about 20 years ago, when a right-wing nimrod wiped it out, Canada had an actual mainstream political party called the Progressive Conservatives. The pre-Mulroney PCs weren't all that bad, for conservatives, but...

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  144. Magatha1:48 PM

    Same here. But there's always the possibility that if we stay real still, we can maintain our old-lady invisibility shield. Although going out like a shrieking harpy sounds good too.

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  145. carpetbaggahs & scally wags6:36 PM

    "William Jennings Bryan .... did racist or repressive things."


    Without the Wallace voters, Goldberg and his ilk would still be a bunch of bitter resentful ex-Trots lurking about the fringes of American politics. Talk about biting the hand that feeds you.

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