THATCHER: "ENEMY ARMADA OFF JERSEY COAST"! YOU KNOW YOU HAVEN'T THE SLIGHTEST PROOF THAT THIS -- THIS ARMADA IS OFF THE JERSEY COAST! KANE: CAN YOU PROVE IT ISN'T? Ted Barlow has a nice idea: send fake personal reminiscences of Democratic candidates to The Corner, where they publish stuff like that by the bushel, and see if they bite.

The good thing about the idea is that it is designed to drive Frat-Boy in Chief Jonah Goldberg batty. Mission accomplished:

Several readers from Crooked Timber have sent me links to this bit from Snopes saying that the "Do you know who I am?" emails I posted about Kerry must not be true. With all do [sic] respect to Snopes, which I consider pretty authoritative, and a little less respect to the folks sending me the email, So what... the idea that self-important Senators, media bigwigs and the like don't ever say "Do you know who I am?" is batty. I've heard it said by self-annointed [sic] big shots numeroues [sic] times... there lots [sic] of real-world instances. And I still fully believe Kerry has provided more than a few of them.

In other words, it is believed by the subject's mortal enemies, therefore it is true, or at least worthy of publication.

The bad part of Ted's idea is throwing it back on Goldberg and his brethren. Instead of challenging The Corner's doubtlessly sterling editorial processes, why not avail one's own? I have done so before, publishing a stunning account of President Bush's ongoing drug abuse and inhuman cruelty, and by a happy coincidence I have just obtained the following missive, which fully meets Goldberg's standards as well as my own:

Your readers may be interested to know that, one night a few years ago, Jonah Goldberg challenged me to a fistfight in Milano's on Houston Street. I am able to identify him positively because earlier that evening he had distributed throughout the establishment printouts from some website with his byline and picture. His resemblance to Flounder from "Animal House" gave me pause, as did his costume, seemingly based on that of Angus Young of AC/DC, except that the schoolboy cap was emblazoned with the legend NIGGERS SUCK and the short pants fit his ample bottom rather badly. I attempted to reason with him, but he kept screaming in a high-pitched voice that he would do to me what Ronald Reagan did to Jimmy Carter, "only without the help of CIA operatives in Iran" (if my memory serves me aright, and taking into account the monstrous slurring of his words), and roaring the acronym, "DYKWIA," over and over again. Finally there was nothing for it but that I must push him out the front door and onto the sidewalk, where he fell upon his back and soiled himself copiously, crying for his mother.

I'm getting a steady trickle of emails like this, but the rest shall have to wait for the next news cycle.

THE DEVIL PROBABLY. Last night PBS ran a little documentary about Galileo and his persecution by the Church -- simplistic and preachy, as is their wont, and Simon Callow is a terrible ham, but overall a decent, compact dramatization. It reminded me of Jonah Goldberg.

Yes, dear reader, I know how strange that sounds -- that, intellectually, Galileo and Goldberg are not even in the same time-space continuum. Let me explain: the PBS show reminded me of, and sent me back to, Goldberg's truly bizarre take on the Galileo story in 1999:

A lovable old scientist is condemned to Hell for refusing to deny the truth of the cosmos (in this case the Copernican notion of heliocentricity... The problem is, it's spin. Ancient, pro-enlightenment, zealot spin.

Goldberg's article does not refute the well-known facts of the Galielo case, but seeks to drive them from the reader's mind with mitigating circumstances. Some of these are just irrelevant and lame: for example, that Galileo's fellow scientists were jealous and really started the campaign against him. (Perhaps, but scientists didn't run the Inquisition.) Others are inversions not only of history, but also of logic:

Galileo's James Carville was no preacher, but a scientist named Schreiner (it helps if you say his name the way Seinfeld says "Neumann"). He fanned the flames in Rome until the Pope felt obliged to call a trial under the Inquisition. The head of the Inquisition was a Galileo supporter, who hoped to get the whole thing over with quickly by just giving him a formal reprimand. Unfortunately, rabble-rousers and opportunists turned the heat up. The trial is very complicated but the result was that Galileo got house arrest, which is where he did all of his research anyway. He was permitted to correspond with any scientist he wanted and he wrote the Dialogue Concerning Two New Sciences while under the Man's thumb.

All the hallmarks of Goldberg's wormy style are here: the gratuitous and irrelevant personal slurs, the jarring insertion of hipster language, and the reflexive minimization of injustices suffered by others (Wow, house arrest was like that time I had detention for a week! Least it got me to read Atlas Shrugged).

Interestingly, it is in some ways comparable to the article on Galileo in the Catholic Encyclopedia, which makes a number of similar non-arguments -- here's one interesting variation:

It is in the first place constantly assumed, especially at the present day, that the opposition which Copernicanism encountered at the hands of ecclesiastical authority was prompted by hatred of science and a desire to keep the minds of men in the darkness of ignorance. To suppose that any body of men could deliberately adopt such a course is ridiculous, especially a body which, with whatever defects of method, had for so long been the only one which concerned itself with science at all.

Actually, this rather elegant sophism -- if we support scientists, we are incapable of doing anything that would harm science -- is quite beyond Goldberg's skill-set, but its author does show something of the same passion for the subversion of plain facts.

Of course, the Catholic Encyclopedia author is laboring for the world's greatest wholesale dealer of dogma. When the cause is holy, no obfuscation can be too dense, no twists of logic too tortuous. Goldberg, however, labors for National Review. Eternal salvation is not in the contract. Why then work so hard to promulgate such outright bullshit, when one could, with less trouble and spiritual damage to oneself, simply kick back and shoot spitballs at Al Gore and PETA?

In my brief time scrupling over the political writing of my time, I have often been insulting and short-tempered. This is not so much because I fault the reasoning of my subjects, in most cases, but because there seems to be no reasoning, or reason, in them at all.

But, as my good friend Bob Schaffer has observed, hell has no floor -- things can always get worse. I really believe Goldberg represents -- and he may not be the best representative, but he is the one at hand -- a newer, lower order of propagandist: one who prevaricates because he thinks it's cool.

Think of it. You're born into a prominent right-wing family. You have a facility for language, and can do tricks with it that make the grown-ups clap. No biggie, but positive attention beats negative. Over time, they put you to work in one of the acceptable venues. You shake hands with their former young, with-it guy correspondent, a tedious boomer. Dude, your thought balloon reads, you are way old and I am so not you.

So you're sitting in the office with your feet up and your "colleagues" are all clacking away at stern denunciations of the welfare state and you couldn't give a lukewarm shit. But you can still sling phrases and so, in your boredom, you decide to drop some bombs: for example, a thousand words on how the Church actually did Galilieo a favor. Audacious! Even the greybeards must applaud your chutzpah.

You keep it up. You'll see their bitching about racial sensitivity -- "There is not a college course in the humanities which does not overly dwell on race" -- and raise them: "It's so depressing that 'people of color' has replaced 'colored people.' In a very important sense, the old phrase was better..." Your gloss does not advance any argument, but gives a tingle to every staffer sick of black bellyaching. Boo-yah!

Eventually your method becomes easy: you don't have to outrage any particular constituency -- outrages to common sense will do just as well. You can give off some particularly sloppy dorm-room windbaggery about Tolkein and make it into an article; the whiplash of your train of thought will provide fans with the confused feeling they learned as undergrads to identify with big ideas.

Boredom's a bitch, though, and sometimes you stretch yourself. When the Big Boss lays down the law on A&F's pornographic catalogue, you know what you have to do: establish yourself as a connoisseur of anime and commercial fleshpix while decrying "peddling what amounts to stylized smut." Makes no sense? Dude, sense is like so over.

Well, Western Civ had a good run. I'll be interested to see what's on next.

THE MONEY SHOT. National Review's Jonah Goldberg's consideration of our nations youth is scent-identifiable bullshit, but some passages beg for a smidgen of research. F'rinstance:

The burgeoning “children’s rights” movement — to which a young Hillary Clinton was connected — saw treating kids as peers to be of a piece with the new egalitarianism. Movies as diverse as Taxi Driver, Bugsy Malone, and Irreconcilable Differences fixated on treating kids like adults in one way or another.

What might Goldberg mean by "children's rights movement"? Knowing the depths of his incuriosity, we might reasonably expect he is working from his own publication's 1992 condemnation of Clinton's alignment with the Children's Defense Fund:

She is a member of five corporate boards and is chairman (currently on leave) of the Washington-based Children's Defense Fund...

But she has also acted consistently to reduce the area of parental authority and to make children direct clients of government agencies. On her principles, the state could decide that parents violate their children's "rights" by keeping them out of public schools, or deny them "equal protection of the laws" when they forbid them to do whatever liberal judges think they should be allowed to do. No doubt other implications would be discovered by ingenious lawyers, to the detriment of the family's independence of the state. It's chillingly . . . Swedish.

Gasp! She endeavored to Swedify our children -- which means nudity! And she fought to keep children in school, and subject to hippie-nudist "equal protection of the laws"! Was there no end to her depravity?

Perhaps sensing the lack of observable connection between Jodie Foster's teen prostitute in Taxi Driver and non-fictional disaffected youths, Goldberg lunges for low-hanging cultural signifiers :

The result? Large numbers of kids raised to be like adults have concluded that they want to stay kids, or at least teens. People my age hate being called “Mr.” or “Mrs.” by kids. Grown women read idiotic magazines, obsess over maintaining a teenager’s body, and follow the exploits of Lindsay Lohan. Grown men have been following professional wrestling and playing video games for 25 years.

All that disrespectfulness and video gaming would be a heavy burden to place on Hillary-forced public education, were it not for the admitted assistance of Goldberg himself. And not only does he admit his own demoralizing distaste for honorifics: he adds,

I’m part of these trends. Not only do I still enjoy "The Simpsons," but I’m addicted to shows like "House" and "Grey’s Anatomy."

Yet instead of cutting his wrists in a bunker, as good taste would demand, Goldberg descends to further depths of culture analysis:

Consider that in the old days, "Marcus Welby" and "Ben Casey" were the ideal: selfless father figures in surgical garb, dispensing not just medical advice but authoritative life counseling. Modern-day "House," by contrast, is about a defiantly drug-addicted doctor who admits week after week that he doesn’t care about his patients, but merely about the personal satisfaction of solving a medical mystery. In "Grey’s Anatomy," horribly wounded patients are wheeled through each episode to serve as metaphors for the relationship problems of the residents. Impaled by a steel rod? That reminds me, my boyfriend hasn’t told me he loves me today! The patients often die, but at least the doctors learn important life lessons about dating.

I, too, mourn the loss of Robert Young's paralytic visage on network TV, but it would never occur to me to blame the insolence of teenagers on Hugh Laurie.

Amazingly, Goldberg skims a more meaningful statistic on his way to the snack bar:

Another result is that the generation taught to share and care beyond all precedent has become the most singularly concerned in history with making a buck. A recent UCLA study found that nearly 75 percent of college freshmen think that it’s important to be rich, compared with 62.5 percent in 1980 and 42 percent in 1966.

What Goldberg cannot admit, even to himself, is that the success of the Reagan Administration played a larger role than any TV show in getting Americans of every age to prize material success above all other values, though this result is blazingly evident in the stock market, in the newspaper obsession with box-office grosses, in the rise of financial reporting in mainstream media, and in the increased interest of ordinary Americans in mortgage and interest rates.

If there is any connection between our culture and what some of us consider a lack of respect from the young, Goldberg might have logically begun his investigation with what we might call the money shot. He might have asked youthful entrants to our economy, who cannot easily afford an apartment of their own even with a full-time job, or a decent health-care plan, how that state of affairs affects their interest in making as much money as they can right away, and their feeling toward those of us who were able to rent studios and get our cavities filled without pledging our troth to a corporation right out of school.

But Goldberg's prior conviction that negative developments begin and end with the Clintons and/or network television prevents that line of enquiry. The conservative faith in the free market really is faith, and like other kinds of faith disallows the possibility of negative results.

TWENTY MINUTES WASTED WITH GOLDBERG AND MURRAY.

"Is it time for civil disobedience? Charles Murray says yes!" So begins Jonah Goldberg's interview of Murray, whose new book about bureaucracy attempts to give a modish civil-rights frisson to the fight against our fascist government's onerous regulations on drinking water, workplace hazards, and other things that should be left to the wisdom of capital. It's in the form of an American Enterprise Institute video, alas, but I have nutshelled it for you:

Goldberg, who increasing resembles Sig Ruman, says he'll start with the riots in Baltimore, which he describes as Murray's "wheelhouse"; as Murray is best known as the author of a book claiming to scientifically prove that black people are stupid, you can imagine the gooseflesh among the brethren in attendance.  Goldberg's got the fever and tries to insert as a topic of conversation the alleged "debate about whether or not it's racist to call people thugs" -- though the closed caption guy has other ideas:

At first it seems as if Murray will oblige. "I'm old enough to remember what Watts was like," he says, and adds that he acknowledged at the time  "there was something really different about inner city neighborhoods," which shows just how far he was willing to go for Those People, but now after all the years you have the "same litany of complaints" despite "overwhelmingly Democratic control implementing Democratic solutions," i.e., using whatever  money is left over after the city or state has delivered all its subsidized stadiums, office parks, and other emoluments for the deserving rich to build an occasional playground or put another bench in the courthouse/cash extraction center. And now, says an indignant Murray, "I'm supposed to be moved when President Obama says 'we know how to cure this if only we had the will'?"  By God, he acknowledged something really different about Watts, but a man can only do so much! 

Goldberg informs Murray that  "I monitor a lot of mainstream media," aka "enemy broadcasting," and he has seen such hard leftists as Joe Scarborough citing the Kerner Commission, as if race had anything to do with it, which Goldberg attributes to a "lack of self-awareness" -- that is, "they all appreciate the irony but they don't appreciate the depth of the irony," which is that black people were happy under Giuliani, or at least terrified into silence. "You have solutions that are tried to no effect," sighs Murray, but "cold-blooded, hard-headed evaluation" shows there's "no effect" cuz look, a riot.

At this point someone must have held up a sign saying PIMP BOOK ABOUT BUREAUCRACY because Goldberg praises Murray for his assertion that "complexity from the federal government always backfires." "Complexity has a whole bunch of different aspects," Murray charitably concedes. Then he gets to his signal example of intolerable bureaucracy, and if you guessed "military" or "housing court" you must be new around here.

"Teaching kids is a pretty simple thing," says Murray, but teachers for some reason want to keep disruptive children in their classrooms. No citation, but Murray assures us there are "six different school of education theories" about "why you should leave that chaotic child in the classroom." Plus even if you get these monster children out, there are "25 pages of regulations" about how to get them out, not like back when Old Man Murray was a boy and you just threw them out a window. It's about "complexity of rules... a rule for everything" -- why, Murray chortles, "I bet there's a long list of guidelines about how much physical contact you are allowed in getting that kid out of the classroom, and if you violate any of those you got a problem." (In their Idaho Barcaloungers, his audience mistily dreams of dishing out some physical contact to young troublemakers.)

Goldberg offers that public schools are "a reward for the guild and less about students." Murray generously allows that for teachers "there's always an internal rationalization for doing what you're doing," but -- look out, "what I'm about to say is not data driven about their feelings"  -- "what it looks like is people making a pretty good salary relative to what they could make in the private sector," that magical place where PhDs are forced to work at Starbucks and millionaires only break a sweat during squash or rough sex; and not only that, these overpaid child-minders have "pretty good job security" (but not for long under President Walker!). Oddly, despite all these unfair advantages, teachers are also  "demoralized" and "cynical," not because they're trying to educate children in a country that spits on knowledge and prizes conformity but because, well, aren't villains always miserable in spite of their ill-gotten gains? Murray even imagines an interior monologue for these demoralized public-sector tycoons ("I have the ability to make trouble for you..."). Ugh, teachers, why were we ever nice to them?

Someone hits Goldberg with a spitball, signalling him to announce that while Murray's book is at odds with "the intellectual Zeitgeist," normal hard-working Americans sit on girders eating sandwiches out of metal lunch pails and extol his wisdom. Then Goldberg suddenly claims that there is some overlap between the Tea Party and Elizabeth Warren, and offers to "characterize" Warren's point of view, which he does thus: the "bureaucrats and the lawyers and the politicians" are "the people who are trying to help" while the real culprits are "the one percent and the billionaires and Wall Street and the fat cats" who are "pulling all the strings." To be fair, as he said this Goldberg did not roll his eyes and speak in a grating falsetto.

You can guess what Fishtown Murray thinks of that! He allows there's a "nugget of truth" in Fake Elizabeth Warren's argument, in that the "big banks and big corporations are in bed with the government," case in point Dodd-Frank (which, in real life, every leftist from here to the Finland Station wants replaced with good ol' Glass-Steagall if not tumbrels and guillotines). The real problem is that corporations are behaving wrongly "with the help of government," whereas on their own they're great, giving us proles "ever more reliable cars, ever more powerful computers," and "Exxon cannot come to my door and say fill up your tank with super or you're going to jail." (No, says Goldberg -- that's "the Obamacare model.") In the end, Murray claims he has "as many complaints about the way capitalism is practiced as Elizabeth Warren does," but this thing you lefties think is capitalism isn't really capitalism, it's a "perversion of what capitalism ought to be," and it's the government's fault. Goldberg, caught up in the intellectual fervor, adds his own gloss on a famous Adam Smith quote: two tradesmen, or a multitude of them, "can't collude against the customer very long without the government helping [them]." Look at the ethical utopia that was the Gilded Age!

Then it's time for Goldberg to ask Murray if he's an optimist or a pessimist. Had he any guts, Murray would have said that since he'd been successfully peddling this hooey for decades and there's no reason why the suckers shouldn't buy this latest bunch of it,  of course he's an optimist. But Murray's a salesman to the end, and so tells the punters  that two hundred years from now "we're probably going to be way wealthier than we are now," allowing his audience to believe that "we" means them, too, and not just a tiny sliver of neo-feudal overlords including Charles Murray IV.

Finally Goldberg has to deliver on the opening pitch, and tells us the book encourages "civil disobedience," though of course it's not the kind with "sit-ins and lunch counters" -- he and Murray share a laugh over that: Imagine us at lunch counters, like some low-IQ you-know-whats! You can read about this in Murray's WSJ essay, but basically, if all of us few remaining middle-class white people get together and don't fill out form 47-B, we can take this motherfucker down!  Murray explains this in terms honkies can understand: that is, with speeding tickets and NBA officiating as examples. Then another shared laugh about putting body cameras on bureaucrats -- ha ha, again with the you-know-whats! -- and we're out. Next week: The people united will never be forced to provide wheelchair access! 

BUT OLD MAN GOLDBERG, HE JUST KEEPS FARTING ALONG.

Jonah Goldberg tells us he had to house-husband for a bit and, after some humorous padding about how what a slob he is, does one of those pirouette-off-a-cliff segues for which he is justly famous:

But I also think about how hard it must be to be an actual single parent. It seems to me that this is the ground-floor argument conservatives should build up from when talking about marriage.

Maybe they should start with jokes about male housekeeping too. "Ah wipe mah ass ohna floor lahk a wormy dog," chortles Rick Perry.

Raising kids is just easier with two committed parents around. Put aside the moralizing for a second (moralizing I often agree with, by the way) and just talk logistics. It’s very hard to do all the things you want to do for your kids without a wingman (or wing-gal).

For example, his wife keeps a stick with a hook on it in the Subaru, for when Goldberg drops a bag of Funyuns under the brake pedal.

I’m not even talking about the financial part, which is huge. It’s simply harder to help with homework, show up at games, serve home-cooked meals, and generally participate in your kids’ life if you’re the sole breadwinner and sole parent. (Charles Murray has been making this point for a very long time.)...

I imagine Goldberg's comrades sitting around the McManse, marveling at how inner city single moms get their kids to soccer and ballet practice. (With our tax dollars via the socialist subways!) Inevitably Goldberg gets to his Murphy Brown section -- liberals are all rich white people who want blacks to breed unwed because something something plantation, whereas conservatives are racially indistinct reincarnations of the Founders, in whose world black families stayed together until sold off separately -- and then offers the traditional solution:

When Hillary Clinton & Co. talk about how “it takes a village to raise a child” they’re invoking wisdom from what P. J. O’Rourke called the “ancient African kingdom of Hallmarkcardia” to make the case for vast new federal bureaucracies, taxes, programs, regulations, etc. But the phrase itself contains a lot of truth. Unlike bureaucrats in Washington, neighbors, teachers, pastors, coaches, coworkers, and friends can help raise your kids, in ways large and small. Real communities involve extended networks of trust and goodwill. Fake communities have regulations, fees, subsidies, and checklists...

While Obama would rob the mega-rich of their precious savings -- savings they need to complete their yacht flotillas -- to subsidize community college, which will only cause the poors to get above themselves reading Derrida, Republican policies will nourish real communities by destroying all safety nets, forcing the poors to huddle for warmth with grampa and all the brats in their slums, thus reinforcing family feeling.

But much as Goldberg enjoys helping the underprivileged with morality lectures and tax breaks for the wealthy, he's really interested in Murphy Brown -- or a similarly well-aged avatar of liberals' refusal to join in the hectoring:

But elites won’t come out in favor of marriage as a social ideal (except for gays, of course), because as Charles Murray likes to say, they refuse to preach what they practice. 

Speaking of preaching, this reminds me of something I’ve been griping about for years: Madonna. Here’s how I put it in The Tyranny of Clichés....

Madonna! I wonder if, before settling for this, Goldberg spent five minutes bugging his intern: "You're young and with it. Who can we call a whore these days?" (He also tries to tart this nonsense up with "hypocrophobia," a perfect Goldberg neologism, in that it disguises incoherence with pretend erudition.)

Then comes a truly breathtaking argument:

This raises a fundamental problem for democracy. When certain lifestyles multiply, they become political constituencies rather than cautionary tales. If we didn’t have so many people in prison, there’d be no movement to give felons the vote. If so many people didn’t smoke pot, the legalization movement wouldn’t be doing so well. George W. Bush lavished praise on single mothers for the simple reason that there are lots of single mothers out there. If enough people go on the dole, then we stop calling it the dole and we stop shaming able-bodied people who turn it into a lifestyle. 

It doesn’t really matter what you think about the specific issues to understand the point. Everyone likes to think they’re principled, but principles can get overwhelmed when enough people violate them...

You're a bunch of whores and moochers and that's why liberals get away with it.

This was the real point I was trying to get at in my column earlier this week. We make all sorts of allowances for Islamic extremism because we are cowed by its numbers (and its willpower), not its arguments. If there were 1.6 million, not 1.6 billion Muslims around the world, there wouldn’t be nearly so much fumfering and fooferall about Muslim sensibilities.

In Goldberg's world, you're only nice to people -- blacks, single mothers, Muslims -- because you're ascared of them. After some more padding which contains, it should be noted for the record, the clause "JFK and Teddy were scummy dudes," comes this:

Principled people can deploy cost-benefit analysis too. For instance, I’ve long argued that if we could do it cheap and without losing any American or allied lives, we would be right to topple the North Korean regime. I believe that. I also believe that we should have wiped out the Soviets once we were done with Hitler provided doing so wouldn’t have meant a long and bloody third world war. But those options aren’t and weren’t on the table.

My fantasies are more righteous than your fantasies!

The trick is to uphold the principle while allowing for the fact that reality often doesn’t let us fully implement our principles without cost (a useful thing for Republicans to remember in their internal squabbles as well)...

Over years of following Goldberg's work, I'm noticed some patterns in it, and this is one: Usually when he leaves a hanging curveball, he won't take the effort to rewrite it into something better, but will instead try to confuse his reader with a barely-relevant parenthetical -- as here, where he clearly hopes you will associate a "reality" that "often doesn’t let us fully implement our principles without cost" with GOP squabbling instead of, for example, the multi-trillion-dollar Iraq War.

The rest is just dribbling, but I have to note this:

There’s a corruption of the soul at work when you can bleat and whine about the “Taliban wing of the Republican party” while effectively making apologies for the actual Taliban.

No link on "effectively making apologies for the actual Taliban," you may have guessed.

UPDATE. Goldberg's column is a rich vein for enthusiasts, and in comments mark f says he can't believe I left this bit unmentioned:

...liberal writers give [the Kennedys] a pass because . . . Camelot! Or something. 

It’s not just writers, though. It’s all of us. And that’s not always wrong (though it often is).

I agree  it's wonderfully Goldbergian -- especially the parenthetical pee-dance -- but, you know, I'm doing this in my spare time and can't do all the glosses Goldberg deserves, so thanks, mark f -- and thanks Yastreblyansky, who takes the trouble to source some of Goldberg's misapprehensions, e.g. one about Obama's community college plan, to which Goldberg objects in part because it requires "raising taxes on college-savings plans":

The college-savings plans in question are the 529 and Coverdell plans used by a little under 3% of the nation's families to pay for their children's tertiary education (the families have a median income of around $142,400 per year as opposed to $45,100 for the rest of us, and median financial assets of about $413,500, or 25 times the median financial asset value, $15,400, of families without the plans). 

I'm not clear about how keeping them tax-free helps the impoverished single parent in a more efficient way than free community college, since the impoverished single parent doesn't actually have any of the money involved. Perhaps the owners of the accounts plan to donate the interest money to the poor...

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."

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the recent Democratic debate, and the odd reactions of the rightwing press -- including the puzzling insistence of some that Hillary Clinton is every bit the socialist Bernie Sanders is.

Whenever "Clinton" and "Socialism" are mentioned, Jonah Goldberg is summoned, like a Candyman who actually wants candy and keeps running his hook uselessly through bins of Smarties going "STUPID HOOK." Goldberg starts by making a wan joke about what a drag it was having to watch the debate ("I really resented watching the Democratic debate. I watched because it’s part of my job") when he could have been, oh, seeing if lying on three mattresses is more comfortable than lying on one, and if that maid weren't such a lazy little Mexican he could have found out.

Then Goldberg complains Hillary didn't have it hard enough because Chafee, Webb, and O'Malley were "like Mohammed, Jagdish, Sidney, and Clayton from Animal House." (The foreigners, the nerd, and the blind cripple, remember? Hyuk!) He compares Bernie Sanders to Alec Guinness in The Bridge Over the River Kwai because, Christ who can tell, maybe his Metaphor Butler was in the hospital this week and all he could remember was Guinness looked rilly beat too, just like Sanders, and fart. And of course Goldberg is mad that Sanders helped Clinton out with her email mishegas.

But he's especially pissed that Clinton called for a "new New Deal." Aha, he cries -- these liberals always want a new New Deal. See, Peter Beinart once called Obama a new New Deal! And in the few nanoseconds Obama had sufficient Congressional support to pass it, he gave us Obamacare, and that didn't solve everything (look, here's Megan McArdle telling us that it's a disaster -- whoops, that was years ago: Now she just says that it's not all that) so ob-viously "The New Deal is just a talisman in their undying faith in their own ability to guide society and make decisions for others better than people can make for themselves."

Finally Goldberg cries "it's all just so exhausting" -- Facilities! This stupid pen made my hand all crampy! -- and throws himself on his farting couch, murmurring:

And I guess what I resent most of all is the fact that I will spend the rest of my life arguing with people who not only think that their faith in progressivism and the State is smart and modern, but that their opponents are the ones who are stuck in the past. And in the process, they’ll keep making the country worse, with every failure providing the latest evidence that now, now, is the time for a new New Deal.

He doesn't know why he bothers. Oh, right -- legacy pledge!  Brightening, Goldberg muses that "pledge" reminds him of Lemon Pledge, which reminds him of Country Time Lemonade Mix and how good it tastes poured over a quart of sherbet. Goldberg triumphantly scrawls a shopping list for Carmelita. The struggle continues!

Oh, if you got distracted, please still read the column.

A FINE EXAMPLE OF THE GENRE (FART). This is, in so many ways, a perfect Jonah Goldberg post:

• Contains meaningless, undefended observation made in passing just to pump up Goldberg's opinions-per-square-inch ratio ("It's pretty nifty looking and a clever idea, though I'm not sure how useful or reliable it is");
• "Truthfully, I don't fully trust any web numbers from any source about any thing. But for a host of reasons, intuitive and historical, Google's numbers feel about right." Also: "But that's pure guesswork on my part."
• Goldberg pretends post will be controversial with the "suits," maintaining that precious Goldberg street cred;
• "Reader" claims Goldberg is right, which vindicates Goldberg's intellectual processes, ensuring there will be many more like this.

I also must applaud a few other Goldberg efforts today: His why's-ID-for everybody-less-offensive-than-ID-for-one-targeted-race post, and his David-Frum-made-me-look-stupid-with-unfair-debate-tricks, come-tell-me-how-great-I-was post. That man's a national treasure.

UP TO A POINT, LORD FARTER.

I've been laughing at the collapse of conservative NeverTrumpism for a while now, and it never gets any less funny. Check out Jonah Goldberg trying to reason with Dennis Prager -- I know! Funny already, right? -- because Prager accused NeverTrumpers of purity policing. Talk about the unspeakable in pursuit of the inedible! Prager barks at the wets that "Trump, with all his flaws, is our general. If this general is going to win, he needs the best fighters"; Goldberg clears his throat and pipes up, finger aloft, "Donald Trump is literally no one’s general, because the president isn’t a general." Aaaagh! It's like Pee-Wee and Francis. And we haven't even got to Goldberg's objection to "another problematic turn of phrase" by Prager (and try to imagine any of Prager's yak qualifying as a 'turn of phrase' rather than as, say, a spume of stupid) -- that is, that NTs have a "utopian streak," to which Goldberg rejoins, basically, nuh-uh (and of course farrrrrt).

Vanitas, vanitas: This is just the rightwing version of virtue-signaling. As I've shown in the past, Goldberg is only NeverTrump up to a point -- the point where it becomes obvious that Trump is doing everything conservatives want and the only worry for such as Goldberg is that he isn't making it look nice and patty-cake, like something he can be House Intellectual of. When Goldberg gets too close to that point, he farts and stammers out gibberish like "What worries me about the nascent Trump administration is that he is making it difficult to defend Trump on the merits." Similarly he has to treat Prager like a misguided comrade ("If Dennis had used the phrase 'culture war' or some such, I think he’d be entirely right") in order to maintain the fiction that they are still united in a "movement" rather than competing for whatever rich donors and brutish Snopeses they can bamboozle into entering their pigeon coop.

Another up-to-a-point man is Jay Caruso, who sometimes says mean things about Trump but still has to make excuses. Today Trump continued paying off his Moscow enablers by starting to return two spy compounds Obama had seized from them. Everyone sees and everyone knows, but here's Caruso:

Trump Administration May Return Seized Russian Compounds Proving Nobody Over There Understands Optics

Almost anybody with a cursory familiarity with politics understands the value of optics. When something looks bad, people are going to think it’s bad.

If only the Trump people knew how this would look! Cut to Sergei Lavrov sneering at reporters about the firing of James Comey, then going backstage to laugh his ass off with Trump and Kislyak. Champ, these people don't care how it looks. If anything, they want people to see how little they care how it looks, so they'll get discouraged and stop caring themselves.

Their little tut-tuts ain't doing shit. But then, they don't want them to.

FRIDAY ROUND-THE-HORN.

•   The imbecility of the Sony/North Korea thing could not achieve full ripeness without a contribution from Jonah Goldberg. He talks about the 1940s, when Jack Kirby and Joe Simon, the creators of Captain America, were getting menaced by New York Nazis, and Fiorello La Guardia phoned them to pledge his support. Alas, New York's current mayor has disappointed Goldberg:

New York mayor Bill de Blasio didn’t call the management of Landmark Theaters in New York, where Sony Pictures was slated to premiere The Interview, and say, “The city of New York will see that no harm will come to you.” He didn’t say much of anything at all.

1.) I wonder if Goldberg called de Blasio's office to confirm this. 2.) I can imagine Landmark receiving such a call and saying, "Thanks a lot, Mayor! Wait'll I tell the management of Sony Pictures that you'll ring the theater with cops if they release the picture -- that ought to change their minds about cyberterrorist threats!" 3.) Doesn't Goldberg know that La Guardia smashed pinball machines, and was therefore a Liberal Fascist? Farrrrrt.

•   Oh Jesus, Goldberg just sent out his G-file email on the same subject. It's not on the internet yet, so allow me to treat you to a key passage:

The collective U.S. response to North Korea’s assault on Sony has been disgusting and dispiriting. I don’t think we should bomb North Korea over this... but the correct response is to flip Kim Jong-un the bird. What form that bird-flipping would take is open to debate.

Open to debate?

I’d like it if the TV networks all ran The Interview at the same time.

 Yeah, let's have a debate about what the nets run. Didn't this guy write a book called Liberal Fascism?

I’d like Barack Obama to call the leaders of the House and Senate to a private screening of The Interview at the White House, just like Woodrow Wilson did with Birth of a Nation.

Wilson, the biggest Liberal Fascist of them all! Goldberg is becoming a National Greatness Conservative, I guess. Wait, it gets betterworse:

Obama’s conduct in this episode has been better than others, but not very good. This is the kind of moment great politicians seize.

"What? Hollywood's making a sequel to Arthur? I'm still president, Mommy, let's nationalize Warner Brothers."

It’s the kind of moment they pray will fall into their lap. First of all, short of C.H.U.D.s, there’s really no better enemy than the North Korean regime. The Left can’t really shout racism about hating on the Norks...

I never thought I'd say this, but I thought this sort of who-would-win-in-a-fight-between-Axl-Rose-and-a-blade-of-grass gibberish was beneath Goldberg. But then, ours is an age of new lows.

•   Michael Coren at Breitbart.com:

AS OBAMA WAVERS, CANADA’S HARPER IS THE TRUE LEADER OF NORTH AMERICAN VALUES

"North American values?" This is weaker than that "Anglosphere" shit.

The Conservative leader has been in office for more than eight years now and his response to the terror attacks was entirely typical. Firm, resolute, controlled, slightly boring but utterly uncompromising.

Boring and uncompromising -- aw, but ain't that North America?

While opposition leaders and liberal newspapers were reluctant to even describe the crimes as terrorism, Harper used the word repeatedly and spoke of the need to combat this darkness internationally as well as domestically. Indeed, along with Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbot, Harper has led the world in candour concerning Islamist aspirations and the need to affirm western values.

Apparently Harper says "terror" and "Islamicism" a lot, which is why a Mountie can just roll up in ISIS territory drinking a Brador and no one can touch him. Also he's "the first leader to officially boycott Hamas," and thinks "Canada should not have to pay fines and be punished for their environmental policies," and is shutting down Canada's socialized medicine program -- kidding about that last one, guys, but though Coren doesn't approve of everything Harper does, "it’s liberals and socialist who most despise him," and after all isn't trolling what North American Values are all about?

BEYOND EMBARRASSMENT. Kudos to Jamie Kilstein for his clever stunt of challenging Jonah Goldberg, who had yammered about beating the socialism out of young people, to beat the socialism out of him for charity. (h/t  Chad Denton.) But I hope Kilstein didn't expect to penetrate Goldberg's thick skull with his point. You may recall that in 2010, after Goldberg asked why Julian Assange hadn't been garroted yet, John Cook asked at Gawker why Goldberg hadn't been punched in the face yet. Goldberg responded as if Cook had challenged him to a fistfight. I doubt Goldberg has the intellectual gifts to understand the simple irony of Kilstein's challenge.

Oh, before you bring it up, yes, I have considered the possibility that Goldberg is only pretending to be that stupid, on the reasonable assumption that his own followers are even stupider. But after years  of reading his crap, I no longer give him the benefit of the doubt; mental insufficiency is my go-to explanation, though I will entertain arguments for animal fear, low cunning, and desperation to access Cheetos.

UPDATE. In comments, speculative fiction by Waingro: "Look, I don't even know who this Kilstein person is and I don't want to get into the weeds about this. Are there any NRO readers who know what a 'fight' is? I'm not looking for a dissertation, just a brief synopsis. Maybe just send me like 3 bulletpoints. And make sure there are no big words. Anyway, whatever this guy just said, I think it only reinforces my original point. I'm sure he thinks he's being very clever and droll, but I don't have the time to respond. If someone wants to write a response for me and have it submitted under my name, just e-mail. I can probably enter you in a raffle for the NRO cruise in return."

A COUPLE OF WHITE GUYS SITTING AROUND TALKING. Jonah Goldberg is puzzled that a private school and a journalists' convention are promoting "diversity" as selling points. I'm puzzled by Goldberg. Isn't he a capitalist? It should no more bother him that services are peddled with diversity than if they were peddled with HD, 9.0 megapixels, electronic brake-force distribution, or whatever. Hell, Violet from Peanuts bought a bracelet because it was hi-fi. Just because Goldberg doesn't want it doesn't mean other high-end consumers won't.

Maybe Goldberg thinks the proliferation of diversity talk is bad for America in some way. Will he grasp the nettle?

Whether you think that’s a good thing or bad — or a mix of the two — is a topic for another day.

Goldberg never fails to come down to our expectations.

John Derbyshire jumps in to make everything worse:

Last week the whole Derb family went to an Open House at the college our daughter will be attending this Fall. As part of the presentation there was a promotional movie for the college. One of the first words spoken in the movie was “Diversity.” I think it may actually have been the very first: “Diversity is our highest goal here at . . .” or some such.

Or maybe it said, "Your daughter will meet attractive black men"; with the blood pounding in his ears, Derbyshire may have misheard. Also, unlike Goldberg, Derbyshire is willing to say where he stands on the whole diversity racket:

The U.S.A. was born diverse and we have never had any choice but to cope with that original Diversity as best we can.

Just so: along with the Brits, Germans, et alia, hundreds of thousands of black people somehow wound up in America in the 18th Century, and it's been nothing but trouble ever since. I believe Charles Murray wrote a book about it.

Still, if managing Diversity demands such commitment of time, resources, and effort, above and beyond what is ordinarily required to keep a civilization going and an economy humming, isn’t it foolish to be taking on more Diversity? Especially in a world where, as one of your commenters points out, we are in rivalry with big nations that have no Diversity overhead at all?

Well, there's an exciting new theory of America's economic doldrums: we face a disastrous racial purity gap. Maybe one day Derbyshire will explain his plan for addressing it. I expect it will involve driving African-Americans out of the country with dialect humor.

UPDATE. Another classic Goldberg-Derbyshire tag team on the subject. (And another.)

UPDATE 2. Right out of the comments box: "What'ya mean 'we,' lime-sucker? Get your rotten-toothed, queen-humping arse back to Old Blighty and leave America to us Americans." You're the real racist, Roger.

UPDATE 3. Ha S,N!

NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN: ADDENDUM. Sometimes I worry that my film reviews may not be up to snuff, so thank God Jonah Goldberg occasionally steps up to make me look like Manny Farber:

For example, I'm kind of surprised that the movie left no lasting impression on Steve Sailer. First and foremost it made me want to read the novel.

High praise indeed. I wonder if Goldberg has ever read Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex But Were Afraid to Ask.

But more importantly, I think you can find some very rich commentary on the American character and predicament in the movie (as Ross suggests in his review in the magazine but, I think, doesn't explore enough). The fatalism, determinism (philosophically speaking), the rejection of cant and the waving away of nostalgia, were all powerful ingredients of the film, at least for me.

Determinism, philosophically speaking! No Country For Old Men is an excellent chase film with twangy talk about the persistence of evil inserted at puzzling intervals. Something that's more like what Goldberg is imagining is John Huston's The Asphalt Jungle. Everyone in it speaks a mannered pulp argot, which gives them enough rhetorical headroom to comment in high style on their own "predicament" whether at rest or in action. This keeps the highflown thoughts wedded to character and threaded into the plot.

In No Country, Chighur's conversations are a little in that vein, but the pronouncements of Sheriff Bell and Ellis are closer to the tedious lecture Commissioner Hardy gives the reporters near the end of The Asphalt Jungle: an insertion that is supposed to radiate meaning onto the action from the outside. In Jungle this comes off as a quick gloss or a way of getting around the Hays Office, and is followed by a more appropriate, though downbeat, spurt of narrative; in No Country the Hardys just hang around the periphery being premonitory until near the end, when they surge to subsume and kill the story. This is the real "dismal tide": geezers talking about good and evil (and what do they say, exactly, besides good sure is good and evil sure is evil?) till their chatter drowns out a perfectly good action picture.

Of course Goldberg ends with his own dismal tide:

Anyway we can revisit later. But one last quick point: I've been surprised more people haven't compared it — favorably or unfavorably — to A Simple Plan which I've long argued was one of the most conservative movies made in recent times. The plot alone is remarkably similar (though hardly identical).

Like anything that made Goldberg forget his popcorn for a moment, it has something to do with his politics. I wonder why he goes to the movies at all: doesn't he have a "Star Trek" boxed set and a microwave?

UPDATE. Today's No-Prize goes to Scott C.: "For Goldberg I believe [ars gratia artis] translates literally to farts for farts' sake."

With respect to the Coens, I must say it is rather cheap of me to associate cosmic readings of No Country with Goldberg. For a much worthier essay, see Glenn Kenny.

...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.

GOLDBERG RETURNS! Jonah Goldberg is back from a European vacation, where I imagine he made Clark Griswold look like Bernard Berenson, to bring some life to The Corner with a breathtaking series of inane posts. There's one in which he compares the Henry Louis Gates case to the Tawana Brawley case -- the only evident similarity between them being that the principals were black -- and concludes that liberals don't care about the truth. There's another in which he says Obama's taste for golf betrays a "double standard," though the only clue as to what he might mean is that "poppa Bush's golf outings during a very minor recession hurt him terribly in his reelection bid," which would make the holder of the double standard the U.S. electorate.

I would be embarrassed to mention his admission of germ paranoia if he hadn't brought it up himself. Be warned; it leads to a series, ending with reader reminiscences about how they couldn't get enough wiping paper in foreign countries. There's a psychology paper in this somewhere.

Eventually he is made to focus on the current events analysis that has justly made him famous. John J. Miller comes in complaining that from what he's seen, the new G.I, Joe movie doesn't have enough American military uniforms to suit him, not to fulfill Hollywood's historic mission of "public diplomacy of creating goodwill abroad." (I should think they'd be grateful to us just for the loud, ugly crap to watch on dates.) You know Goldberg couldn't resist this, and gasses about the commies in Hollywood trying to make our fighting men look bad, and in so doing makes a passing comment about the Bourne movies that spurs a reader to remark that the anti-American content is present in the Bourne novels as well. Another reader says Hollywood totally anti-Americanized the property. This puts Goldberg into a fog, from which he is stirred by Jonathan Adler, who asserts that "There's plenty of evidence Hollywood leans left, but the Bourne movies are not among them."

Goldberg grasps the nettle, which is on a rose bush in an entirely different county:

Jonathan - You write: "There's plenty of evidence Hollywood leans left, but the Bourne movies are not among them."

To the extent I understand your argument, it seems to be that because they made a good movie from a good book, and despite the fact it is a leftwing interpretation of the book, it cannot count as proof that Hollywood is left-leaning. How does that work?

As Goldberg is a legacy pledge, and because they are both talking gibberish, Adler is obliged to respond with the slightly exasperated deference of bearded doctors in Three Stooges shorts ("My point [perhaps inartfully made] is that the decision to make the Bourne movies is not evidence of Hollywood's ideological leanings..."). Fortunately for him, it's getting late and Goldberg has a date with the director's cut of Road House.

I'm glad to see him back. The Corner is pretty tedious without comic relief.

THAT'S RACIST. NO, SERIOUSLY, THAT IS RACIST.

Ta-Nehisi Coates complains of the "half-assed social contract" applied to blacks since Reconstruction ("The black migrants did play by the rules, but they did not enjoy the right to compete"). Jonah Goldberg thinks he has a good one:

Coates doesn’t mention it, but it’s worth noting that many of the mechanisms of this “half-assed social contract” were forged and defended as progressive laws. The Davis-Bacon Act is the most famous example, in that it was designed to benefit white union members at the expense of equally qualified but less expensive black labor... 

Take, for instance, the minimum wage. The founding fathers of progressivism at the University of Wisconsin, but also such figures as Sidney Webb, saw the discriminatory aspects of the minimum wage as among its chief selling points...

So, in a nation where unions offer blacks a rare chance at higher wages, Goldberg portrays such wages as Liberal Fascist Racism; and in a nation where blacks traditionally get lower wages than whites, Goldberg portrays the minimum wage as Liberal Fascist Racism.

While for many years most American politicians were racist to a greater or less extent, Goldberg only notices the racism of those whose legacies have actually been of some help to non-white Americans. (For him Robert Byrd is eternally a Klansman, but William Buckley was a great man who couldn't have meant all those things he said.)  In fact, any successful attempt to improve the lot of non-whites, such as diversity programs, Goldberg unfailingly identifies as the real racism ("If I give extra credit to Joe because he’s black, I’m making things just that much harder for Tom because he’s white"). I've never seen him speak well of a black person who wasn't a National Review author or a member of the Bush Administration. I'm not even sure if he likes Prince.

I used to think Goldberg did this shit because he came up as a fratty chucklehead who saw how much the grown-ups liked it when he acted "politically incorrect," and that he kept it up as part of a conscious attempt to peddle conservatism as the fun American ideology. But now that he is no longer remotely young and not even Goldberg is stupid enough to think conservatism is fun, I've come to the conclusion that he just doesn't like black people. I'm rather embarrassed that it took me this long to figure that out. The moron has outsmarted me at last! Farrrrt.

ACT LIKE BLUTO, VOTE LIKE NIEDERMEYER. Jonah Goldberg is the son of longtime GOP dirty trickster Lucianne Goldberg, and an apple that appears not to have fallen from the tree at all. Note his own recent brown ops:

• Weeks ago, Crooked Timber suggested that the anonymous letters that increasingly comprise NRO's/The Corner's ammunition against Democrats were fake ("If you possess an email address and an eye-opening story, you've passed the rigorous fact-checking that has made National Review and the Penthouse Forum world-famous") and proposed that readers send fake anti-Democrat testimonials to The Corner to see if they would bite.
  
  
• At The Corner, Goldberg acknowledged CT's strategy and defended himself against the specific charge on which it was based ("...while the posts in the Corner may be anonymous, they are virtually never anonymous to me... some emails should certainly be taken with a grain of salt on the off-chance a correspondent is embellishing...").
  
  
• Popstar Moby suggests to the New York Daily News that concerned Bush opponents should spread false stories about the President's past.
  
  
• Seeing the main chance, Goldberg harshes on Moby and, without notice, changes his characterization of the CT attack:

  A couple of weeks ago, several liberal bloggers announced that they wanted their readers to deliberately make up fake emails and send them to NR because they found the real emails we were posting in the Corner too unhelpful to their cause. So far they've all been way too stupid to fool us, but that could change... it now seems safe to predict that the Moby-Moore fringe of liberalism is ratcheting-up it's ends justify-the-means approach to political discourse. Get ready for the Age of Mobyism, it won't be pretty.

In short, what Goldberg knew, and said he knew, was an attack on The Corner's credulity when it comes to anonymous anti-Democratic emails, he now conflates with Moby's active attempt to spread lies about the President. Even better, Goldberg uses this hastily-arranged moral high ground to denounce the Democrats' initiation of dirty tricks -- as if GOP Astroturf (or, for that matter, his Mom) had never existed.

This strategy is classical, and best known by Otter's use of it in Animal House: "Well, you can do what you want to us, but we're not going to sit here and listen to you bad-mouth the United States of America!" No wonder Goldberg's always got that shit-eating sneer on his face: he's got what for modern conservatives must be the best of both worlds: he gets to live out his favorite movie every day -- in defense of the Dean Wormers of the world.

DUMBASS, DON'T TELL. 11 months ago, Jonah Goldberg said, "conservatives shouldn’t take Obama’s bait on repealing Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell... I’m not saying he doesn’t believe it should be repealed. But no one seems to think Obama will do anything to achieve this supposed goal." That ship has sailed, so now Goldberg's back to tell us how the repeal of DADT is good news for conservatives.

Goldberg starts, as conservatives tend to do when talking about gay people, with sex:

Two decades ago, the gay left wanted to smash the bourgeois prisons of monogamy, capitalistic enterprise and patriotic values and bask in the warm sun of bohemian "free love."

Two decades ago would be 1990, at which time I was living in the bohemian Ground Zero of the East Village and perceived very little monogamy-smashing among gays or straights. Maybe he means the 70s, bathhouses, and such like. (I still don't know how this relates to "capitalistic enterprise and patriotic values.")

In this, they were simply picking up the torch from the straight left of the 1960s and 1970s, who had sought to throw off the sexual hang-ups of their parents' generation along with their gray flannel suits.

Gay people had to learn about free love from heterosexuals? But I thought they were supposed to be corrupting us!

As a sexual lifestyle experiment, that failed pretty miserably, the greatest proof being that the affluent and educated children (and grandchildren) of the baby boomers have reembraced bourgeois notions of marriage as an essential part of life. Sadly, it's the have-nots who are now struggling as marriage is increasingly seen as an unaffordable luxury. The irony is that such bourgeois values — monogamy, hard work, etc. — are the best guarantors of success and happiness.

Goldberg can't claim that America, exhausted by the Great Orgy of 1990, has fallen in love with marriage all over again -- in part because marriage rates among young people have actually dropped. So he falls back on the standard rightwing idea that getting hitched makes you wealthy, leaving us to wonder why the poor haven't caught on to this money-making secret and how a bunch of rich people having weddings constitutes a conservative social revival. Maybe getting married is the new Going Galt?

Getting back to the homosexuals, Goldberg explains how they lost their taste for free love:

Of course, AIDS played an obvious and tragic role in focusing attention on the downside of promiscuity. But even so, the sweeping embrace of bourgeois lifestyles by the gay community has been stunning.

To put it another way: Yeah, there was this virulent, sexually-trasmitted plague, but still and all, you gotta wonder why gay couples are nesting in front of the TV.

Nowhere is this more evident — and perhaps exaggerated — than in popular culture. Watch ABC's "Modern Family." The sitcom is supposed to be "subversive" in part because it features a gay couple with an adopted daughter from Asia...

I'll spare you the detailed explanation, but the upshot is, Americans like gays on the TV, which means something conservative, because everything does. Finally we get to DADT:

Or look at the decision to let gays openly serve in the military through the eyes of a principled hater of all things military. From that perspective, gays have just been co-opted by the Man. Meanwhile, the folks who used "don't ask, don't tell" as an excuse to keep the military from recruiting on campuses just saw their argument go up in flames.

For years gay people have been fighting for the right to serve openly in the military and conservatives have been fighting against them. This month Democrats finally got a handful of Republicans to go along with DADT repeal. But Goldberg has found in his imagination a "principled hater of all things military" who doesn't approve. Plus ROTC! It's a wonder Mitch McConnell and Jim DeMint didn't get in on the big win in the Senate.

Finally, on to the next frontier:

Personally, I have always felt that gay marriage was an inevitability, for good or ill (most likely both). I do not think that the arguments against gay marriage are all grounded in bigotry, and I find some of the arguments persuasive.

Remember this ringing endorsement when marriage equality hits 50 states and Goldberg is telling us that gay is the new Tea Party.

UPDATE. See also Zandar.

BEZOS AND FDR FINALLY UNITED IN RIGHTWING HISTORY.

I keep forgetting how dumb Jonah Goldberg is, merely because I don't read him as much as I used to (yes, I am still capable of growth and learning). But Jesus:

Amazon is taking its ball and going home, and New York Democrats are actually celebrating.

I wasn’t a huge fan of the deal New York and Amazon worked out. I don’t like corporate welfare, and the race among municipalities to bribe businesses to set up shop in their backyards has a lot of problems.

Followers of the Goldberg style will recognize the all-bases cover he uses when he knows taking a firm position will leave him exposed. (Around here we call it the pee-dance.) He can't just say, as have many wingnut morons doing If I Was Mayor of a City I Obviously Hate cosplay on the internet, that it was bad to reject Amazon's deal because conservatives are supposed to be against "Crony Capitalism" these days (It's one of the THIMK-style signs in his office, the others include Liberal Fascism, You're the Real Racist, and My Mom Can Get You Fired). But he still has to bitch about it -- the big picture over his column of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, with whom the dummies are associating the deal, shows he's pretty much expected to -- so he has to fudge (without thinking about fudge, which would delay his filing by 30 minutes and 700 calories). Now let's look at the horrible mutant baby of logic in which this results:

...But what’s just astounding to me is how Democrats can (almost in one breath, figuratively speaking) champion a Green New Deal that would use the powers of the state — taxes, subsidies, regulatory bullying, etc. — to herd whole industries into alignment with their vision of a just and green society, and at the same time denounce these very tactics when actually put into practice.

Did you know large national projects such as the Space Race and crony capitalism are the same thing? Let's hear Goldberg explain:

...The most prominent architect of the GND is New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Under her proposal, cows might suffer, but humans will thrive thanks to all the wonderful new jobs and free health care her utopian scheme would provide.

LOL at the idea you can ever make anything better for non-billionaires!

...When Inskeep pointed out to her that deficit spending is “borrowing money that has to be paid back eventually through taxes,” AOC reversed herself with an impressive lack of embarrassment, saying that’s okay because this isn’t spending, it’s investing. Borrowing tens of trillions for her “investments” will pay for itself, “Because we’re creating jobs.”

The Amazon deal would have created some 25,000 jobs with an average annual salary of $150,000...

Quit laughing -- just because it would cost New York $3 billion in tax breaks, plus which these big corporate promises seldom pan out, doesn't mean it's impossible.

...but AOC was against it because the agreement amounted to “creeping overreach of one of the world’s biggest corporations.”

Maybe it did. But I have news for AOC and others trying to use the precedent of the original New Deal as an excuse to get the band back together: This is how New Deals work.

Yes, Goldberg thinks the profit motive of a rich oligarch is pretty much the same as FDR's reason for launching the Works Progress Administration. His hook, or rather his rusty hatpin, is that the New Deal was a "bonanza for big business":

In their effort to mobilize the U.S. economy to fight the Depression, the New Dealers favored big businesses and “associations” — cartels, guilds, syndicates, etc. — at every turn. The largest corporations individually or in association wrote the “codes” — i.e., regulations — of the National Recovery Administration and other agencies for their own benefit. It was all done in the name of efficiency and progress. 

For instance, the big chain movie houses of the 1930s — the Netflixes and Hulus of the time — wrote the codes in such a way that independents were nearly run out of business, even though 13,571 of the 18,321 movie theaters in America were independently owned.

The New Deal also, indeed primarily, fed, housed, and gave employment to a whole lot of starving, homeless, jobless citizens. Even if Amazon's promised jobs panned out they were not going to the needy, and might not even have gone to locals.

Goldberg thinks it was just a racket, though, the secret purpose of which was... I don't know, to make America Communist by consolidating the power of Big Movie Theater Chains, or to pay off FDR's donors.

The howler is that when Republicans do big-government big-money interventions -- even the one Republican president Goldberg allegedly disapproves of -- he's willing to accept their allegedly patriotic and utilitarian logic: e.g. "My hunch: The tax bill will help the economy," tweeted Goldberg about the amazingly transparent donor payoff Trump and Congressional Republicans pulled in 2017. But if Democrats propose a jobs program, it's a utopian fantasy. Even if it were a fantasy, I'd still take it over the dystopian reality Goldberg seems to think we deserve.

RACE TO THE BOTTOM. Michael Potemra on populism:

So with the Palin-Trump summit meeting, we got an indication of who she is — and, I hasten to add, it’s not only a negative indication, even for those of us who are unimpressed with Trump. Sure, on the negative side, she’s saying, I’m impressed with Donald Trump. Not a good sign in a potential president. But, on the positive side, she’s saying, Yeah, I’m impressed with Donald Trump — you got a problem with that, Mr. East Coast MSM Intellectual? And that, I think, shows a level of comfort with herself that we would like a president to have.

In other words, Palin's sumptuously-covered meeting with the buffoon Trump is good because it reaffirms Palin's contempt for the media and comfort with herself. This is so dumb I thought at first Jonah Goldberg had written it. Then I found, to my astonishment, that Potemra was answering a relatively innocuous Goldberg post on the subject. He out-Goldberged Goldberg! Jonah, watch your back.

UPDATE. The one time I'm nice to Goldberg, commenter Froley has to spoil it -- regarding Goldberg's desire for an NRO Bus Tour, Froley writes, "he could easily waddle into the Ken Kesey role and travel the country by bus (appropriately named 'Farter') with his band of less than merry NRO pranksters -- LSD and marijuana replaced by Cheetos and Mountain Dew." WE BLEW IT!