Via the Sullivanator 2010, this Jonah Goldberg quote:
“One of the great failures of my book is that it has popularized the use of ‘fascism’ as an epithet. And one of the things I was hoping to do, and I failed miserably, is shut down the use of the word ‘fascist’ as an epithet. Instead it’s become bipartisan. And I don’t like it. I don’t think it’s all that helpful. It might help my books sales, but that’s not what I had hoped to do,” – Jonah Goldberg on C-SPAN over the weekend.
Normally, I would say no one is that damned stupid, and he is just lying. But this is Jonah Goldberg, and there is a very distinct possibility that he is so damned stupid that he didn’t realize that wingnuts would be spending the next four decades saying “Liberals are the real fascists!” After all, he still maintains his book is scholarly work.
I’m just going to have to and go with stupid AND evil.
arguingwithsignposts
Center of the Venn Diagram, Jonah is.
JGabriel
Jonah Goldberg:
(Boggles in gob-smacked, slack-jawed, disbelief.)
.
Snayke
Jonah Goldberg is a terrible human being. That is all.
suzanne
Yep. We’re in the age of postmodernism, after all. You never have to be just one thing!
Dennis SGMM
Evil (Jonah Goldberg) is stupid (Jonah Goldberg) because if it succeeds in destroying its object then it has no further reason to exist.
DonkeyKong
STEVIL!
Karen
That’s the Sarah Palin method.
I think this is the reason why the Teanuts and GOP has been so successful against the Dems.
They say the most stupid things and we think, no one could be that stupid and get completely blindsided. We’re the deer in the headlights. So we have no response. No strategy.
Only for them to win. Again.
Rinse and repeat.
VixenStrangely
For some reason, I am brought to mind of a toddler who has lucked onto the actual “f-bomb”, courtesy one alleged adult, who is so taken with the attention and the comical discomfiture of the big folks, she now won’t leave off dropping it. Who gets blamed for ruining Meemaw’s Easter dinner? The toddler? Or Uncle Pottymouth?
General Stuck
Goldberg may or not be stupid as he sounds. But he is a soldier in the narrative armies of the right wing. His mission, it appears, is to create a projection offensive for his tribe.
Or, if the other side is making headway with a meme, ie fascist right wingers, then muddy the waters by claiming the same of your foe. You only need someone to publish a book, and some out of context facts, making correlation into causation, and walla, a counter meme is birthed.
Doesn’t change the world by itself, nor everyone’s thinking, but plants a seed of false equivalence and doubt. Add up a gazillion or so of these bullshit charges, and you have yourself some ground to air missiles for the more fact based charges your opponents try to fly at you.
What do you think they do all day in the Heritage Foundation basement? These sinister fuckers have a plan, and infrastructure developed over decades, that has created an inventory of bullshit urban legends, to pull off the shelf as needed for this or that election, or other political fight with liberals. We have Keith Olbermann.
El Tiburon
Sarah plain is stupid.
Dough pants ain’t stupid. He is pathological in his hatred for liberals. He knows he is peddling bullshit, but it’s all he has. He can’t do anything else.
beltane
He is a misbegotten son of a b**ch, in the literal sense of the term.
Calouste
deleted
JGabriel
VixenStrangely:
Wait, in this analogy, which one is Goldberg?
(squints again, closely, at analogy)
Yep, it seems to work either way.
Or is that the point? Do we have to go with toddler AND Uncle Pottymouth?
.
Calouste
Besides stupid and evil, also self-aggrandizing. ‘Fascist’ as an epiteth was popular long before Jonah Goldberg even knew how to spell it, and of course it was mostly (and correctly) applied to people like Jonah Goldberg.
Oscar Leroy
We have to consider the possibility that Jonah Goldberg is a good, reasonable person who wrote Liberal Fascism so that people would see how ridiculous it is to call liberals “fascists”. It’s possible!
11-dimensional chess, people!
Dennis SGMM
@beltane:
Seconded.
kdaug
@El Tiburon:
Ding.
The spawn of Lucianne has no blue dress to sniff and taste, but still, the hunger.
Tom Levenson
Jonah Goldberg is the event horizon of stupid. He is the point at which the last glimpse of stupid is stretched out long and thin and slowed to near-eternity in time (in our frame of reference) and sucked into the black hole that is the deep seething mass of stupid so dense that nothing but Goldberg radiation escapes to signal the stupidalarity.
Apologies to Schwarzchild, Oppenheimer and Chandrasekhar. And to anyone who actually knows and cares about black hole physics.
Zandar
“Why no, I had no idea recording my drunken mental masturbatory theories comparing anyone to the left of Susan Collins throughout history to Hitler was going to get me wingnut welfare. I was honestly going to call the book ‘I So Totally Made Godwin’s Law My Bitch’, you see.”
JGabriel
beltane:
Oh, come on. That’s a terrible thing to say about our canine friends. Rosie and Lily are coming after you. That’s all I have to say.
.
CJ
I think Karen’s right. All they have to do is keep hurling mind-numbing horseshit and watch us try to parse it. You have to admit, it’s bloody exhausting.
Bnut
@DonkeyKong: This will be the name of my first child.
Ash Can
I don’t even know wtf he’s talking about. Using “fascist” as an epithet is tied inextricably to his book? Is that really what he’s saying? Does he live only in some little bubble, in which everyone has actually read his book and takes it seriously? Or is this quote just taken out of context?
JGabriel
@Tom Levenson:
I’m not sure why, but somehow that doesn’t quite work.
.
freelancer
@Tom Levenson:
Heh. Meatball Spaghettification.
ETA: @JGabriel:
You think Jonah could clog a singularity?
ChrisNYC
His punishment is that he has to go on those National Review cruises. Hahahaha …. pitiful. Not enough of a punishment, but close.
bootsy
Here’s a little tip for y’all: if you pretend you’re one of the wingnuts, they’ll tell you about all the shit that they’ve lied about. And pretending to be honorable is something they’re proud of. They admit that they lie, and they’re proud of lying to anyone who challenges them.
VixenStrangely
@JGabriel: I was considering Goldberg as the uncle who brandished the offending word, since J.G. is what passes for a, heh, heh, public mmmpf…intellectu…ha, ha, sorry. That’s hard to type with a straight face. I mean: right-wingers pretend he’s smart, so he should pretend to be responsible. But you’re right–he may well be at toddler-levels of clueless. I’m saying whether he was just a dumb ass about cheapening the impact of the word “fascist”, he still should be blamed.
JGabriel
@Tom Levenson:
The Wingularity returns!
.
cthulhu
Wow, that actually made me laugh…
Goldberg has his column in the LA Times and I often read it for a good chuckle. I have heard of the theory that people most prefer to read opposing opinion that they can easily knock down. Thus I understand why the left-leaning LAT carries him.
joe-nah Lowell-burg
Hi, guys, I’m working on a column about how liberals are so unfair and ferocious in denouncing their opponents as fascists these days. Has anyone seen any stories about liberal protesters using “fascist” or “Nazi” as an epithet over issues like health care before or during the 2010 election campaign?
Thanks!
I have a dog!
arguingwithsignposts
Goldberg in the LATimes is a waste of trees.
bootsy
He’s a horrible writer, but a lot of people can’t write (they just weren’t born into wingnut-welfare book deals). If he were really stupid, they would run him for office.
I’m telling you, these guys get together and slap each other on the back after they’ve told a big lie to “dem liberals.” They’ll pretend to be dumb, or pretend to say anything else that will keep their privilege going.
I guess I’m saying put me down in the ‘evil’ column.
Sloegin
Lotta people don’t actually believe true old-fashioned evil actually exists. They substitute stupid waaaaaay too much when plain evil is the appropriate label.
JGabriel
@freelancer:
Nah, I’m just saying: Jonah Goldberg is fat.
That’s all.
.
Sly
Liar.
jrg
Yeah, I never would have thought to use the word “fascist” to describe someone who opens secret prisons around the world, tortures, or invades other countries for no other reason had it not been for Jonah Goldberg.
What a stupid, fat, authoritarian fuck.
Tom Levenson
@JGabriel: You know, you’re right.
But dense. Now dense works a treat.
JGabriel
While we’re on the topic of physics and the stupidalarity((tm) Tom Levenson), have we ever considered the possibility that Jonah Goldberg’s head is so far up his ass that he might qualify as a Human Klein Bottle?
.
JGabriel
@Tom Levenson: Dense works. Yes, dense definitely works.
.
Svensker
@El Tiburon:
Really? I think he is. He’s better educated than Sarah, but he is pretty much of a moron, in my book. Also, too, a lazy sucker.
Now, Sarah is pig-ignorant, but shrewd.
I don’t like to imagine a conversation between the two of them. Did dough pants get starbursts or not?
Tom Levenson
@JGabriel: FTW!
Ozymandias, King of Ants
@cthulhu: The country is in a pitiful state if the LA Times is considered “left-leaning.”
But then, I grew up in a California household where the Times was was referred to as “that goddamned Republican reg.”
Ozymandias, King of Ants
Oops. Meant to type “that goddamned Republican rag.”
JGabriel
@VixenStrangely:
So he IS both toddler AND Uncle Pottymouth. I knew it!
.
Redshift
I think we need a tag for “not an either-or question.”
Anne Laurie
@El Tiburon:
__
His life history seems to contradict this. He may not be as stupid as he writes, but he couldn’t get into an Ivy college despite all his mother’s efforts, and he hasn’t been able to leverage his “best selling” book-meme into a job more dignified than live-action Comic Book Guy at America’s Worst Website.
__
Doubtful. He’s not motivated enough to be pathological… he’s just in it for the money. If the Wingnut Welfare Wurlitzer fountain was to dry up tomorrow and all the other Kochsuckers committed hara-kiri, Doughbob would be sitting on the stoop when the Nation editorial offices opened, asking if they needed someone to make fun of Orange John and Mitch the Turtle.
__
Ding-ding-ding-ding! If it weren’t for his part in destroying the fabric of our mutual community, Jonah Goldberg would be a tragic figure: a lazy, half-bright tummeler with just enough self-awareness to understand his own limitations. Kinda like the media version of Dubya Bush, in fact.
Ruckus
@JGabriel:
My take is that a real HUA person looks normal because their head is so far up their ass that it sits back on top their neck. The way you know for sure is they keep spewing shit out of their mouth on a regular basis.
IOW you are correct.
And Jonah qualifies.
daveX99
Goldberg isn’t lamenting the use of the word ‘fascist’ to smear liberals – that was the point of his fucking book, after all.
He’s crying because the word is being applied to players on the right. He’s truly, deeply stupid.
Calouste
@Sly:
__
There, better.
WereBear (itouch)
Jonah Golberg refutes the very concept of meritocracy.
xochi
At the end of Liberal Fascism (yes, I actually read the thing) Jonah mentions that famous time when William Buckley and Gore Vidal got into a flame war on TV. Vidal called Buckley a “crypto-Nazi”, and Buckley called Vidal a f-ggot. “My hope,” Goldberg wrote, “is that this book has served much the same purpose as Buckley’s intemperate outburst, while striving for his more typical civility.” So the whole point of the book is to call liberals names. And now he’s surprised that others have taken up his standard?
Blotto von Bismarck
Bill Hicks came to the consensus on pro-lifers. We can come to a similar one on the matter of Jonah Goldberg.
I’d lean towards stupid, though. No intelligent person tries to equate vegetarianism with Hitler, nor would such a comparison further the goals of the evil when it is exposed to the masses.
Tara the antisocial social worker
I remain convinced that Jonah was tapped for the “liberals=nazis” book project because his last name would lead people to assume that he’s Jewish and therefore he wouldn’t exploit the Holocaust for his own political purposes. He isn’t and he would.
Batocchio
@arguingwithsignposts:
Funny thing, I actually just posted Venn Diagrams of the whole Stupid-Evil Crazy Vortex. I also vote for stupid and evil for Jonah, plus “shilling stupid evil with horrible ineptness.”
Randy Paul
I have said this several times, but it bears repeating: in his book, Goldberg ignores the fact that Franco used military support from Mussolini and Hitler to aid his efforts. most dramatically, in the bombing of Guernica. Franco returned the favor by supplying volunteers to fight alongside the Nazis against the Soviets.
Now if Jonah wants to make the argument that Franco was a leftie, then he needs to square it with William F. Buckley’s statement that Franco was “an authentic national hero.”
Or he needs someone to help him put on his shoes.
fisher cat
The first time I saw Jonah Goldberg on CSPAN3 I was concerned that he might actually die from flop sweat.
Fortunately, the kids in the Bob Roberts trench coats kept him hydrated.
fasteddie9318
@Randy Paul:
But Hitler was a fucking vegetarian! Don’t you see the connections, man?
alwhite
ITS A BREATH MINT!
ITS A CANDY MINT!
Stop girls, you’re both right!
– Certs commercial circa 1970
HE IS DUMB AS A FUCKING POST!
HE IS AS EVIL AS A DEMON FROM HELL!
Stop John, they’re both right!
asiangrrlMN
@Anne Laurie: I am in agreement with you. Goldberg is stupid, lazy, pathetic, and a jerk. He does what he does because it’s all he can do. Fucker. And he’s evil.
gnomedad
@Tom Levenson:
This happens when virtual particle pairs of stupidity and intelligence form near the stupidity horizon. The stupidity is sucked in, which is the only reason any intelligibility escapes at all.
cthulhu
@Ozymandias, King of Ants: Yeah, editorially they are pretty much centrist but with Bush II, the Daily News decided to shift harder right. I suppose there is always the Weekly but that seems to be in a different category. Still relatively speaking, the LAT is definitely left-leaning compared to all dailies in CA. For example, their endorsements this cycle weren’t all that different from Calitics.
gbear
Jonah is just another clever pundit wannabee who’s dying to be seen as an important writer while never ever taking responsibility for anything he’s written.
Except that Jonah isn’t clever. And that is central to his pointlessness.
joe-nah Lowell-burg
@gbear:
Sniff. I fail to see how that’s relevant.
trollhattan
Goldberg’s a liar and an idiot. He may also be stupid and evil. I don’t care, but I would prefer he go away, never again to be published or have his ugly mug on television.
Orders of magnitude more evil, in intent and in deed, are the Johns, Bolton and Yoo. These fuckers need decades of imprisonment and a hearty daily waterboarding. Yet, here they are in the lubrul NYT. Why rush to cut nukes, indeed?
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/10/opinion/10bolton.html?_r=1
Triassic Sands
I can hardly wait for Goldberg’s autobiography:
“The Dumbbell Curve”
handy
This is a guy who, in the course of writing his book, was publicly begging people to do his research for him. He’s stupid, evil, and lazy.
RadioOne
I’m going with evil. I think conservatives have too much at stake making sure that the rich get what they want to dismiss the rich’s claims as being willfully ignorant.
celticdragonchick
@Tom Levenson:
I can’t improve on that at all.
Beautiful.
SFAW
Exploit it? Hell, he’d be leading the charge.
Load Pants -> Brown Pants -> Brown Shirts
Coincidence? I think NOT!
(Now, if only I had an online blackboard, so I could go full-boat Beck on this)
mclaren
Says it all.
paperbagmarlys
Sigh…yup, stupid and evil…and…and…the author of a book in the Amazon top ten lists for History and Theory, Fascism, and Systems of Government. Laughing at Goldberg, alas, doesn’t make him go away. The toehold the book has gained over the last couple years–and it really is a mainstay on winger blogs–will be haunting us for decades. Michael Bellesiles paid a high price for a tiny fraction of the academic fraud committed by Goldberg. Goldberg has been rewarded for his fraud. Yes, Goldberg is very slippery and, doh, not at all an academic but why hasn’t his book been taken apart, word by word, and positive reviewers and his publisher and editor made to account for it? Sure, it’s a distasteful task but not that hard and, at this point, necessary.
As mentioned above, Goldberg does end his book on the infamous Buckley v. Vidal debate but even the most cursory glance at the transcript of that debate is devastating to Goldberg’s argument, no that’s too generous, Goldberg’s statement that the purpose of his book is similar to Buckley calling Vidal a queer after Vidal calls Buckley a Nazi. Yes, Vidal calls Buckley a Nazi but Buckley largely earns it in those debates. Buckley lies about his WWII service, tosses out angry crap, and refuses to address Vidal’s points. Maybe Goldberg only glanced at a two-line transcript. Maybe he discounts Vidal on principle. But whatever his excuse, Vidal’s comments before and after calling Buckley a Nazi are more historically accurate, more logical, and, doh, far more democratic than those of Buckley. In context Goldberg is saying “My argument is complete crap but, hey, sometimes I get mad when people call me on it and so I spout even more vile crap.”