Going There

This pooped into my inbox a little while ago:

Eric Allie, who’s an unfunny and not very talented cartoonist, must need some hits, because he drew a cartoon titled “Deep Throat II”, which shows Obama (who’s beyond Allie’s limited ability to caricature, so he’s mainly recognizable because his skin is brown) sitting in the Oval Office. Another misshapen human-like caricature asks “I thought the Washington Post was here to discuss the campaign” and a bubble from under the desk says “Down here”.

I think I’d have to work to push out something this old and tired: a Watergate reference, the Washington Post as the exemplar of liberal media, and a Lewinski/blowjob joke. If I had to make my living as a cartoonist and this was the best I could do, I’d be sharpening my razor and drawing a hot bath.

Update: I thought this was Daryl Cagle’s work initially but I fixed the post to give credit/blame to the right asshole. BTW, Cagle is the cartoonist for the liberal MSNBC and syndicates Allie’s work.

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Is the Doughy Pantload Just A Wanna-Be David Brooks?

Would it be irresponsible to speculate? It would be irresponsible not to! Alex Pareene observes the specimen in his latest “Hack List” entry at Salon:

Jonah Goldberg is a syndicated columnist, author of books and National Review Online editor because his mother nearly took down Bill Clinton. He is, it’s fair to say, aware of that fact, or at least aware that everyone else thinks it, and his insecurity has made him a uniquely pathetic figure in contemporary conservative thought: He aspires to be taken seriously as a public intellectual, but he is the world’s laziest thinker. It is a grand and wonderful joke that Jonah Goldberg, of all people, would write an entire book about how liberals rely on clichés instead of original thought and intellectual argument…

Goldberg soon created the National Review’s multi-contributor blog The Corner, which will be his greatest legacy: Now an entire generation knows the National Review not as the leading intellectual light of the conservative movement, but as the place where random right-wing hacks alternate arguments about the grossness of Mexicans and gays with brief thoughts on Star Wars and personal tales of harrowing run-ins with liberal stereotypes.

Goldberg is always careful never to actually stake out a controversial position on anything. He’ll never buck the movement, but he sees himself as above the right-wing populists. His position on any number of issues is impossible to discern. On gay marriage: “I have always felt that gay marriage was an inevitability, for good or ill (most likely both).” Jonah defended waterboarding while also claiming to find it a “tough question” and complaining that supporters of waterboarding were unfairly tarred as “pro-torture.” Everything he writes for publication is littered with “to be sure” ass-covering and declarations that he’s not actually seriously arguing what it seems very much like he’s arguing. (The Supreme Court’s Fred Phelps ruling was deplorable but also probably correct but maybe not. Julian Assange should be assassinated not that I’m saying for real that he should be assassinated.) He’s too cowardly and insecure to allow himself to be pinned down on most divisive political issues, much preferring to devote pixels and ink to making fun of mythical sandal-wearing Prius-driving (formerly Volvo-driving) liberals who supposedly think things he finds silly. Or Barbra Streisand, a recurring figure in his oeuvre…

In one of my favorite Goldberg passages of all time, he wrote: “I was trying to make a general point which everyone understands but also ended up communicating an even more general falsehood. Like saying violence never solves anything, people understand what I mean even when in reality what I’m saying isn’t true.” Not sure how anyone could argue with that…

Much, much more to enjoy at the link. I wonder if Mom Lucianne saved her own navy-blue dress, because that last quote sure reads like the idiot bastard offspring of the NYT’s house-brand Very Serious Centrist!

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The Moustache of Understanding Is Shocked, Shocked!

In casinos, gambling is going on; in a Monetized Free Market, advertising is everywhere:

PORING through Harvard philosopher Michael Sandel’s new book, “What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets,” I found myself over and over again turning pages and saying, “I had no idea.”

I had no idea that in the year 2000, as Sandel notes, “a Russian rocket emblazoned with a giant Pizza Hut logo carried advertising into outer space,” or that in 2001, the British novelist Fay Weldon wrote a book commissioned by the jewelry company Bulgari and that, in exchange for payment, “the author agreed to mention Bulgari jewelry in the novel at least a dozen times.” I knew that stadiums are now named for corporations, but had no idea that now “even sliding into home is a corporate-sponsored event,” writes Sandel. “New York Life Insurance Company has a deal with 10 Major League Baseball teams that triggers a promotional plug every time a player slides safely into base. When the umpire calls the runner safe at home plate, a corporate logo appears on the television screen, and the play-by-play announcer must say, ‘Safe at home. Safe and secure. New York Life.’

And while I knew that retired baseball players sell their autographs for $15 a pop, I had no idea that Pete Rose, who was banished from baseball for life for betting, has a Web site that, Sandel writes, “sells memorabilia related to his banishment. For $299, plus shipping and handling, you can buy a baseball autographed by Rose and inscribed with an apology: ‘I’m sorry I bet on baseball.’ For $500, Rose will send you an autographed copy of the document banishing him from the game.” ...

Throughout our society, we are losing the places and institutions that used to bring people together from different walks of life. Sandel calls this the “skyboxification of American life,” and it is troubling. Unless the rich and poor encounter one another in everyday life, it is hard to think of ourselves as engaged in a common project. At a time when to fix our society we need to do big, hard things together, the marketization of public life becomes one more thing pulling us apart. “The great missing debate in contemporary politics,” Sandel writes, “is about the role and reach of markets.” We should be asking where markets serve the public good, and where they don’t belong, he argues. And we should be asking how to rebuild class-mixing institutions.

Because Irony has swallowed cold poison and jumped in the sea*, Tom Friedman could use the title “This Column Is Not Sponsored By Anyone” without fear of being struck by lightning. As Calvin Trillin once said about a certain congressman, if truth-in-advertising required professional spokesmen to show the logos of their paymasters, Friedman would have to wear one of those NASCAR jumpsuits to get all the sponsors within line-of-sight at his globetrotting speaking gigs. Your winnings, m’seur!

I guess it’s a dangerous sign when all the Masters of the Universe can afford private limos, and are therefore separated from the Global Street Wisdom™ of Friedman’s famous cabdrivers. Or maybe the decimation of his no-longer-a-multibillionaire father-in-law’s fortune has embittered Tom to the point where he now identifies with the economic top One Percent instead of the Point One Percent. Could be he needs a new theme song.

(* Thank you, Peter Beagle)

(h/t commentor Corner Stone)

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R-money at Failwell U: More Mush from the Wimp

Dave Weigel at Slate has the text of Romney’s Liberty U commencement address up. Even by the generous feel-good commencement-address standard, it’s extremely pander-iffic:

Today, thanks to what you have gained here, you leave Liberty with conviction and confidence as your armor. You know what you believe. You know who you are. And you know Whom you will serve. Not all colleges instill that kind of confidence, but it will be among the most prized qualities from your education here. Moral certainty, clear standards, and a commitment to spiritual ideals will set you apart in a world that searches for meaning…

... and packed full of name-checks targeted for the audience: Chik-Fil-A founder Truett Cathy, Tea Party shill Dick Armey, “Dr. Falwell” (“deserves the tribute he would have treasured most, as a cheerful, confident champion for Christ”), Rick Santorum, Martin Luther King Jr. (no “Doctor” for that guy), Chuck Colson, yadda yadda yadda. Less waving the bloody shirt, more nursing the tiny paper-cuts of professional christianist victimhood.

Weigel, who is paid to do this, gamely attempts to gin up a horserace angle:

Mitt Romney’s commencement address at Liberty University offers a smorgasboard of shout-outs to Christians from every branch of the faith: Martin Luther King, Jr., C.S. Lewis, Billy Graham, William Wilberforce, Rick Santorum. It also, very gingerly, touches on Romney’s Mormonism without mentioning it by name… Fascinating that he jumps from Mormonism, which many graduates do not consider a legitimate faith, to Colson, an ex-con who was born again in prison…

Yeeaah… don’t think so. Sure, I can imagine Romney’s handlers telling him he has to tease the Talibangelicals with the gauzy hope of converting the missionary away from his cult. But apart from all normal human considerations (upbringing, habit, social / business ties) there is less than zero chance Willard “Mitt” Romney would ever abandon the church which assures him that he is not only a Latter-Day Saint but one of the most Elect of that elect bunch: a rich, white, straight man of impeccable pedigree. And goddess knows, I don’t mind Romney being King of the Mormons; I just wish he’d stop trying to buy or bully his way to a title as King of America.

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Open Thread: American Select Still Looking for the RIGHT Candidate

Per Jim Cook at Irregular Times, the libertarian millionaires running “nopartisan centrist” Americans Elect still haven’t been able to sell their preferred trojan horse on the open online market:

Out of three originally scheduled ballots, there is only one ballot left in the Americans Elect presidential primary process, because no candidate to date has qualified. The privatize-social-security draft candidate David Walker is painfully far behind. In order to get on the Americans Elect ballot, the rules stipulate a candidate must obtain 1,000 votes of support from each of 10 states by May 15. That’s 10,000 votes in a candidates top ten states; David Walker has accumulated only 318.

In its last gambit, the Draft Walker campaign has “invited” Buddy Roemer to make David Walker his Vice Presidential candidate…

(Poor Buddy. On the other hand, he did volunteer for this sideshow.) Much more information at the link. I guess the “good” news is that, okay, at least the Average American Voter isn’t quite stupid enough to throw his allegiance at a bunch of Rich Fvcks just for the ideological purity of it all—you have to offer at least a public carnival or some primetime TV spots if you want the rubes to vote for disenfranchising themselves.

And since we’re speaking of time-wasting and idleness, what’s on the agenda for the evening?

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Dancing Dave Scores Another Gig

Ladies and Gentlemen, your liberal media:

The National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB), which calls itself “the voice of small business,” is one of the Republican party’s strongest allies. The group spent over $1 million on outside ads in the 2010 campaign — all of it backing Republican House and Senate candidates (and, Bloomberg News reported last month, “another $1.5 million that it kept hidden and said was exempt” from disclosure requirements). The group is the lead plaintiff in the lawsuit against the Obamacare law and bankrolled state governments’ challenges to the law. The NFIB has also taken stances against allowing the EPA to regulate greenhouse gases, opposing regulations on businesses, and supporting curtailing union rights.

Given the group’s obvious Republican alliance, it comes as little surprise that the NFIB’s three-day 2012 Small Business Summit, which begins Monday, will feature headliners Karl Rove and House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH).

But the first name and photo on the invitation for the $150-per-person event — Tuesday’s “keynote address” speaker — is NBC’s Meet the Press host David Gregory. He is marketed by NBC as an anchor and “trusted journalist.”

As we all know, even the epitome of journalistic ethics, David Broder, was nothing more than a paid whore, it shouldn’t surprise you that this kind of thing is happening. Although in fairness to Gregory, he’s probably just going to line up some more white male Republicans for his Sunday show, Meet the Republicans.

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There’s Something About Romney

The Marquis de Mittens’ former Lt. Governor Kerry Healey went on CNN yesterday to counter charges that her old running mate is a heartless prick. As evidence, she cited his reaction during a GOP debate when a certain goofy bastard could not remember all three of the government agencies he vowed to abolish as president:

In defending Romney as “deeply compassionate” and “unfailingly kind,” she pointed to moments during the GOP primary when Romney was “being attacked from every side.”

“His response was always professional, calm, civil,” she pointed out. “In fact, he even intervened on behalf [of] — to try to help — Gov. Perry when he was stumbling [in attempting to remember a talking point during a debate]. His impulses are very kind impulses and there should be no debate about whether or not Gov. Romney is a bully.”

For some reason, I was reminded of this scene from “There’s Something About Mary:”

Matt Dillon’s character is a lot like Romney, only without the gazillions of dollars. He’s a liar who tries hard to be ingratiating but kind of sucks at it.

[X-posted at Rumproast]

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Open Thread: Mitt {Hearts} Gay Pride… NOT

It’s all over the internetz, but I found this image at Charlie Pierce’s place. As Mr. Pierce very fairly points out, Eric “Etch-A-Sketch” Fehrnstrom has fiercely repudiated the provenance of this flyer. (And Fehrnstrom is an honorable man; so are they all, all honorable men…)

Paul Constant points out that Kerry Healey is still defending Willard Romney’s back, ineptly. Constant is too nice to point out that Healey is stuck with this Sisyphean task because she’s Michael Steele in a dress (lost her post-Willard gubernatorial run by 21 points, got curb-stomped by Scott “Cosmo Boy” Brown when she attempted to steal ‘Ted Kennedy’s seat’)—unemployable outside the Wingnut Welfare circuit.

Boston Pride 2012—it runs ten days, because we are just that fabulous—doesn’t start until June 1st. It’s reasonable to assume that Candidate Romney will find ways to be very, very far away from the Hub of the Universe at that season, but I can’t wait to see what the creative Pride Paraders come up with by then…

Speaking of timely scheduling, tomorrow Mr. Romney is due to deliver the commencement address at Jerry Falwell’s college. As Paul Constant points out, “Neither Mitt Romney Nor the Boy He Bullied Would Be Allowed at Liberty University” (no longhairs, and no Mormons, either):

But they’re making an exception for this cultist, because Liberty University officials are citing a passage from Exodus (“And Moses chose able men out of all Israel, and made them heads over the people, rulers of thousands, rulers of hundreds, rulers of fifties, and rulers of tens.”) to suggest that God wants them to vote for an “able” Mormon, rather than a “disabled” Muslim socialist. That’s a real stretch, even for Bible-scrying.

“Bible-scrying”: there’s a phrase that needs to be added to the general vocabulary!

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Worldwide Parody & Satire Industries Collapse

NEW YORK – May 11, 2012 – Roiled by a lengthy Republican primary that featured sickly-wife dumper Newt Gingrich in the role of family values advocate, prissy uterus invader Rick Santorum as a small government champion and multimillionaire vulture capitalist Mitt Romney shedding Armani suits in favor of mom jeans and “work” shirts as he positioned himself as a regular guy (with a car elevator), the global parody and satire industries utterly collapsed Friday.

The market sector had teetered on the verge of collapse this week following an accusation from thrice four-times-married drug addict Rush Limbaugh that President Obama had attacked the institution of marriage by coming out in favor of same-sex unions. But some analysts had thought the sector was positioned for recovery.

Those hopes were dashed early Friday when parody and satire futures were bludgeoned by the publication of an opinion piece by 21-year-old single mom Bristol Palin. The daughter of failed vice-presidential candidate and serial quitter Sarah Palin criticized the president for allowing his daughters to influence marriage equality policy, decried the persecution of conservative Christians and urged the president to direct his children since “dads should lead their family.”

“Parody and satire were already on life support thanks to Rush,” said analyst Seymour Butts of the Under the Bleachers Report. “But when Bristol let loose, even hard-bitten industry veterans who had survived the Nixon and Reagan years threw in the towel.”

Most experts were unable to articulate a scenario under which parody and satire could recover. However, at least one long-term analyst envisioned a resurgence contingent upon a direct asteroid strike on the earth that wipes out all existing life, after which single-cell organisms might once more emerge and evolve to acquire language skills.

[X-posted at Rumproast]

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Later Late Night Open Thread: Paalegg

(Tom Toles via GoComics.com)

According to the Spousal Unit “paalegg” is Norwegian for “anything that can go in a sandwich”. Here’s a collection of bite-sized random items that tickled my palate.

The RonPaulistas continue to harass the GOP primary gatekeepers, and Mr. Pierce at Esquire has his suspicions as to why:

I am gradually coming to the conclusion that Crazy Uncle Liberty (!) is doing all this finagling with delegates and stringing out the campaign until he gets what he wants, which is some sort of validation for his son, Senator Aqua Buddha of Kentucky, within the party that might make the kid a legitimate kind of presidential candidate in 2016 and going forward, so that The Revolution (!) can continue until our grandchildren are being bored by the whole business…

... which led to my personal choice for Comment of the Day, All-Internetz Edition:

I will bet one giant genuflection on the altar of the gold standard that they have a gun pointed at Obama in this advertisement because the noose depicted in an earlier draft looked too regional.

Marin Cogan at GQ’s Death Race 2012 blog tracks down the reporter behind the WaPo Bullygate story:

Marin Cogan: And what about the suggestion—it was made in the Fox interview with Romney but now it’s being discussed on Twitter, that this was some sort of oppo story handed to you by another campaign?

Jason Horowitz: I can just say that I can fully deny that. This is a story that in no way was generated by opposition research. This is an entirely independently reported story, with no help from any politically affiliated partisan side. This was all just talking to people who went to school with him.

Marin Cogan: Last question—Did Joe Biden force your hand, too, In terms of the timing?

Jason Horowitz: [Laughs] If you look at the last story I wrote I think was a Joe Biden story. Technically Joe Biden has again stepped in first. Maybe Joe Biden is behind everything.

Felix Salmon blames the latest JPMorgan fiasco on some guy named Bruno Iksil, “the London Whale“, and draws a dispiriting conclusion:

... Of course, this loss only goes to show how weak the Volcker Rule is: Dimon is adamant, and probably correct, in saying that Iksil’s bets were Volcker-compliant, despite the fact that they clearly violate the spirit of the rule. Now that we’ve entered election season, Congress isn’t going to step in to tighten things up — but maybe the SEC will pay more attention to Occupy’s letter, now. JP Morgan more or less invented risk management. If they can’t do it, no bank can. And no sensible regulator can ever trust the banks to self-regulate.

For those who proclaim themselves already bored beyond caring with this year’s election, Ed Kilgore at the Washington Monthly shares a vision of the future:

There was good news and bad news for Sarah Palin in the self-consciously ridiculous Public Policy Polling survey of Iowans for their preferences in the 2016 presidential contest (I mean, Caucus campaigning starts pretty damn early, but not this early!). On the one hand, she has an impressive 70/17 favorable/unfavorable rating among Iowa Republicans. On the other hand, only 10% of them chose her as their 2016 presidential favorite, tied for fourth with Jeb Bush…

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#StopRush: Rush Babes for America LOL

Oink Limbaugh is a hot cup of fail drizzled in fail sauce. Honestly. He may be one of the most vile people on the planet.

You see, Rush Limbaugh has a bug up his ass about the National Organization for Women or “NAGs” as he likes to call it (because National Organization of Gals is so hilarious LOL.) NOW, in concert with the Stop Rush movement has been sticking it to Limbaugh where it hurts—his pocketbook. As a result, Oink has gone into panic mode.  As sponsor after sponsor pulled their ads from his show, Rush was forced to call in a crisis manager to help him undo the mess he got himself into when he went on a three day-rant about Sandra Fluke, attacking her in the most disgusting and vile manner possible (and then trying to scrub it from the internets, to no avail of course).  Rush thought if he just waited it out, the fervor would die down because what’s the big deal?  He’s always been foul and disgusting, right?

Right.  That’s true—he has always been foul and disgusting.  But had he ever gone on a three day rant against a private citizen the way he did back in March?  Just in case you’ve forgotten, let’s take a walk down fuckery lane, shall we?  From John Cole:

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Classic Physical Comedy

And the Team Obama rope-a-dope of the Romney campaign into the Wingnut Event Horizon took just 100 hours or so from Joe Biden’s statement on Sunday.

Ed Gillespie, senior adviser to Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign, told Chuck Todd on MSNBC’s Daily Rundown that the campaign would make President Obama’s support for marriage equality an issue this November and that Romney will actively push for a constitutional amendment to take away the right of states to voluntarily extend marriage equality to same-sex couples.

Gillespie told Todd that same-sex marriage “will be another bright-line difference in this campaign.” He added that the GOP intends to campaign on the issue.

In other words, Mr. Etch-A-Sketch here just got drawn all over by a giant Sharpie and the manic scrawl reads I AM A BIGOTED NUTJOB JUST LIKE THE REST OF THEM.  Good luck with that pivot to “small government centrist” there, Mittastrophe.

Or in other other words, this just happened.

Muahaha.

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Let’s Do the Time Warp Again

Mrs. Mitt seems like a nice enough person—she comes across as exponentially more human than her husband. Admittedly, that’s a low bar since anyone who seemed less human would be relegated to the cargo hold of a commercial airliner without a notarized document from an anthropologist.

But Mrs. Mitt seems as pleasant as a clueless rich lady could possibly be when she’s trying to sell you an animatronic plutocrat with an anti-99%, anti-woman and anti-gay agenda. Sort of like a defanged Lynne Cheney. So I don’t mean to pick on her. But this passage of a Mothers’ Day op-ed she penned for USA Today struck me as odd:

People often ask me what it was like to raise five boys. I won’t sugarcoat it. There were times I wanted to tear my hair out. I can remember visiting my friends’ houses, seeing their daughters’ manners, the way they helped with the chores. Then I would return home to my boys, hoping only that my house was still intact.

Sweet al dente Flying Spaghetti Monster, is she actually suggesting that daughters are universally better mannered and tidier than boys? I’d disabuse her of that notion by posting a picture of my teenage daughter’s room right now, but that would be invading the kid’s privacy. Trust me, I’d stack that girl’s smart mouth and capacity for generating household-roiling mayhem against all five Little Lord Fontleromneys.

But that’s not all that bugs me about the piece. It illustrates something more broad and disturbing—a weird trapped-in-amber vibe to both Romneys, something that can’t really be explained away as a generational thing. They are about the same age as my parents, and though my parents’ political views differ significantly from the Romneys’ (my dad is way to their right and my mom is way to their left—divorced ages ago, obviously!), you can tell my parents experienced the decades that followed 1959 and took away certain lessons, for good or ill.

The Romneys, not so much. To paraphrase a line from “Field of Dreams,” it seems like they had six helpings of the 1950s and landed in the second decade of the 21st century pretty much unscathed. It will be a weird rolling-back in more ways than one if, FSM forbid, Mittens becomes president.

[X-posted at Rumproast]

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Mitt Romney, High School Bully

Romney was involved in a pretty horrifying bullying incident in high school:

John Lauber, a soft-spoken new student one year behind Romney, was perpetually teased for his nonconformity and presumed homosexuality. Now he was walking around the all-boys school with bleached-blond hair that draped over one eye, and Romney wasn’t having it.

“He can’t look like that. That’s wrong. Just look at him!” an incensed Romney told Matthew Friedemann, his close friend in the Stevens Hall dorm, according to Friedemann’s recollection. Mitt, the teenaged son of Michigan Gov. George Romney, kept complaining about Lauber’s look, Friedemann recalled.

A few days later, Friedemann entered Stevens Hall off the school’s collegiate quad to find Romney marching out of his own room ahead of a prep school posse shouting about their plan to cut Lauber’s hair. Friedemann followed them to a nearby room where they came upon Lauber, tackled him and pinned him to the ground. As Lauber, his eyes filling with tears, screamed for help, Romney repeatedly clipped his hair with a pair of scissors.

The incident was recalled similarly by five students, who gave their accounts independently of one another. Four of them — Friedemann, now a dentist; Phillip Maxwell, a lawyer; Thomas Buford, a retired prosecutor; and David Seed, a retired principal — spoke on the record. Another former student who witnessed the incident asked not to be named. The men have differing political affiliations, although they mostly lean Democratic. Buford volunteered for Barack Obama’s campaign in 2008. Seed, a registered independent, has served as a Republican county chairman in Michigan. All of them said that politics in no way colored their recollections.

“It happened very quickly, and to this day it troubles me,” said Buford, the school’s wrestling champion, who said he joined Romney in restraining Lauber. Buford subsequently apologized to Lauber, who was “terrified,” he said. “What a senseless, stupid, idiotic thing to do.”

As disturbing as that is, I’m not ready to condemn a man for something he did as a stupid teenager.  The world would be a very lonely place indeed were that to be my way of doing things.  That said, Rmoney’s handling of this report is telling:

“Back in high school I did some dumb things and if anybody was hurt by that or offended by that I apologize,” Romney told FOX radio host Brian Kilmeade Thursday. “If I did stupid things, I’m afraid I’ve got to say sorry for it.” (italics mine)

And of course, the world famous “If anybody was hurt or offended, I apologize.”

These responses today are almost as disturbing to me in the man who wishes to be our President, as the actions of the teenaged Mitt Romney were back before I was born.  Those actions are of a piece with other things in his life that we know about, and that is concerning.  What I find most disturbing about all of this is his apparent lack of any sense of responsibility to others or to even himself as a Christian to acknowledge his role and his place in the world and how he deals with and affects other people.  That his attitude about this incident is roughly the same as his attitude about the workers of the various companies he destroyed during his tenure at Bain Capital, and is similar to his attitude towards anyone he deals with—”I like being able to fire the people who work for me”—are indicators to me of a deeply morally flawed human being, and certainly one not fit to lead a great nation.

 

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Big &#%!ing Liar

In the excitement of yesterday’s big gay leap forward by President Obama, we appear to have missed mentioning Jonah Goldberg’s useful article where Jonah helpfully takes Joe Biden to task for abusing the words “literally” and “figuratively”.

The problem is that Biden insists that he does know what it means. One of his favorite ways to emphasize his seriousness is to say, “and I mean literally, not figuratively,” as if “literally” meant “I’m really serious” and “figuratively” connoted some effeminate lack of conviction. He says JFK’s “call to service literally, not figuratively, still resounds from generation to generation.” He told students in Africa, “You are the keystone to East Africa — literally, not figuratively, you are the keystone.” “The American people are looking for us as Democrats,” he has said. “They’re looking for someone literally, not figuratively, to restore America’s place in the world.”

I think Jonah is doing us all a service here because as we all know there’s literally nothing more annoying than some idiot saying something like “It literally blew my mind” or “He’s literally such a pain in my Oshkosh-Scranton corridor”.

I suspect we could all do with a quick refresher on the difference between “literal” and “figurative”. So here, if you will bear with me, are two illustrative examples.

Literal:

“Jonah Goldberg was lying when he claimed, on the dustjacket of his latest book, “The Tyranny of Clichés: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas”, and the NRO website, and his publisher’s website, that he had “twice been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize”, when in fact his name had merely been submitted twice by his publisher for consideration.”

Figurative:

“Jonah Goldberg is a lying douchebag with the morals of a badger on crystal meth.”

I suggest that you print this post out, so that if you ever get confused as to the difference you can refer to it and it should clear everything up.

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