Oh, for frack’s sake…
Is there any public “intellectual” who’s more comically fraudulent than Jonah Goldberg? Well no, but that doesn’t mean I still can’t be amazed by stuff like this NPR interview that General JC Christian dug up:
Jonah Goldberg: The benefit of Bush’s compassionate conservatism [in 2000] was that it was majorly a marketing slogan…
Alex Chadwick: You mean you’re worried Mike Huckabee might actually mean it?
Goldberg: Yes, that’s what I’m terrified of.
This is really Jonah’s worldview in a nutshell: it’s perfectly OK to pay lip service to the mindless, inbred rubes that make up your party’s base as long as you don’t follow through on any of your promises to help the poor goobers out. This dovetails nicely with Jonah’s past praise of elitism in which he wrote that:
[P]opulism is a useful and healthy passion when aimed at the liberal elite. But conservatives can get drunk on it when they proclaim that elites are bad simply because they are elites. Conservatives respect authority — the authority of ideas, traditions, morals, religion, customs, reason, law, excellence and so on. One cannot believe in this kind of authority while having a blanket hostility to elitism in any form.
In other words: it’s cool to rile up the idiot vote by telling them that liberals want to ban Christmas, but helping them pay for their kids’ health care goes way, way over the line. Religion, in Jonah’s world, truly is the Cheetos bag of the masses.
That’s the one! That’s the one I was talking about a couple of threads back where he got stupid all over the inside of my truck and I can’t wash it out.
All this time I thought y’all were exaggerating but, Sadly No!, he defines preposterous blithering idiocy.
The benefit of Bush’s compassionate conservatism [in 2000] was that it was majorly a marketing slogan…
Damn! If only someone had been able to figure that out before November 2, 2000!
BTW, I’m told that if you go to the page of the Whitehouse website called “compassionate conservatism” you’ll find an entire gallery of Bu**sh** posing for photos with black people!
I’ve long held dear the notion that Jonah the Whale (and to a similar extent Billy Kristol) is gleefully self-aware…some sort of performance art piece in of himself, a satire of what we think he is.
I mean, that’s gotta be it, right? Who really goes around twirling his mustache and admitting to duping the GOP’s “family values” base like this?
So, were the French Revolutionaries fat-cysts because they got all mean & stuff and did the head-chopping, or because they took that whole “Revolution” thing serious for a while?
And I love how the picture on the link makes it look like we’ve caught Jonah in a special moment.
I don’t want to know anything about Jonah’s special moments, and that picture only confirms that this is central ro my point.
“Conservatives respect authority — the authority of ideas, traditions, morals, religion, customs, reason, law, excellence and so on.”
Now, that’s just funny. Conservatives respecting reason? Ha! Repspecting the law? Ha, Ha! Respecting excellence? Oh please, you’re killing me…
It says something about the current state of the conservative movement that Jonah Goldbrick is one of its pre-eminent intellectuals.
Seriously … in conservative circles, Jonah is an intellectual.
No, no, no, no, no. You read it wrong. Conservatives don’t have to respect reason. They respect the authority of reason. All you have to do is have an authority declare that something is a good idea, moral, religion, custom, reason, or law, or vice versa, and they respect that authority.
The actual reason & whatnot are for the liberal fascists who only care about making Jo’butt Bitburg stop throwing his Slim-Jim wrappers on the carpet.
“No, no, no, no, no. You read it wrong.”
Fascist! I’ll read it anyway I darn well please–especially before I’ve reached optimal caffeine intake.
Sometimes a guy just needs a good laugh in the am.
I hear what you’re saying though–they are pretty spineless and need someone (are you my Daddy?) to tell them what to think, say and do.
You know, the chief prerequisite for keeping the rubes in the tent is that you never let them know that you think they are rubes.
Jesusgodamighty, he’s stupid.
Someone with more ambition than I needs to start collecting these disdainful little snerks from the DollahCons and spam the Fundie mailing lists with ’em.
That is a priceless little gem … it’s a pocket definition of the phrase “authoritarian follower”. They do what they’re told.
How much clearer can it be stated?
“majorly” a marketing slogan?? What is he, 16 years old? Majorly lame.
the authority of ideas, traditions, morals, religion, customs, reason, law, excellence and so on.”
I was gonna say… the authority of ideas? traditions? customs? excellence? What authority, exactly, do these things have? Am I, somehow, morally and existentially bound to adhere to customs and traditions? How does excellence have any control over my Life? Goldberg is a campaign speech writer’s wet dream
I like how he ignores the the fact that there are (or even the possibility of) conservative elites. Intellectual, my corn-sucking ass…
Wait, that came out really, really wrong. You know what I mean.
Shalom, gentlemen.
I think he forgot “the authority of a Dear Leader” — that’s the one that gets most of the respect, neh?
The truth of the matter is that liberals hate all authority, including that of physics and economics, and think they are immune to natures laws. We here in the heartland know we must bow in the face of authority, temporal or spiritual, when we know the authority is right.
“Goldberg: Yes, that’s what I’m terrified of.”
One of oh, so very, very many things. I mean, what isn’t the poor boy terrified of?
But I thought Gary Novak had disproven all those liberal physics some time ago?
It’s true. I hate the authority of physics more than any other authority! Well, maybe the transit authority.
There’s authority in excellence? And ideas?
Irregardless that traditions, morals, religion, customs, and laws are all subjective are derived from authority, not inherently given power.
Anyways, my feeling on this subject is to do the Time Warp again.
SATSQ time:
Jello Pudding Pops and being proved wrong.
Of course, to be fair, he did recognize that conservatives respect authority and didn’t try to argue that conservatives respect facts. We all know that Jonah and pals have shown a particular allergy to facts.
Hey, whatever you do with Jonah inside your truck is your business.
But dude… TMI.
;P
The truth is that Saul, who I strongly suspect is actually Episcopalian, is right. I, myself, routinely jump off my roof at least once a day to give the “Law” of gravity the big swivel on it. My only regret is that it doesn’t have a flag that i can burn.
“We here in the heartland know we must bow in the face of authority, temporal or spiritual, when we know the authority is right.”
What kind of crap is that? You sure sound like one of those brown skinned a-rab islomoterrorists to me.
You just keep bowing to Mecca, Saul. This heartlander bows to noone.
Nice one Johan. Now tell us how the lefties are the elitist doody heads.
I liked it better when I thought the JG pic said “I CAN HAS UR FUNYUNS?”
Mierenneuker alert: He says mostly, not majorly.
More from the interview. Asked why The Corner writers have been so harsh on Huckabee of late, Goldberg responds:
No bias or snobbishness at all. Of course not. Just a marketing scheme gone awry.
The interviewer mentions Bill Kristol’s debut column at the New York Times, in which Kristol posits Huckabee may be the party’s best candidate. Goldberg concedes this may be true then adds:
Right.
Liberals don’t respect authority, and that makes us fascists.
But I’ve never been personally that invested in the Republican Party. I’m invested in the conservative movement and what’s good for America.
Jonah suspects those grapes were sour, anyway.
@g –
Jonah? Grapes? Sour grape soda, or kool-aid maybe.
Who really goes around twirling his mustache and admitting to duping the GOP’s “family values” base like this?
Someone who’s given up on his party holding political power for a few years, knows he’s going to keep getting paid, and wants to make sure that everyone on the upper east side knows he had his fingers crossed because he’s sure that’s why he never gets invitations?
When did this corpulent, legacy-hire turd become an “intellectual”? Does writing a book make you an “intellectual”? According to that definitive source, Wikipedia, an intellectual is “…a person who uses his or her intellect to work, study, reflect, speculate on, or ask and answer questions with regard to a variety of different ideas.”
You would be hard pressed to prove that Dr. Pantload, PhD., is using his intellect to ask any questions that don’t begin with “I can has yr…”
What a fucking piece of work. What a shit time to be alive.
Jonah has always come across with that delightfully honest sort of idiocy. Most of the rest of the NR cons know better than to say this sort of thing outright, though of course most of them believe it.
I do wonder if they get tired of Goldberg blowing their cover on a regular basis.
Well, what can you add to that? Jonah really is the gift that keeps on giving (BTW when are you going to do a few more pages of his book?). I do think that it’s pretty amusing that he seems to think he’s some sort of enlightened over-man who gets to guide the ignorant masses with his noble lies. I’ve said it before, but the fact that Goldberg is taken seriously as a political philosopher/historian by ANYONE is a national disgrace.
What “terrifies” Jonah is that Huckabee might actually have real convictions? He, like, believes things and acts according to his beliefs? Terrifying indeed.
That Huckabee truly believes the Jeebus thing and believes the stuff Jeebus said about compassion and treating the poor fairly and all that other turn the other cheek crap? That’s terrifying?
I don’t believe any of that junk about Jeebus, and I’ll happily ridicule Huckabee for thinking that Jeebus rode a dinosaur, but Huck actually does seem to have convictions and I respect that. (Caveat, I don’t know much about Huck and he could be just another in a long line of Elmer Gantry southern preacher/swindlers, all as crooked as Dick Nixon’s penis.)
Jonah’s convictions extend to whatever spewed out of the fax machine this morning.
A conservative movement differs from a classical bowel movement, wait..no it doesn’t, indeed, that is central to my point.
Just go away Jonah, the conservative movement has fucked up virtually every facet of American life, and any conservative proud of the lowered standard of living as a result of the conservative movement is just a fucking moron.
That’s right Jonah, I’ve compared the price of cheetos and mountain dew before and after the conservative movement, so you can take your conservative movement and shove it up your momma’s ass.
Conservative movement…give me a fucking break.
The Liberal Fascism blog now has content.
I don’t think it has to do with an anti-evangelical bias or a snobbishness on the right. But at the same time,
Jesus Christ that asshole can’t argue his way out of a paper bag.
The Liberal Fascism blog now has content.
That’s a strong word, content.
You wouldn’t think a highly enlightened thoroughly researched and thoughtful tome would need a blog (without comments) defending it.
Unless…
That’s a strong word, content.
I read “content” here in the strictly information-theory sense – that there is a larger number of bytes shoved through your browser when you access the page than there was before.
Yep… that’s what has all the neocons and pundits’ knickers in a twist: the fact that Huckabee is going by Jesus’s word on compassion and whatnot. It freaks them out in both that those ideas are more progressive than theirs, and it makes the point that they were most likely lying their asses off for all these years when they claimed to be “upstanding Christians”.
Just for the record, I knew about the fact that Mussolini was the first world leader to stand-up to Nazi aggression. In fact, I spent months reading and writing about this sort of thing when I first started only to have all of it fall on the editing room floor or be reduced to a couple paragraphs.
Awww.
Exactly. The CIA defines information and intelligence in this manner:
— Information is data.
— Intelligence is data or information that is usable.
Call me crazy, but there’s actually one thing I like about Saul — the fake shalom thing functions like the popping sound in the fire swamp so I know it’s time to get out of the way.
Wait… you mean his book was actually edited by someone?
Well, I suppose, since the excerpts seem to be grammatically correct and do not wax poetically about the virtue of Cheetos and chocolate cake.
Bah. Pantload is the same as the rest of the republican scum. They’re worse than carnies (at least carnies are entertaining…wait, maybe I’m wrong there…hmmmm).
Pantload is just fucking dumb enough to blurt out whatever floats the top of that sack of pus his mom calls a brain.
All republican “thinkers” are frauds. They’re shills, trolls, nothing more. Pantload is merely one of the most egregiously stupid legacies of thinned out DNA they have. He’s no different in content, just in presentation.
The comments of Righteous Bubba and SamFromUtah are central to my point.
So does a Port-A-John.
Now, the question is, is this at all addressed by the book’s central primal screams, that fascists are of the left, the liberals are the real fascists, and the old timey fascists aren’t the important ones.
Now, Mussolini actively called himself a fascist, so, if he went up against the Nazis, does that make the Nazis not fascist? Or liberal? Or conservative? Or is it simply yet another interesting historical fact which shall be treated ironically, entertainingly, and without any effects on any theses (feces) or arguments?
Britain also didn’t back the Spanish Republic when it was under attack by fascists, but it did block other allies who wished to send weapons and aid by sea. Was this a liberal thing to do? Or conservative? Or were they being liberal fascists for not helping the anti-fascists fight the fascists?
It makes more sense when you know that “America,” is Jonah’s pet name for himself.
“All republican “thinkers” are frauds. They’re shills, trolls, nothing more. ”
So true, except in the real world, a lot of dumbasses have been feeding them.
Wait… you mean his book was actually edited by someone?
Adam Bellow, editor-at-large for Doubleday.
Has Saul ever posted here on a Saturday?
Was this a liberal thing to do? Or conservative? Or were they being liberal fascists for not helping the anti-fascists fight the fascists?
This is why that Tech Central Station guy was writing about the virtues of stupidity. Jonah has crossed the line and gotten hisself all befuddlicated.
Elites aren’t bad simply because they are elites, so no blanket hostility to elitism or to ideas, traditions, morals, religion, customs, reason, law, excellence and so on. Unless they are liberal elites, ideas, traditions, etc; then feel free to get your unthinking hate on!
Re: the Spanish Civl War
The Republicans were fascists and the Nationalists were conservatives. Among the Republican coalition, one finds liberal fascists, communist fascists, anarcho-fascists, and even a few Lincolnian fascists (they had a brigade). The Nationalists were all just conservatives, though they were not compassionate. That would’ve made them fascists.
Has Saul ever posted here on a Saturday?
The Li’lest Rabbi isn’t all that wound about the Sabbath, for some reason. Were you around for the bit where he was thinking it ended at midnight?
Isn’t it pretty liberal fascist just to expend so much effort on getting this kind of list so organized & stuff?
zsa,
Yes. Then he compounded the error by saying that it was past midnight where he was. I’d find it for you, but since then I installed a GreaseMonkey script that translates Saul to Terry Pratchett’s Foul Ole Ron, and I don’t feel like undoing it.
Also, as far as the Liberal Fascism blog is concerned, there’s no information there. Since everything Jonah says is entirely predictable (“libruls r bad! lolz”), there are no bits there that cannot be precisely determined from the current state, so no information exists.
It seems worth pointing out that for all of Jonah’s “Gotcha”-calling over the phrase “national socialist,” most historians agree that the arc of the nazi party was to use the compassionate facade of socialism to gain the support of the masses in the face of the depression, then to cast all that aside once they were in power, eliminate the real left, and establish an authoritarian and anti-liberal regime. Wouldn’t saying that it’s okay to pay lip-service to the concept of a compassionate conservativism, so long it allows you to gain power for your real, nation-building neoconservative agenda, be pretty analogous?
Just a thought.
The Liberal Fascism blog now has content.
If by content you mean words and spaces between words and punctuation, ayup. Otherwise not so much.
But the list is partial! I haven’t even got to the international players, like Britain and Germany. And partialness can’t be fascist, because fascism is totalitarian. When my list is done, then I’ll be fulfilled as a liberal fascist, which makes what I’ve done so far partial fascism in the process of totalization. Once again, all this is central to my point.
Huff!
Out of breath hurrying back from TownHall.com, where I just posted this:
************************************
Eddie writes: Wednesday, January, 09, 2008 12:23 PM
I’m surprised by the lack of response…
But I’m going to go ahead and post again anyway. I have a question for everyone here.
According to a recent NYT article by Tim Weiner, “A newly declassified document shows that J. Edgar Hoover, the longtime director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, had a plan to suspend habeas corpus and imprison some 12,000 Americans he suspected of disloyalty.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/23/washington/23habeas.html? ex=1356066000&en=51115b422df80200&ei=5090&partner=rssuserla nd&emc=rss
Here’s my question:
Who would it be correct to label a “fascist”:
a) the conservative J. Edgar Hoover
b) the liberal Harry S. Truman
c) both Hoover and Truman
d) neither Hoover nor Truman
I apologize for being vulgar, but its just a rub and tug at that blog. Jonah just links to reviews of his books, says “look, a good one, Gotcha!” or “A bad one, but he doesn’t take me seriously, so bah.”
Right click on the Greasemonkey icon in the status bar and uncheck the name of a script to temporarily disable it without uninstalling it.
Sure, such a thing would be worth pointing out and in fact we’ve gone over it several times here too, myself noting how Mussolini directly negated Marxist class-conflict theory by saying that it was really nations in conflict, not classes within nations.
However, it would only be “worth pointing out” for our own entertainment or edification on this blog, or because you’re talking to a moderately sane person actually interested in history.
It would not be “worth pointing out” with regard to someone releasing the verbal flatulence that we’ve seen from Liberal Fat-Systems: From Ho Ho’s to Carl’s Jr, because there is no such thing as a real argument based on definitions which are consistent and theses which can either be verified or falsified.
It’s “empty” in the old fashioned logical sense, meaning that if the contrary thing is stated or alleged, it doesn’t have anything to do with damaging the various arguments hurled — because they are empty arguments unassailable by fact or examination. They are ‘right’ because if you don’t agree you are a stupid poopyhead. That’s it.
a) the conservative J Edgar Hoover
Nice try, good honest effort, Flying Fox. Because according to Jo’butt, that would only have been evidence that J. Edgard Hoover was copying the Liberal Fascists who preceded him like Woodrow Wilson.
…Jonah’s “Gotcha”-calling over the phrase “national socialist,”…
Heh, indeed. I wonder what he thought of the Republican Guard?
a) the conservative J. Edgar Hoover
The special genius that is Jonah has produced a rock solid thesis that when activated by a super secret special super power makes this answer impossible. The correct answer id FDR.
Owen nails the projection perfectly, thereby exposing how Pantload performed the triple lutz with a halfgainer. And most importantly, WHY.
I just checked out Pantload’s “Lieberal Fat-heads” “blog.” Holy cow. If he weren’t so stupid, he’d be ashamed of himself for being so stupid.
Right click on the Greasemonkey icon in the status bar and uncheck the name of a script to temporarily disable it without uninstalling it.
Or just click on the happy monkey and make it sad for a minute, heartbreaking though it is.
The Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (National Socialist German Workers Party) were so well known for its strict policies of socialism and worker’s rights that German industrialists were unanimous in steadfastly refused to contribute a single pfennig.
So the poor NSDAP was forced to survive by holding bake sales until it came to power in 1933.
The NSDAP achieved power thanks to the generous help of liberals and communists, and, once in power, showed its appreciation of its friends on the the left by totally limiting its persecutions to Jews and conservative.
I guess the lie that Goldbergs universe is built on is exposed. He argues that there is a fascist elite that are allowed to say anything to the rubes to maintain power.
The problem Pantload is that you are not part of the elite. You can’t elect yourself to that status either. You are a common pseudo-intellectual that is self-unaware enough to not know how stupid you really are. Luckily for you, your stupidity is profound enough to protect you from the knowledge that you are the laughingstock of all that can walk and breathe at the same time.
Yeah, what empressmitzi said. Intellectuals do not use the (non)word “majorly.”
Ooo! I kan haz millenium hand an shrimp?
I never tire of telling this tale… sometime during campaign 2000, on one of those weekend pundit talking heads’ shows, Jonah sneered [paraphrased], “I can’t stand that phrase, ‘compassionate conservatism’. What we need are more cruel conservatives.”
I notice the LibFacha blog has yet to mention or link to Dave Neiwert’s review (via albany layman here yesterday). I anxiously await Goldberg’s response.
Also, this paragraph from Neiwert’s essay goes out to a certain professor of history and reviewer of the book in question for the Times of New York.
As Montell Jordan would say, “This is how we do it.” And it ain’t that hard either.
Bush’s compassionate conservatism was…a marketing slogan
I knew that.
Everyone’s probably moved on to the next thread, but…
I know how to turn Greasemonkey off; the problem is that since being introduced to Greasemonkey, my physical tolerance for trolls has faded–and I’m afraid that exposing myself to BoogerSaulKevinGary’s unfiltered verbal diarrhea might land me in the hospital, a gibbering shell of my former self.
A blast from the past on the same point:
http://dir.salon.com/story/news/feature/2005/11/03/abramoff/index.html
Heh, indeed. I wonder what he thought of the Republican Guard?
Or the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, where “of” is perhaps the only honest word.
the fact that Huckabee is going by Jesus’s word on compassion and whatnot
I wouldn’t go that far. I would say that he believes in the Bible in the way that Bush was told to pretend to, not that he’s actually compassionate.
Sorry, I just can’t let what seemed to be grudging admiration for Huckabee (and apologies if that’s not what you meant) go by without comment.
“majorly”?
That’s majorly awesome liek woah.
You know, in every new bloviation from Pantload, Coulter et al I just hear this somehow simultaneously desperate-yet-smug “Aren’t I bracingly contrarian and interestingly provocative and someone you’d like to have back on your show? Aren’t I? Aren’t I?”
Davis said,
January 9, 2008 at 18:12
Liberals don’t respect authority, and that makes us fascists.
‘Zackly!!
Religion, in Jonah’s world, truly is the Cheetos bag of the masses.
It is the Cheetos bag of the masses.
But Jonah is still a pantload.
Most of the rest of the NR cons know better than to say this sort of thing outright… I do wonder if they get tired of Goldberg blowing their cover on a regular basis.
I have always assumed that the Doughy Pantload’s right to hang out with the less stupid, somewhat more self-aware NR “intellectuals” is based on a contract, written by Lucianne, that permits his slightly smarter Reichtwing brethren to smack Jonah upside the earhole, open hand only, not more than a specified number of times per 24 hours. You know — the same contract Lucianne herself signed with the Social Services people, once it became obvious that even the most disabililty-hardened, stress-tested foster family wasn’t going to take little Jonah.
Similar to Delay saying last night on MSNBC that “moderates are people who think too much.”
The naked cynicism of the right…
I’m not sure Bush even realized, or realizes to this day, that “compassionate conservatism” was nothing more than a marketing slogan. All this means is that he’s less cynical than Goldberg. (Dumber, too, although that’s a given.)
St. Augustine was right when he called cynics “canine philosophers.”
The naked cynicism of the right…
If it was naked it’d be more interesting but they keep pretending that Janet’s nipple is a weapon of mass destruction.
Wait… you mean his book was actually edited by someone?
Adam Bellow, editor-at-large for Doubleday.
Another legacy hire.
Author of In Praise of Nepotism.
Surprise, surprise.
GWB’s phony “humble foreign policy” promise was another marketing slogan sham.
So the problem with Huckabee is that he isn’t a shameless liar? Hmm…curious…
Huckabee is dangerous because he’s the (unintentional) trial balloon for a proprietary Religious Right candidacy.
That would split the Republican Party right down the middle.
That’s why they hate him.
But if you only “bow in the face of authority” when you know it’s right, you’re not bowing to authority at all, are you? You’re following your own internal sense of what’s right and what’s wrong, which is to say, the dictates of your conscience. This is a non-authoritarian position, unless for some reason you wouldn’t do what you think is right unless you could find some authority figure to ratify it for you. Is this what you meant? Or do you even know what you meant?
we must bow in the face of authority, temporal or spiritual
No discussion of “the face of authority” is complete without mentioning Teh Great Countenance, Macroposopus.
The Zohar devotes 13 chapters simply to describing the beard of Macroposopus.
I can’t get enough of this.
[…] candidates are lame, the people who vote for them are lame, and Mike Huckabee, the one guy I really don’t want to win our primary, is sort of lame […]
I tihnk you’ll find its spelt “frak”, you CUNT.