For the Record: Rage

Photo by Tyrone Siu/Reuters, via Trending A to Z.

Marco on Hong Kong

It enrages me beyond words that an ignorant hypocrite like Rubio should get away with capitalizing on the suffering of people in Hong Kong to build up his cred.

A people accustomed to liberty & democracy do not easily surrender it.

As tens of thousands protest #China’s plan to use #NationalSecurityLegislation to crush the autonomy of #HongKong we will #StandWithHongKong https://t.co/W11ecziWBd

— Marco Rubio (@marcorubio) May 24, 2020

You should think about your record of support for voter suppression measures in Florida--not that different in outcome from the way China maintains control of HK legislative council--and elsewhere and ask whether you're really a good spokesman for democracy.

— Leaves of Yas (@Yastreblyansky) May 24, 2020

It seems Americans are really not familiar with this: Hong Kong doesn't have democracy, though it has had economic freedom and a good deal of freedom of speech and assembly which are nowadays under very serious threat. The Hong Kong Legco has never been a representative body, though when Hong Kong was a British colony it represented the (originally all-white) business community. But even after elections were introduced there were always enough appointed seats to ensure the governor general (then) or Beijing-appointed executive (now) would command a majority, as the Republican governor of Florida does, through various techniques of disenfranchisement. Rubio doesn't see anything wrong with that. Coincidentally, it keeps him in a position of power.

The British had a chance to institute real democracy in Hong Kong in the years leading up to 1997 but they chose not to. Rubio has a chance to back democracy in Florida but don't hold your breath.

Intellectual Bubble

Grouchy old Tom Hobbes and smooth-talking John Locke in a quiet, conservative moment. Horse Feathers.

Le tout-Washington is talking about a new book, James Comey's memoir of the events leading up to his firing as FBI director (A Higher Loyalty: Truth, Lies, and Leadership), so David F. Brooks is talking literature as well, seeing "A Renaissance on the Right": "all the political turmoil is creating a burst of intellectual creativity on the right" in which "Young, fresh writers are bursting on the scene" (getting stuck using the word "burst" twice in a space of 13 words gives you an idea of how fresh David Brooks is) such as Charles C.W. ("Cromulent Whiskers") Cooke, Mollie Hemingway, and James Poulos among other even younger and fresher names I'm not so familiar with, but the youngest and freshest of all is our old friend Jonah Goldberg, entering the field with his own immensely subtitled new book, Suicide of the West: How the Rebirth of Tribalism, Populism, Nationalism, and Identity Politics is Destroying American Democracy, which might sound better in the original German (Selbstmord des Abendlandes).

Which I'm not likely to be reading any time soon, after the disclaimer with which it begins—

Harping, Carping, and Barking: Hooey, baby

Jonah Goldberg, back from a National Review Cruise on the Danube:

NR Cruises are special things. They are filled with friends of National Review, often lifelong friends. No one who hates the magazine plunks down that much hard-earned money to spend a week drinking, eating, and touring with its writers and editors (and other passengers who are fans of the magazine). As a result, nearly all disagreements are like family disagreements.

It's so cute how he feels the need to explain why there weren't any passengers who hate NR. Strictly speaking, I suppose it would be more correct to say nobody on board hates NR except the staff, who don't have to pay, and the undercover reporters from Harper's, which if nobody has ever done that before I'd like to say I'm totally available for the next cruise, if they'd spot me a wardrobe. Just kidding!

It's going to be aboard the MS Nieuw Amsterdam, taking seven days to circumnavigate the island of Cuba, mostly at a safe distance from its Communism-tainted territorial waters—

Annals of Derp: Jonah's MacGuffin Theory

Via Amy Sterling, who's a little worried about Jonah's diet: "heart attack waiting to happen". Seriously, you need to ease up on the brandy and beef suet—and Froot Loops too— and pay some attention to the vegetables.

The derpetology practice here at Rectification Central too often focuses on rebarbative matters like statistics or money or earth science with which your correspondent himself is, to tell the truth, not all that in love or even very familiar. If it's just David Brooks misreading a chart, that's one thing, but frequently we are obliged to deal with the work of real scientists—or economists, which is even worse, imaginary scientists or scientists of the imaginary—and I really have to wonder why I'm working so hard. Can't some qualified person take over?

So it's pretty refreshing when we get Jonah Goldberg turning to film theory, riffing off a 2013 piece by the so-called Ace of Spades, "The MacGuffinization of American Politics".

The Ace's original complaint was the not very original thought that American politics has been turned into entertainment, which he believed had suddenly happened with the election of Barack Obama as president:

Poor Jonah

Update: Hi MBRU fans, thanks Blogenfreude!

Pieter Aertsen, The Egg Dance, 1552. Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, via Wikipedia.

Goldberg is so guileless, really, it's almost kind of sweet:

Donald Trump almost never uses the language of traditional American conservatism, with its emphasis on classically liberal notions of limited government, constitutionalism, individualism, and free trade. He prefers to talk about “strength” and “winning” while vowing to restore the “greatness” of yesteryear through his indomitable will.

The language of traditional American conservatism, dear boy, has never won an election and never will, because the voters don't give a shit about it, unless you mean when you're talking about their taxes, and they're the kind of voters (as we mostly are, unfortunately) who look at their paystubs and don't realize that the bulk of what's deducted from the gross pay is insurance for old-age health care, pension, and unemployment, and the amount dedicated to cash for welfare clients and foreigners vanishingly tiny.

That's what Republicans do

Image by Dorsey Shaw/Buzzfeed.

So elements of the rightwing noise machine are working on the interesting project of attacking Hillary Clinton as a tool of rapacious capital, as in Karl Rove's hilariously inept-looking ad (h/t Marie3)—



—like Rove and his masters think getting bought by Wall Street would be a bad thing ("$20 million, same as in town").

And here's Jonah, right on cue, to castigate her for pretending she's on Obama's side:

The thinking is pretty obvious. Obama is personally popular among core Democratic constituencies, particularly African-American voters in South Carolina and other states that come after New Hampshire and Iowa. That’s why she’s casting Sanders’ “Medicare for All” program as an attack on Barack Obama’s “legacy.”

Pandering to those Negroes and their childishly personalized politics, wouldn't you know it. Speaking of childishly personalized politics, the reason Jonah knows Hillary really hates Barack is classic middle school:

From Jonah's world

Jonah-in-the-Whale, via WhatWouldSpideyDo.

I wouldn't presume to know what happened in San Bernardino on Friday, but I think we can be pretty confident it isn't as Jonah Goldberg suggests:

I think the “hybrid” attack theory is still plausible to me. I suspect that the original target wasn’t the Christmas party. My hunch is that Syed Farook went to the party and Bob from accounting stole his stapler or told him the ice-cream cake wasn’t halal and, in a rage, Farouk called an audible. He ran home, told his mail-order jihadist bride, “It’s go-time!” After a brief detour to drop their baby girl off at grandma’s and inscribe themselves in the Book of Worst Parents Ever, they went and murdered a bunch of innocent people. The willing suspension of reason about this is just amazing.

Monday Cheap Shots

Via Democratic Underground.

And the Wolf Blitzer award for making the blindingly obvious sound even less interesting than it is goes to...

Another way to understand Clinton v Sanders. Their political pitches are essentially idealism vs pragmatism.

— Chuck Todd (@chucktodd) August 15, 2015

Wait, what was the first way? That he has funnier hair?

Annals of derp: Jonah Goldberg on American political theory

Welcome Crooks, Liars, and the people who love them! Thanks, Tengrain.

And on air guitar... Image via Crooks&Liars.

Mike Huckabee doesn’t have a lot of prominent defenders, and I am not volunteering for the job.

Imma let you finish, Jonah....

Huckabee has always struck me as a right-wing populist-progressive. A deeply religious — and by all accounts decent — man...

Not quite all accounts. There's a little disagreement on that score. I mean, just on a couple of issues. Not necessarily anything serious. Or anything.

...Huckabee nonetheless has a view of the state that would have jibed almost perfectly with such forgotten titans of the Progressive Era as Richard Ely, Josephus Daniels, and even William Jennings Bryan.

Ah, here we go. Progressives are the real Prohibitionists, or is it the other way around?

Check your privilege at the door, this joint is really jumpin

Image via Hand of Ananke.

I wasn't going to write anything about the Jonathan Chait political correctness pity party, because everybody I like had such great things to say about it already, but then there was this other thing I never got around to that ties in, from Jonah Goldberg's New Year's Eve piece (I wrote a lot about that sucker, too, but there's still more):

Frank Rich, the former New York Times columnist and theater critic, recently interviewed Chris Rock for New York magazine. He wanted to know why right-leaning comedian Dennis Miller isn’t as funny (at least according to Rich) as Jon Stewart of The Daily Show. He asked Rock, “Do you think that identifying with those in power is an impediment to laughter?”

Cereal murder

If it's Froot Loops, on the other hand, you might be tying to score an online interview with the president, as GloZell has done, but certainly not bathing in cereal and interviewing the president at the same time. In spite of her youth she is unquestionably a more accomplished journalist than Jonah Goldberg, in the respect that she has in fact interviewed people in the course of her career.

Hai, Jonah—

Dear Reader (Unless you’re sitting in a tub full of Cap’n Crunch, in which case you’re too busy talking to the leader of the free world)...

This is an apparent reference to a scandal of March 2011, when Daily Finance reported questions about the fate of the imaginary mustached ship's officer who serves PepsiCo as mascot of Cap'n Crunch breakfast sugar; was he being pushed out of his job under pressure from a Crunch-hating White House? Would he end up retired, on the bocce pitch with his mates Ronald McDonald and Joe Camel, talking about the good old days when poisoning small children was something a man could take some pride in?

"You're always using tu quoque arguments, Jonah!" "No, YOU are!"

Update:Thanks for the shout-out, Blogenfreude, and welcome Mike's readers!

Image via Buzzfeed.

Jonah doesn't know what old Steve Scalise was up to in 2002:

As I write this, GOP House whip Steve Scalise is in hot water over reports that he spoke to a group of racist poltroons in Louisiana twelve years ago. Whether it was an honest mistake, as Scalise plausibly claims, or a sign of something more nefarious, as his detractors hope, remains to be seen.

But one thing he knows for sure, whatever it was, some Democrat has done exactly the same thing and gotten away with it scot-free. Or at least that's what he hears on the Twitter:

Liberal Fascism Watch: Electing another people

Bertolt Brecht–Helene Weigel House in Buckow, Brandenburg. Wikipedia.

Well, on Senator Mary Landrieu suggesting that some element of President Obama's unpopularity might be ascribable to a lingering racism among some persons, I give you Mr. Jonah Goldberg:

In Die Lösung Brecht famously quipped that if the people lose faith in the government it would be better if the government dissolved the people and elected another. For progressives it’s always five minutes to Brecht-O-Clock. What I mean is this desire to fix the people, not the government always seems to be lurking behind liberalism. It was there when Woodrow Wilson said the first job of an educator is to make your children as unlike you as possible....

Amend it don't end it

Image via The Amendment Gazette.

Stupid Jonah Goldberg moment: he's complaining that Democrats are proposing a constitutional amendment to overturn the Citizens United decision, even though "ironically" they are constantly opposing constitutional amendments

not just on the merits but on the puffed-up principle that we mustn’t “tinker” or “tamper” with the genius of the Founding Fathers’ constitutional design.

And then his first example is criticism of Republican attempts to eliminate birthright citizenship as tampering with the 14th Amendment. The one they ratified in 1868, or 81 years, you know, after the Founding-Fathery stuff.

How do you plead? Special, your honor.

Jonah Goldberg has a new butch gravatar at the National Review Online, with a better-trimmed beard and a ferociously flinty don't-tread-on-me expression behind his new glasses. No more Mr. Nice Doughy. Am I seeing things, or is he slightly cross-eyed?

Anyway, he's pretty ticked off at us Americans:

A new Pew survey found that 44 percent of Americans don’t often feel pride in being an American, and only 28 percent said that America is the greatest country in the world. Respondents who “often feel proud to be American” were overwhelmingly conservative (from 72 percent to 81 percent, depending on the kind of conservative). A majority (60 percent) of “solid liberals” said they don’t often feel proud to be an American.

Fuck yeah. What a bunch of losers, that 72% of the American population, failing to assert at every opportunity that they're better than everybody else, which is, as you know, the way you prove you're better than everybody else. (Note, by the way, that the survey he's talking about, to which he doesn't give a link, came out just over a year ago.)

Liberal Fascism watch

Via Nairaland.

Culture War reporting from Raw Story:

The [Colorado] Civil Rights Commission last week upheld an administrative judge’s finding that Christian bakery owner Jack Phillips had violated Colorado’s anti-discrimination statutes.

“I’m beginning to think, are re-education camps next?” [Family Research Council president Tony] Perkins wondered aloud. “When are they going to start rolling out the boxcars to start hauling off Christians?”

Republicans built that!

Updated 2/8/2013:

Key Wilde/Getty.

Jonah Goldberg sez:

the real CBO story should be: “That awkward moment when everyone realizes Obamacare was a huge mistake.”

Yes, yes! How come that's only a false CBO story instead of the real one? Why isn't there any justice in the world any more? He adds,

Jonah Ownah

I used the @twittername of Jonah Goldberg today, not in the hope of attracting his attention, but just because it autocompleted itself, in a remark about the use of the term by rightwingers to abuse the left:

@RightOrgs @jonhartmannjazz And rightwingers using the term "fascist" that way (@JonahNRO's trick) smells just the same. Just postmodern.
— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) December 21, 2013

"Fascism," my friend added, "is the control of government by corporations," and that did attract his attention, however; not with the explosive defensiveness of a Glenn Greenwald, but with a kind of weary patience:

Image via And Magazine.

He wishes he knew how it feels to be free

I just noticed that Jonah Goldberg's new book is called The Tyranny of Clichés. Then again, his own writing is a banquet of linguistic road-kill, as you can verify from his latest National Review Online column:

only real accountability / Benghazi scandal / partisan report / no actual crimes were committed [jump]

Kerala by bike. From BCM Touring, India.

Blame of Groans

Shorter Jonah Goldberg, "Excuse me? GOP to blame for Obamacare?", USA Today, August 5, 2013, and reprinted as "The Obamacare Blame Game" in NRO, August 8, because recycling's fine when the Market does it:

Where do they get off blaming Republicans for Obamacare's problems?
We only tried to destroy it, for heaven's sake! Not like we succeeded!

Bildungblog (February 2007) claimed to have spotted Goldberg as Lord Harkonnen in the film version of Dune.

No, really.

The Affordable Care Act — aka ObamaCare — is off to a very rocky start, and according to the law's biggest defenders, the blame falls squarely at the feet of Republicans.

(No links in the NRO version,  because hypertext is a secular humanist conspiracy to make you read something icky.)

The law's biggest defenders according to Jonah are the folks at ThinkProgress, who in fact blame Republicans not for a rocky start (since it hasn't started yet, for one thing) but for a "media narrative" about it, but let that pass.

...the fact that activists won't give up may be annoying to supporters of the law, but just talk to any one of them and they'll be the first to tell you that so far they've failed utterly. Similarly, asking the NFL to stay out of a bitter political controversy may be unseemly, but such actions haven't done anything to stop ObamaCare.

Well, then. It's not like attempted murder is some kind of crime, right?