Wednesday, August 16

Alpha and Omega

The above search began and ended with Jonah, not that I didn't find a couple of the guys (Tigerhawk, a hand washing, Cap'n Ed, a medium sigh) willing to admit that Allen had said something pretty stupid; one couldn't get around that, no sir. But not racist by any means. Rather, Jonah's continuing substitution of stupor for style just laid me out again, even though I thought I was ready for it:
Frankly I found the original Washington Post story so confusingly written I couldn't figure out what to think.

Which is followed all of two sentences later by:
Garance at Tapped has a pretty detailed discussion of the whole thing which gives me reason to rethink that interpretation.

Now, don't get me wrong; the two lines in between include his decision that it "wasn't such a big deal" and "just boilerplate" to Allen's earlier remarks. It's not incoherence per se I'm on about here, just this: anyone who could write that second sentence has no business complaining that someone else's writing is confusing.

And another, minor point: the Tapped commentary didn't offer reasons for a rethink, say with the Port and Stilton after the ladies had been dismissed. It made explicit what the context had already made obvious: Allen used a racial epithet. Surely Jonah and all the other great admirers of Martin Luther King, Jr., should be the first to denounce it.

I'd been directed to that comment, so I hit "Home" to catch up with all the zany NRO characters, and damn me if there weren't Cheetos stains at the top of the page.
Whatever the merits of the charge that Iraq is a "distraction" from the war on terror, the reality is that arguments about Bush are a larger distraction from the war on terror.

For the love of Mike, how did this man get his job again? If there isn't anybody who can put an end to that incontinent wishy-washiness which is supposed to indicate--what? extended ratiocenation over brandies in the library?--could someone at least try to explain to him that you don't follow that sort of thing by putting quotation marks around the word in question?
For much of the past five years, Democrats not in the Joe Lieberman wing of the party — which is to say the Democratic Party, minus one — have repeatedly pointed to Osama bin Laden's ability to elude capture (as opposed to, say, his inability to once again murder thousands on American soil) as proof that Bush's anti-terror efforts have been a failure.

Jonah's writing from Alaska, by the way, and not Tunisia (4/02), Karachi (5/02), Karachi (6/02), Bali (10/02), Mombasa (10/02), Riyadh (5/03), Casablanca (5/03), Riyadh (11/03), Istanbul (11/03), Madrid (3/04), Khobar (5/04), Jiddah (12/04), London (7/05), Bali (10/05), or Amman (11/05).
It would surely be nice to see bin Laden's head on a pike, but this is childishly partisan.

When U.S. forces killed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, bin Laden's "prince" in Iraq, Democrats presented Zarqawi's demise as good but trivial news....


Why shouldn't this same logic apply to bin Laden and the global Islamic insurgency?

Okay, earlier I asked how someone who writes like Jonah could critique anyone else's output; now I'd like to know how he can type the words "the same logic applies" without his monitor exploding?

For God's sakes, how does someone pass through into high school in this country without outgrowing this sort of nonsense? More importantly, what have we done to rate this pathetic twerp as an adversary?

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

It is the National Review after all. Even W.F. Buckley's ostentacious familiarity with the arcane pages of the OED and William Rusher's desperate attempts to master the haughty Buckleyian tongue-in-mouth flap couldn't turn the rag into anything respectable. So Jonah Goldberg is just one more right-wing sinecure hack, without any courage or convictions, to add to the fold.

The LA Times, however, is a different story and should die of embarrassment.

On the bright side, Jonah promises this as soon as all the Twinkies are consumed: At some point I'd love to start a larger discussion on how envy remains the largest-least-spoken-about root cause for most of society's problems.

Can't wait.

julia said...

It's the big tent, WFB-style. At some point he regretfully decided that his ideology wasn't going to get anywhere without the support of people even he finds vulgar and stupid and he hired up. Er, down.

That the mouthbreathing vulgarian whose machinations did so much to hand them the White House had a son she wanted to stop supporting sometime before she died, who knew all the mouthbreathing vulgarian buzzwords and had no shame at all, probably came as manna.

Doug said...

I learned from Jeremiah Johnson or Dune or something that one's quality can be judged by the quality of one's adversaries. With that in mind, Jonah Goldberg doesn't do much for my self-esteem.

Anonymous said...

"Incontinent wishy-washiness" sounds like it must be really uncomfortable and probably "distracting."

Anonymous said...

Jonah Goldbrick slugs his article: From today's paper tomorrow (It's still Tuesday in Alaska):

[sigh] Yes, thank you so bloody much for that helpful explanation of the confounding nature of time zones. Porrofatto is right, the fact that any newspaper of record publishes this moron's twitterings is an embarrassment to the species.