alternative hippopotamus

progressive cyberdadaism from our nation’s capital

May 29, 2006

What If MLK Were a Lefty Blogger?

by AltHippo @ 11:30 am. Filed under hacks

That is, if MLK were a lefty blogger, how would he deal with the likes of Jonah Goldberg, Michelle Malkin, or Insty Reynolds?

That’s basically how I put it to Art Levine paraphrasing the discussion from Saturday’s post.

We were kicking back at the Chevy Chase Lounge (probably the seediest place in Chevy Chase, but fortunately the weather was decent for sitting outside).

Art’s thought was that he didn’t know what MLK would do specifically, but MLK was a force to be reckoned with. So he may well have found a way to deal with Goldberg, Malkin, Reynolds without attempting to defeat or humiliate them.

It’s hard to say since the landscape has changed since 1968. Imagine for a second that the protest at the University of Alabama happened today. I suspect Gov. Wallace would be on Hannity and Colmes, and Hannity would ask him tough questions like You’re an upstanding American, sir, and I know you are only trying to preserve law and order so the people of Alabama can get a higher education. But, what would you say to the Communists and Hippies who make up the left when they say that using firehoses on the protestors was going too far? Could it be that the Communists and Hippies just don’t like the sight of water? Larry King would have MLK on, at some bringing up rumors of extra-marital affairs. Teh Norbot would bring up hazy irregularities about his PhD thesis.

My guess is they would Swiftboat MLK.

It’s also fair to say that I’m not MLK. My instinct when I see gossip, innuendo, propaganda, and disinformation is to react with a disdain for the untruth tellers. Yes, I want to humilate them. Yes, I want to defeat them. Hey, I gotta be me.

Take Jonah Goldberg. Please. His latest entry into the Big Book of Untruth was something he oozed out onto the pages of the LA Times. I’ll spare you Goldbert’s actual words. Hopefully that will keep your brain from turning into mush. The basic idea was that Gore lied when he said he visited France when he was 15 years old, since he said he was working on the family farm that summer.

Greg Sargent at the American Prospect called up Gore’s people, and they said, emphasizing Gore had verified this: “Mr. Goldberg’s insinuation is simply incorrect. Mr. Gore did indeed spend an educational week in Cannes during the summer when he was fifteen. That summer he also spent a great deal of time working on the family farm.”

A commenter at Ezra Klein’s place finds an account from an anti-hagiography of Gore: “While his father served in Congress, Gore spent most of the year living with his parents in an eight-flooor apartment on Embassy Row’s elegant Fairfax Hotel. He was “finished” by extensive foreign travel. To help their boy learn Spanish, his parents sent him to Mexico one summer. They also shipped him to France and Switzerland to improve his C average in French.”

Ezra also writes: “… I think Jonah’s a good writer, and, when he’s not hacking it up, an interesting and fresh intellect”

Here’s where I disagree: I think misrepresenting the global warming debate, particularly when it’s accompanied by smearing someone’s character, as he does with Gore, is neither an attribute of a good writer or of an interesting and fresh intellect.

Ezra attributes a more pure motive than I would to Goldberg: “… all that happened here was that Jonah heard Gore mention that he spent a summer studying existentialism in France, decided not to believe it, and wrote a newspaper column based on his hunch. That’s it.”

Here’ an alternative hypothesis: what motivates the likes of Goldberg is Cheetos. Handfulls of Cheetos he stuffs in his mouth at right-wing cocktail parties, bags of cheetos he keeps in his desk. Some fathers put food on their family’s table. Jonah puts down Cheetos.

Update: Just caught this on Sadly No!:

To save young wonks like Ezra from wasting their lives responding to Jonah Goldberg, I have made a list of the three best responses to any Jonah Goldberg piece. You can mix’n’match ‘em as you see fit:

1.) “Jonah Goldberg is the stupidest man alive.” (We’ll call this “The DeLong Method.”)

2.) “Jonah Goldberg is a wanker.” (a.k.a., the Atrios Method.)

3.) “Jonah Goldberg spends his weekends watching Xena re-runs while receiving injections of Mountain Dew and Twinkee filling into his buttocks.” (a.k.a., The Remarkably Insensitive and Mean-Spirited Bradrocket Method.)

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hip·po·pot·a·mus n. A notion, perhaps distinct from conventional wisdom, that needs to be verified by reality-based scrutiny.

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95. Cogito cogito ergo cogito sum (I think that I think, therefore I think that I am.)
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