alternative hippopotamus

progressive cyberdadaism from our nation’s capital

February 8, 2007

Yea! It’s Jonah Goldberg Day!

by AltHippo @ 11:58 am. Filed under Uncategorized

Some of you may have noticed that some of the lefty blogs are celebrating Jonah Goldberg Day. Understandably, this could be confusing. Why celebrate the career of someone who, having got a job at National Review as a result of his mother’s involvement in the Monica Lewinsky scandal, uses his little microphone to explore rhetoric through constant bad example. Yet, somehow sees himself above it all at the same time. Like he says here:

You know, Jim does make a good case and I hope he’s right. I think about this a lot. I get a lot of grief from longtime readers about how I’ve “matured” or “grown up.” And the truth is I have. Though I still think there’s a lot of room left for humor (and once the book’s done and put to bed, I’ll bring back some pull-my-finger G-Filing), I’m basically burnt out on the smash-mouth stuff.

[…]

Simply as a writer, when I see the nasty stuff now, on both the left and the right, my first reaction is to think how easy — and therefore uninteresting — it is. The Edwards bloggers’ anti-Catholic diatribes bore me more than they offend me because they are precisely the sort of thing you’d expect to hear from a living cliche who can’t imagine the other side might be worth listening too.

Ah. Widdle Jonah’s all grown up. He’s such a big boy now. I’m trying to remember: “pull my finger,” was that Molliere, or was that Oscar Wilde?

The real point, in my opinion, is that right-wing punditry is the sole profession, at least that I’m aware of, where the uninformed, and uninquisitive can make a substantial living from scribbling and bellowing unsubstantiated opinion. And in the process look down on those who are more informed, but less renumerated.

Here’s how Hilzoy puts it:

But to me the point of this story is: this was the test Goldberg chose to illustrate the superiority of his own judgment. He came up with the idea. He could have chosen some other test, but he chose this one. He was, presumably, pretty sure of it. He failed that test. Moreover, he didn’t fail it as a result of some unforeseeable fluke; he failed it completely, and in spades. The decent thing to do would be to admit that his judgment about such things is dreadful, and that whoever gave him a platform to write about them made a terrible mistake.

He should then find some other line of work, where he might yet, in some way, prove useful to mankind.

It’s hard for me to imagine any field, other than NRO web pundit, where Jonah could make much more than minimum wage, much less afford a comfortable home in the DC suburbs. I’m afraid “useful to mankind” is out of the question.

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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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