It’s Jonah Goldberg Day

February 8, 2007

Try as I might to resist, I just can’t help but enjoy Jonah Goldberg Day. It’s possible you haven’t heard why it’s Jonah Goldberg Day, so let’s review.

On Feb. 8, 2005 — exactly two years ago today — Goldberg was engaged in one his pointless arguments, this time with professor Juan Cole. Goldberg told his readers:

“Anyway, I do think my judgment is superior to [Cole’s] when it comes to the big picture. So, I have an idea: Since he doesn’t want to debate anything except his own brilliance, let’s make a bet. I predict that Iraq won’t have a civil war, that it will have a viable constitution, and that a majority of Iraqis and Americans will, in two years time, agree that the war was worth it. I’ll bet $1,000 (which I can hardly spare right now).

“This way neither of us can hide behind clever word play or CV reading. If there’s another reasonable wager Cole wants to offer which would measure our judgment, I’m all ears. Money where your mouth is, doc.”

To his credit, Cole took the high road, telling Goldberg that would not place “a wager on the backs of human beings.” Clearly, that was the classy thing to do. In return, Goldberg taunted Cole and accused him of being a terrorist sympathizer. Clearly, this was not the classy thing to do.

In fact, because Goldberg was particularly obnoxious, political observers everywhere are today celebrating Jonah Goldberg Day, honoring the foolishness and inanity that has come to dominate the LA Times columnist’s work.

And how is Goldberg celebrating Jonah Goldberg Day? I’m glad you asked.

Goldberg acknowledged in December that Cole “would have won [the wager], quite obviously.” Today, Goldberg followed up on the subject, explaining that he has “nothing substantive to add,” except that, “[T]he vitriol and bullying of this crowd is something to behold.”

One gets the distinct impression that Goldberg is feeling rather sorry for himself. After accusing Cole of practically being a traitor, he made a series of bold predictions about how successful the war in Iraq was going to be. As is usually the case, Goldberg was mistaken. Now it appears he’d prefer the political world not bother him by mentioning any of this. What a shame.

As for the “vitriol” coming from the left, perhaps now would be a good time to bring up the fact that Goldberg is writing a book called, “Liberal Fascism: The Totalitarian Temptation from Mussolini to Hillary Clinton.” I’m sure it’s going to be mild, fair, and even-handed.

Of course, this is not just about mocking Goldberg, as entertaining as that may be. Nitpicker’s Terry Welch is organizing an effort to celebrate Jonah Goldberg Day by donating $1,000 to the USO — the money Goldberg presumably would have ponied up.

The last I heard, about $500 had been raised. I’ll let you know what happens.

Sorry, Jonah, you buttered your toast and now you’ll have to eat it. Forever.

  • Goldberg is intellectually dishonest, and as such, an embarrassment. He simply hasn’t gotten the memo yet, so he continues to lament how he is misunderstood. No, Mr. Goldberg, you not only were wrong, you continue to hold assumptions about this glorious world that are simply untrue. When he finds it, the truth will set Mr. Goldberg free. -Kevo

  • Ah Jonah Goldberg. I feel some eliminationist rhetoric welling up in my throat, but I’ll refrain. This is the age of un-responsibility. For newspaper pundits there are consequences for being wrong, but they all seem to be good consequences. Book deals, tv appearances and no loss of status.

    Jonah. Where’s a whale when you need one.

  • How the LA Times keeps this waste of human flesh on its payroll is beyond me. As long as the WaPo keeps Broder and Krauthaummer on its payroll, I will not purchase that paper. I suggest Los Angelinos boldly and repeatedly let the LA Times know how you feel.

  • You know, if the Doughy Pantload was a man of honor and integrity (yeah, I know … that made me laugh, too) he’d donate the money to the USO anyway.

    And, like others, I’m still trying to figure out how the likes of Goldberg — who, as someone else once posted “are 95% wrong 100% of the time” — continue to get jobs, tv appearances, and book deals.

  • “Rube Goldberg”—a quaint term used to describe taking something that’s broken, patching it together with duct tape, bubble-gum, and kite string—and making the damned thing work again; sometimes even better than before it broke.

    “Jonah Goldberg”—a quaint term used to describe that some idiot has taken something, broken it beyond all reasonable hope of repair—and then, while vainly attempting to fix the damned thing anyway, he it breaks even worse than before. Also referred to by the abreviated form of the term—“JoGo.”

    Happy JoGo day, folks!!!

  • Hypocrisy and contradiction define the American Conservative movement.
    Goldberg, what a maroon!
    The Left, who wishes to share power and wealth amongst the broadest majority of peoples and parties, are “fascists”, while the Right, whose wishes to consolidate power and wealth to 1 single source, the corporation, consider themselves the stronghold of freedom and Democracy.

    Hypocrisy and Contradiction. American values, under Capitalism.
    Tired of it yet??

  • In honor of Jonah, the biggest fightingest chicken of the 101st Keyboardists and apologies to those who liked the Ballad of the Green Berets.

    Fighting reality while eating pie
    A Fearful boy who twists and lies
    A twit who knows not what he says
    Wearer of the Dunce Beret

    Chorus:
    Chicken wings litter Jonah’s chest
    Here he is, America’s “best”
    Many silly words were typed today
    By a Wearer of the Dunce Beret

    Trained to suck on mommy’s breast
    Trained in verbiage, lies in hand
    Man who types by night and day
    Wearer of the Dunce Beret

    Chicken wings litter Jonah’s chest
    Here he is, America’s “best”
    Many damn posts were sent today
    Wearer of the Dunce Beret

    Back at home his mother waits
    Her lying boy has met his fate
    He’s been burned by those he smeared
    Leaving her his last request
    “Put chicken wings on Juan Cole’s desk
    Spread’em round and make a mess
    Maybe once I’ll be right some day
    So I won’t settle his win today”

    Chicken wings litter Jonah’s chest
    Here he is, America’s “best”
    Many silly words were typed today
    By a Wearer of the Dunce Beret

  • Goldberg the pantload says (in Dec 2006):

    …guess what? I have no problem giving money to the USO and similar organizations and have done so several times since 9/11. So, sure, maybe I will [donate the $1,000]…

    Sounds good so far. Then, a few lines later he says:

    …while I will surely give money to a worthy cause(s) this year. I doubt I will jump through the hoops of these people…

    “Sure, maybe I will, but I doubt if I will” Now there’s a superior intellect at work. This douchebag is not worthy of a national column, unless you compare him to some of the other douchebags at NRO like Michael Ledeen, who recently opined about the virtues of military service (did he serve? He doesn’t say. Hmm.) and “Machiavelli, the smartest of all of us”.

    http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=MWI5ZmZkOGQ4NTc5YWYzOTdlY2M2MjAzOGJmNzY5YjQ=

  • Juan Cole weighs in (and puts it nicely):

    …As Cohen points out, the worst travesty of all is that the Tribune Corp. that owns the LA Times fired Bob Scheer, who has a great deal of sound judgment, and hired Goldberg, who couldn’t find even his behind with both hands. NPR also gave Goldberg a perch, apparently to fend off the troglodytes in Congress. It isn’t right, but, well, the US is run by cranky old rich white men, and some of them like what Goldberg has to say. Has nothing to do with whether he actually knows what he is talking about. As his foolish bet shows, he hasn’t the slightest.

    http://www.juancole.com/2007/02/helicopter-crash-killed-7-us-gis-on.html

    The part about NPR is something we can all complain about next time there’s a fundraiser going on.

  • I swear I hear Goldberg shrieking from here – MOMMY!!!! THE MEAN LIBERALS ARE MOCKING MY MISTAKES AGAIN!!!! MOMMY!!!! I NEED MORE CHEETOS!!! NOW!!! MOMMY!!!!! NOW!!!!

  • We all know what this embarassment will do to his career –he’ll get a promotion! Has Bush given him the Presidential Medal of Freedom yet? Such stupidity in the cause of neoconservatism musn’t go unrewarded.

    Juan Cole said it best in a quote that, oddly enough, Goldberg included in his infamous bet column …

    “But Goldberg is just a dime a dozen pundit. Cranky rich people hire sharp-tongued and relatively uninformed young people all the time and put them on the mass media to badmouth the poor, spread bigotry, exalt mindless militarism, promote anti-intellectualism, and ensure generally that rightwing views come to predominate even among people who are harmed by such policies. One of their jobs is to marginalize progressives by smearing them as unreliable.”

    Well said.

  • Don’t forget that when the Beltway snipers were apprehended, Goldberg speculated that they might represent a “threefer”–black, Muslim, and, just possibly, homosexual. A real class act.

  • …while I will surely give money to a worthy cause(s) this year. I doubt I will jump through the hoops of these people…

    Unless I’m missing something here, it’s not as if anyone put a gun to his head and made him say that he’d donate the $1,000 – the idea seems to have been completely his own, along with the terms by which he’d win or lose. So who’s making him jump through what hoops?

  • And the score is:

    JC – 1,000
    JG – A dingleberry.

    Of course you know if Cole had taken the bet and demanded payment, Goldberg would issue prim-mouthed pronouncements on how ugly it is to call in a bet over such a serious issue.

    “[T]he vitriol and bullying of this crowd is something to behold.”

    We almost don’t need S. Colbert to parody the right. They’re spoofs of themselves. It’s almost Zen.

  • I hear Johah Goldberg features prominently in O’Beirne’s book, “Women Who Make the World Worse”. As an example of said.

  • What still galls me is that in the end, Goldberg still wins. He gets a new perch at the LA Times while Cole gets blackballed from a formerly prestigious post at Yale by neocon cockroaches.

  • Speaking of winger bets/predictions and LA Times columnists, here’s what Power Line’s Scott Johnson wrote when he was ridiculing Robert Scheer back in July of ’03:

    “Well, here’s a prediction: Five years from now, Iraq will have a government far better, by any measure, than the nightmarish tyranny of Saddam Hussein. And one more: When all the facts are known about Iraq’s weapons programs — which will be soon — extremist critics of the administration like Robert Scheer will look very foolish indeed.”

    Time sure ain’t on his side for the first one and we all know how things turned out for that second one.
    Jackasses – all of them.

  • If we called it Jonah Groundberg (or Groundbhog) Day it might have more resonance. In case Pennsylvania’s feckless rodent screws up on the 2nd, a week later we can trot Jonah out to check on the weather and international affairs. If he can’t see his shadow we’re ok. Otherwise, run to the bomb shelters.

  • Poor Jonah Goldbrick! An unfortunate turn of luck in lineage and some rather suspect DNA may of, in the past, given him an undue advantage with all trans-lake creeps and assholes, and adversely affected the degree of world renown he used to enjoy for the skill that put him on the map and do the hoodoo of who’s who, as he was also regaled as one of the premiere fire hoppers and a finalist in the intramural keg dancing competitions you undoubtedly have seen on short hop flights of less than 1,000 miles and at less than 12,000 feet, as the now deregulated airlines used to show free newsreels along with their reruns of “My Mother the Car”. Of course, those heady days are over. The lake now is quite acidic and is slowly refilling since the ’96 eruption, although strangely unsatisfying. While swimming, crawling, and drooling are certainly not recommended at present, bathing in the crater was a popular pastime for skeezicks, even though, like you recounted, the occasional thud of the errant moose chad and the annual shedding of the badger nad sack definitely contributed to the lake’s eventual unpopularity as a lavatory sump of natural proportions. The first person to use this to his advantage was Hugh Girdlecomb in 1908, as he demonstrated its use in crossing the lake. And although no one was hurt at the time, a few hard floaters were harvested as suitable fire starters when dried, and a minority of clever entrepreneurs managed to eek out a hardscrabble living selling the logs to errant campers without the brains or means enough to bring their own firewood. This ultimately doomed Hugh to the local county slammer as he was also known to display his wood for any and all tourists unfortunate enough to happen upon him frolicking in the numerous back bays of the lake, resplendent in his lime taffeta one piece speedo/wife-beater ensemble with clashing maroon bathing cap. Even though local municipal codes were particularly harsh for that time, it was noted at his trial that he was not menacing in any way and allowed his unwilling victims to clamber to higher ground whilst his willie was erupting. During his perverted heyday, his ass was thrown spectacularly 20 meters into the air, subsequently landing in the lake and displacing its water, just like that bitch Physics teacher I had in third period of my junior year told me it would. Towards the end of his eruption period, when the lake’s shore were abandoned due to his behavior, flying lather could be seen, and the lake fathers knew that drastic measures were required, else they would have to raise local taxes, a bad precedent in an election year.

  • And, like others, I’m still trying to figure out how the likes of Goldberg — who, as someone else once posted “are 95% wrong 100% of the time” — continue to get jobs, tv appearances, and book deals.

    Comment by Unholy Moses — 2/8/2007 @ 1:52 pm

    His momma, the venomous Lucianne Goldberg is extremely well-connected with the right-wing radicals. Lucianne Goldberg was the one who coopted the hideous Linda Tripp and convinced her to tape her conversations with Monica Lewinski. She was instrumental in the right-nutters’ attempt to bring down Clinton . Her doughy boy would be flipping burgers in a fast-food joint if his momma was not always calling in favors to get him jobs. Jonah Goldberg is the perfect example of wingnut welfare.

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