Jonah Goldberg Is A Slobbering Moron: Exhibit 1547

It's astonishing how tenuous a grip on reality is required to be a pundit these days. Take, for instance, Jonah Goldberg, who has a syndicated column that is picked up by quite a few newspapers in this country, including the L.A. Times. Mr. Goldberg seems to have exactly one thing going for him, which is that he writes opinions that the people who own newspapers and other news publications find convenient. That's the most polite way I can describe it. A less polite way to describe it is that he's a useful idiot. While I disagreed with him nearly as often as Goldberg, Robert Scheer, whom the L.A. Times replaced with Goldberg, actually did seem to know the difference between his rectum and a hole in the ground. He was a liberal, however, so he clearly had to go.

None of this is much of a revelation to most folks who spend much time on the Internet, I'm sure. Just google "Jonah Goldberg, moron" or "Jonah Goldberg, idiot", or "Jonah Goldberg, doughy pantload", and you'll see plenty of examples of why this guy hasn't a brain cell to call his own. That he is a nationally syndicated columnist, when there is better writing and journalistic talent sitting unemployed in every tavern in America, is all the proof one could possibly need that the phrase "liberal media" is the most overused one in our political discourse these days.

Jonah Goldberg's such a moron that I wouldn't trust him to tell me whether it's raining outside. Here's a case in point, thanks to Taylor Marsh, whose tolerance for idiocy is clearly much higher than mine:

The 11th Commandment for liberals seems to be, "Thou shalt not intervene out of self-interest." Intervening in civil wars for humanitarian reasons is O.K., but meddling for national-security reasons is not. This would explain why liberals supported interventions in civil wars in Yugoslavia and Somalia but think being in one in Iraq is the height of folly. If only Truman had called the Korean civil war a humanitarian crisis, Ike might not have called the whole thing off.

The Body Democratic: Fight today or occupy forever

We'll ignore the obvious snark at the end, and just go with the rest of this paragraph. What's he talking about? Yes, I know we liberals, along with everyone else with a working heart, wanted to help out in Yugoslavia and Somalia. Yes, the Somalia thing didn't go so well, but there's a reason for that, and it had little to do with it being a civil war and a whole lot to do with mission creep that we weren't prepared to deal with. A President named Bush got us into the conflict with no idea what the next step would be. Any of that sound familiar? Yugoslavia (AKA Bosnia/Serbia/Macedonia) went pretty well, actually. The reason it went well is that we worked with the regional powers in the area, France, Germany, and the U.K. not to mention Russia, a country we disagreed with about the future of the region. This was another lesson we ignored in Iraq.

What's more, since when were Vietnam and Iraq (the other wars Jonah refers to) in our vital national interest? For that matter, when was continuing the Korean War? We stopped Communist expansion, which is mostly what that war was about. War often requires that your soldiers do dreadful things to win, like firebomb cities or kill large numbers of civilians to achieve a military objective. It kills our people and brings many back permanently crippled. Why put our people, not to mention the other guys, through that if it's not in our vital interests? This is the central lesson of Iraq and Vietnam - that if it's not in your vital national interest, don't start a war. That should be so damned obvious that even Jonah Goldberg could understand it.

So, next time some neocon acquaintance starts to whine about the "liberal media" as if that were anything other than a fantasy brought on by overexposure to fumes from hydrocarbons, ask him to explain the existence of Jonah Goldberg in your local newspaper, when a reasonably competent village idiot could have managed the same quality output, and contributed to your local economy.