When Jonah is good, he’s very good.

Jamie posted this at 1:08 PM HKT on Tuesday, August 2nd, 2011 as There Is Only One God And Jonah Goldberg Is His Prophet

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People tend to see what they want to see in political figures.  Consider this old Goldberg file about three old Reaganites: Joshua Muravchik, a foreign policy specialist; Irwin Stelzer, an economist; and Michael Novak, a theologian.  Each of them had a very different view of Reagan:

In the course of his answer, Muravchik said that the Reagan movement was primarily a foreign-policy cause united around defeating Communism. I don’t want to put words in his mouth, but I recall [he said this]. At this assertion, an “au contraire” was offered from Irwin Stelzer, Ronald Reagan’s former director of regulatory affairs. He said that Reaganism was essentially an economic philosophy and while anti-Communism was surely a vital part, foreign-policy activists were simply another wing emanating from the core of the true Reagan coalition. Seconds after Stelzer made his comments, my friend Michael Novak — one of America’s leading Catholic intellectuals, former Templeton Prize winner and an ambassador-at-large under Reagan — begged to differ. While, of course, fighting for free markets and against the Red menace was vital to Reaganism, these policies were largely outgrowths of a moral and religious vision, which is why the Reagan movement was essentially a religious cause.

In each case, what Reagan was got a heavy dose of coloring from the perspective of whoever was telling the story.  Robert Samuelson comments on and falls prey to this today:

We are deluged with Ronald Reagan celebrations and retrospectives, but most are misleading. They omit Reagan’s singular domestic achievement and the wellspring of his popularity: the defeat of double-digit inflation. In 1979 and 1980, inflation averaged 13 percent; by 1984, it was 4 percent — and falling. Without subdued inflation, the economy would have remained a mess and Reagan might have lost his 1984 re-election bid. He certainly wouldn’t have won his 58.5 percent to 40.4 percent landslide.You will not find this in most of today’s Reagan appraisals, which tell us more about the appraisers than about Reagan. In an 11-page cover package, Time magazine doesn’t mention inflation but pronounces Reagan a “transformational” leader whose political style — not his policies — should be emulated by Barack Obama. In its 11 pages on Reagan, the conservative Weekly Standard also avoids inflation and argues that Reaganism endures as the rediscovery of the “principles of the founding.”

Coincidentally, Robert Samuelson’s book is The Great Inflation and its Aftermath.

Hubbard posted this at 2:04 PM HKT on Friday, February 11th, 2011 as Politics, The Past Is Never Dead--It Isn't Even Past, There Is Only One God And Jonah Goldberg Is His Prophet

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So I went by The Corner today and saw this adorning the upper left hand corner:

Yarrrgh. That’s going to replace the whale in my nightmares.

Jamie posted this at 11:18 AM HKT on Friday, August 13th, 2010 as There Is Only One God And Jonah Goldberg Is His Prophet

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Liberal journalists are liberal!

Jonah expresses my stance on the Journolist scandal more eloquently than I ever could.

Jamie posted this at 10:58 AM HKT on Friday, July 23rd, 2010 as Journalism, There Is Only One God And Jonah Goldberg Is His Prophet

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Andrew McCarthy has a new book The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America.  Based on the past performance of his fellow Cornerites who have published books with inflammatory titles, I have full confidence that the following will occur:

1. Tonight on FoxNews, Sean Hannity will tell McCarthy what a wonderful book he’s written and imply something even more inflammatory than what McCarthy wrote.  McCarthy will not exactly endorse this, but he’ll smile and let it slide.
2. In a post on the Corner, McCarthy will thank Hannity for being such a great host — and a Great American! — and complain that the Establishment Media is ignoring him.
   
3. After the book begins selling, McCarthy will be invited on various talking heads shows, possibly The Daily Show.
4. When Jon Stewart confronts him about the book’s subtitle title, McCarthy will emphatically deny its plain meaning.  In fact, he’ll be a little hurt that Jon would think that’s what he meant.
5. Fellow Cornerites will rush to his defense and complain that Stewart was unduly fixated on the title and ignored the book’s substance.
6. Moments later, Kathyrn Lopez will un-ironically link to Kieth Olberman’s latest screed as evidence of how liberals are coarsening our national discourse.
7. Jonah Goldberg, who is traveling, will make a quick post promising to weigh-in as soon as possible.  A week later, he will write a 1,200 essay on the subject.  Twenty-four of those words will concede McCarthy’s critics’ point (three of which will be “everybody knows this”); the remaining 1,176 will defend McCarthy from strawmen.

I love NRO and am a subscriber but, Jeez guys, this routine is getting old.

Tom posted this at 4:42 PM HKT on Monday, May 24th, 2010 as Conservatism, Liberty and/or Security, The Past Is Never Dead--It Isn't Even Past, There Is Only One God And Jonah Goldberg Is His Prophet

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Dude.

I think the last time I geeked out this hard was when I was standing in front of Steven Spielberg at Sam Goody…while buying Close Encounters…

Jamie posted this at 6:46 PM HKT on Monday, March 8th, 2010 as Ourselves, There Is Only One God And Jonah Goldberg Is His Prophet

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Some time ago, Apollo offered a theory about what was wrong with Obama:

We know this guy. He’s that college professor who never personally said anything outlandish, but when students spoke up in class and said outlandish things, he’d respond with something like “That may be right,” or “there’s some truth in that” instead of the more appropriate “that’s wrong and off topic.” Therefore more people felt free to raise their hands and say outlandish things, and those of us not interested in such nonsense stopped participating in class because it wasn’t worth it. Obama is the “that’s a valid point” professor, so he respects equally my anti-abortion point of view, and his pastor’s government-created-AIDS point of view. They’re all valid.

Jonah Goldberg has refined and expanded it somewhat:

A Hidden Cost of the Health-Care Summit

It seems that I wasn’t alone in finding Obama increasingly un-charming as the event unfolded yesterday. Even Dana Milbank notes that Obama ultimately came across as a bit of a condescending, well, jerk. Here’s Michael Gerson: “President Obama, as usual, was fluent, professorial and occasionally prickly. Some are impressed by the president’s informed, academic manner. Others (myself included) find an annoying condescension in Obama’s never-ending seminar.”

Obama’s habit of deciding what is a serious point and what are mere “talking points,” started out seeming like an attempt at fairness but ultimately revealed itself to be one of the more grating aspects of his personality and his philosophy (It’s worth noting that many points become talking points because they are such good points!). After awhile, it seemed Obama deemed many talking points to be illegitimate simply because they were inconvenient to his argument.

This is not news to certain people who have greater immunity to his charms. Obama has a very thin skin when it comes to disagreement. He has a Fox News obsession. At campaign-style events, Obama has insisted that he doesn’t want to “hear any talk” from the people who “created this mess” or some such. Remember his call for a “new declaration of independence not just in our nation, but in our own lives — from ideology and small thinking, prejudice and bigotry.” Translation: Ideological objections to what I want to do are akin to bigotry and stupidity.

I think one of the great explanations for the mess the Obama administration is in — the whole cowbell dynamic — is that he, his advisers, and many of his fans in the press cannot fully grasp or appreciate the fact that he is not as charming to everyone else as he is to them (or himself). Hence, they think that the more he talks, the more persuasive he will be. Every president faces a similar problem which is why, until Obama, every White House tried to economize the deployment of the president’s political capital. The Obama White House strategy is almost the rhetorical version of its Keynesianism, the more you spend, the bigger the payoff.

The hidden cost of this strategy is that the more he talks the more pronounced or noticeable this tendency  becomes for the average American. Eventually, it could come to define him. Presidents — all presidents — get caricatured eventually because certain traits become more identifiable over time. That’s one reason why parodies of presidents on Saturday Night Live get more convincing and funnier at the end of their terms — everyone can recognize the traits and habits by then. The more instances where Obama grabs all of the attention while acting like an arrogant college professor — particularly as memories of Bush fade — the more opportunities the White House creates where people can say, “Hey, I finally figured out what bugs me about this guy.” Not long after that, it becomes a journalistic convention, a staple of late-night jokes and basis of SNL parodies.

Hubbard posted this at 9:09 AM HKT on Saturday, February 27th, 2010 as Barack Obama Couldn't Persuade a Bear to Crap in the Woods, There Is Only One God And Jonah Goldberg Is His Prophet

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Thank you, Jonah.

Jamie posted this at 2:09 PM HKT on Friday, September 18th, 2009 as Race, There Is Only One God And Jonah Goldberg Is His Prophet

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Jonah Goldberg discusses North Korea:

In his recent visit to Buchenwald, the Nazi death camp, President Obama insisted that we must “bear witness” to the evil of the Holocaust. Such platitudes are the stuff of every president and potentate who visits such places. And that’s fine. It is, after all, what we are supposed to say. But we are also supposed to mean it. After all, it is easy to say we must bear witness to things that have already happened and to promise to “never forget” the sins of others and our own good deeds.

But what of things figuratively happening under our noses and literally transpiring a click away on our computer screens? You can see the slave camps in North Korea — not quite live via satellite, but close enough — where the machinery of suffering chugs along 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Ask yourself: What if Buchenwald were a mouse click away?

It’s a good question, but the column raises the uncomfortable question: what should we do about that psychotic state?

Hubbard posted this at 12:14 PM HKT on Tuesday, July 21st, 2009 as Commie Recrudescence, The Past Is Never Dead--It Isn't Even Past, There Is Only One God And Jonah Goldberg Is His Prophet, We're all DOOMED

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Hating Robert McNamara is bipartisan sport.  True, liberals hate him for starting the Vietnam war and conservatives for not winning it, but there’s at least something they can agree on.

Years ago, Andy Ferguson wrote an oblique take down of the world of McNamara.   As is often typical of Ferguson, he seems to be writing about one topic, and then with the last few sentences we suddenly see a broader indictment.  First, Ferguson slammed McNamara’s life:

At Ford Motors, in the late 1950s, he designed the sclerotic top-down management system that almost sank the American automobile industry; for good measure, he oversaw the production of the Edsel. Accordingly, JFK handed him the Pentagon. There McNamara got the idea for the Vietnam War — the Edsel of American foreign policy. So awed was the Washington establishment that it placed him at the head of the World Bank, in hopes that he might do for the international economy what he had done for the American military. And he did! Within ten years he had doubled the amount of money loaned, and lost, to Third World kleptocracies like Brazil and the Central African Empire. He was Midas in reverse. Wherever he draped his hand, industries wilted, economies collapsed, corpses piled up.

Then came Ferguson’s take on McNamara’s memoirs and Washington’s reaction to them:

No one should have been surprised, then, that when McNamara chose to write the story of his life, it should have turned out to be a disaster by every literary measure: mendacious, sentimental, shameless in its exculpation, oily in its tone, a book so badly written that no one would ever really want to buy it. And of course it has been a rousing bestseller. . . .

Washington’s inverted culture, where failure propels a man ever upward, bespeaks a kind of masochism. Of course, the actual pain is dispersed to the country at large. But for the professional failure Washington remains safe harbor. Within weeks of the publication of the book, McNamara had been called “evil,” a “liar,” and a “hypocrite.” Out in the heartland, a few Vietnam vets even sued him. Here in Washington Katharine Graham threw him a book party. Everybody who’s anybody was there.

It is oddly fitting that the week that McNamara died, an one of his world’s institutions took it on the chin.  The Washington Post circulated flyers offering lobbyists a way to meet the powerful.  The late Katherine Graham, the Post’s publisher, was famous for this once—as Ferguson observes above—but unlike her heirs, she was classy enough to use word-of-mouth rather than flyers to attract the powerful.  Jonah Goldberg’s assessment was gleefully malicious:

“You cannot buy access to a Washington Post journalist,” insisted Marcus Brauchli, the Post’s executive editor. Really? As a close observer, I say balderdash. You may not be able to pay cash or make out a check to the Washington Post Co., but getting access to journalists is pretty easy. They make it hard to buy them lunch — the fastest access in the old days — but a party with an open bar still works. A surefire way for lobbyists to gain access to a reporter is to give him or her a scoop. Another way is to help them with their stories. You could also subsidize a think-tank conference, sponsor a PBS show, or just flatter the dickens out of a reporter. This last is the cheapest financially, but often costly in terms of self-esteem.

The real trick to these methods is to make it seem like they’re not methods at all. The best lobbyists know everybody, get along with everybody, and make things happen for their clients and bosses. That’s the value of lobbyists; they make it look so easy and take the sting off the fact that they’re lobbyists. Washington is rich in rituals in which incredibly valuable favors are exchanged for other incredibly valuable favors. Nobody puts a price on them, but everyone understands they’re not free.

Perhaps what really offends is the flier’s truth in advertising. If the Post didn’t try to charge for attendance, most journalists, politicians, and lobbyists would have leaped at the chance to attend. That’s the way things used to work for Weymouth’s grandmother, Katharine Graham, who hosted Washington’s most famous high-powered salon for decades.

The old media industry, ostensibly objective but actually agenda driven, is dying.  The old elites weren’t all bad: they’d generally known each other since prep school days, genuinely loved the nation and wanted what was best for it.  But they were insular and isolated and ignored the heartland’s legitimate concerns.  We’re entering a more populist era, where politicos who were once invulnerable thanks to the support of grand institutions like The Washington Post can be brought down with twittering and youtube videos from cell phone cameras.

We know, thanks to hindsight, the weaknesses of the old elite era—Ferguson skewered it quite nicely.  But now we’re entering a more populist era thanks to technology.  This will have its own weaknesses, which we have yet to discover.

Hubbard posted this at 9:57 AM HKT on Wednesday, July 8th, 2009 as Journalism, The Past Is Never Dead--It Isn't Even Past, There Is Only One God And Jonah Goldberg Is His Prophet

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Jonah Goldberg discusses Obama’s fear-mongering ways:

Recall that not long ago, the first item on the bill of indictment against the Bush administration was that it was “exploiting” 9/11 to enact its agenda. Al Gore shrieked that President Bush “played on our fears” to get his way. In response to nearly every Bush policy proposal, from the Patriot Act to the toppling of Saddam Hussein, critics would caterwaul that Bush was taking advantage of the country’s fear of terrorism.

The Bush administration always denied this, and rightly so. If the president admitted that he was using a national calamity for narrow partisan or ideological advantage, it would be outrageous. Indeed, every time Karl Rove or some other administration official said anything that could be even remotely interpreted as using the war or 9/11 for partisan or ideological gain, the editorial pages and Democratic news-release factories churned into overdrive with righteous indignation.

Well, now we have the president, along with his chief aides, admitting — boasting! — that they want to exploit a national emergency for their preexisting agenda, and there’s no scandal. No one even calls it a gaffe. No, they call it leadership.

It’s not leadership. It’s fear-mongering.

Franklin Roosevelt said that all we have to fear is fear itself. Now Barack Obama all but admits that all he has to fear is the loss of fear itself.

Question for conservatives and libertarians: since Obama’s relying on fear to pass his agenda, how do we unscare the electorate?

Hubbard posted this at 9:15 AM HKT on Tuesday, March 10th, 2009 as CHANGE!, There Is Only One God And Jonah Goldberg Is His Prophet

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The Prophet is appropriately annoyed:

One of the main talking points, particularly among left-wing bloggers, was that Wurzelbacher was a tax cheat because, it was revealed by ABC News, he had a tax lien of $1,182 for back Ohio state taxes. This fueled the argument that he was a fraud, his opinion didn’t matter. Nothing to see here, folks. Move along.

Fast-forward to today. Timothy Geithner, President Obama’s choice to be the next treasury secretary, quite clearly tried to defraud the government of tens of thousands in payroll taxes while working at the International Monetary Fund. The IMF does not withhold such taxes but does compensate American employees who must pay them out of pocket. Geithner took the compensation—which involves considerable paperwork—but then simply pocketed the money.

His explanations for his alleged oversight don’t pass the smell test. When the IRS busted him for his mistakes in 2003 and 2004, he decided to take advantage of the statute of limitations and not pay the thousands of dollars he also failed to pay in 2001 and 2002. That is, until he was nominated to become treasury secretary.

Obama defends Geithner, saying that his was a “common mistake,” that it is embarrassing but happens all the time. My National Review colleague Byron York reports that, at least according to the IMF, Geithner’s “mistakes” are actually quite rare. Indeed, it’s almost impossible to believe that the man didn’t know exactly what he was doing given that he would have had to sign documents, disregard warnings, and all in all turn his brain off to make the same “mistake” year after year. And keep in mind, Geithner is supposed to run the IRS. So maybe sloppiness isn’t that great a defense anyway.

One somehow suspects that had John McCain nominated Geithner to be Treasury Secretary—which could conceivably have happened—Geithner would have been run out of town on a rail by now.  So there’s a certain partisan tinge to the coverage.

Beyond that, however, government officials tend to mostly talk to other government officials, and it’s difficult for pundits (let alone ordinary people) to get points across to them.  Eliot Cohen, though writing about foreign policy rather than economic, explains:

My first, sobering observation is that government pays only intermittent attention to talk on the outside. To a remarkable extent, in fact, government talks only to itself.

Officials in the foreign policy and defense worlds go through vast quantities of official data, briefing papers and talking points. They meet urgently with one another. They fly to foreign capitols and back in a few days. They telephone and email incessantly. Every day in the office I spent hours reading a three- to six-inch stack of intelligence, plus all the other cables, messages and memoranda that are the lifeblood of the Department of State. I scanned the press clips, reading an opinion piece rarely, usually when it was written by someone who had a track record for good judgment. By and large, the buzz on the outside was just that — a background noise of which I was dimly aware, unless it was either unusually nasty, or unusually perceptive, which often merely meant that it fit my own views.

Most commentators have a radically imperfect view of what’s going on. Those on the inside, including at the very top, know more, though less than one might think. Government resembles nothing so much as the party game of telephone, in which stories relayed at second, third or fourth hand become increasingly garbled as they crisscross other stories of a similar kind (”That may be what the Russian national security adviser said to the undersecretary for political affairs on Wednesday, but it’s not how the Turkish foreign minister described the Syrian view to our ambassador to NATO on Thursday.”) Add to this the effects of secrecy induced by security concerns, as well as by the natural desire to play one’s cards close to one’s vest, and the result is a well-nigh impenetrable murk of policy making.

But it’s even murkier on the outside. “Occasionally an outsider may provide perspective; almost never does he have enough knowledge to advise soundly on tactical moves,” Henry Kissinger once remarked. Or as the White House correspondent of one major national newspaper once confided to me, “We really don’t have a clue what’s going on in there.”

Cheery thought: Cohen was describing the last few years of the Bush administration.  The Geithner blunder is in the first few days of the Obama administration.  The unforced errors are probably going to compound.

Hubbard posted this at 12:28 PM HKT on Friday, January 23rd, 2009 as Denizens of DC, Politics, There Is Only One God And Jonah Goldberg Is His Prophet

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The Prophet applies broken window policing to geopolitics:

The solution, it largely turned out, wasn’t to become more tolerant of criminality by recasting it as a cultural or lifestyle choice or by invoking root causes (as The New York Times often did), but to become less tolerant of crime. In New York, turnstile jumpers, graffiti artists, even the infamous “squeegee men” were treated as the lawbreakers they were. One heartening moral of the story is that sometimes deviancy can be defined back up.

We learned a similar moral after 9/11. For years — starting around the time of Klinghoffer’s murder, as it happens —  policymakers in both parties debated how to define terrorism. Is it a law-and-order issue or a military threat? If it’s a military threat, how do we define a “proportionate response” — this legalistic phrase entered the national-security lexicon back then, too. By the end of the 1990s, the best and the brightest of the Clinton administration found the answer in a lawerly kind of proportionality, blowing up empty office buildings as a way to “send a message” in response to attacks on America and her interests.

After 9/11, the gloves were off. The far left beseeched the government to retaliate with, at most, a proportionate response, but no one cared. We toppled the Taliban as a warm-up act. Terrorists weren’t criminals anymore, they were enemy combatants, ineligible for the Geneva Conventions. But the war in Iraq and reports of American zeal in the war on terror have left a sour taste in our mouths. That there have been no terrorist attacks on our soil only bolsters the sense that terrorism is manageable, even banal. Barack Obama leads a counteroffensive from a legal establishment that wants to treat terrorists like any other criminals. Terrorists in Mumbai or Jeddah are little more than the squeegee men of the New World Order.

It’s a great article, even if Goldberg is on the following edge of a few things.

Hubbard posted this at 12:53 PM HKT on Thursday, January 1st, 2009 as Global War on Terror, The Past Is Never Dead--It Isn't Even Past, There Is Only One God And Jonah Goldberg Is His Prophet

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Jonah Goldberg peers into a crystal ball and sees 2012 with President Obama:

Indeed, the overconfidence of Congressional Democrats posed another major challenge to the Obama presidency. During the 2008 election, Obama’s conservative critics had long complained that the then-freshman senator had little to no record of standing up the leftwing base of his party in part, they argued, because he himself was much more leftwing than he had let on.

Whatever the truth of that, what is not contested is that the Congressional Progressive Caucus — the largest partisan bloc in the Congress when Mr. Obama was elected — believed that the new president was “one of us” according to many sources contacted for this article.

The CPC, colloquially known as the “big swinging caucus” after an unfortunate joke by then-Republican Minority Leader John Boehner after a scandal involving Rep. Barney Frank (see side story), pushed Barack Obama on a wide array of fronts: they demanded very large cuts in the military budget, a sweeping government expansion into the role of healthcare, and in a move that experts agree caused the Wall Street Panic of 2010, they persuaded Mr. Obama to make the government’s partial ownership of the remaining “Big Five” banks permanent. Representatives Frank and Charlie Rangel argued that the stakes, bought by the Bush treasury department, in the banks provided, in Frank’s words, a “once in a lifetime opportunity to inject some social justice into the capitalist system.” Or as Senator Jesse Jackson Jr. said, “if we’ve got them by the b***s already, why let go?”

Enjoy.

Hubbard posted this at 10:04 AM HKT on Sunday, November 2nd, 2008 as I have seen the future. . ., There Is Only One God And Jonah Goldberg Is His Prophet

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Thomas Sowell, one of the brightest economists today, opposes the bailouts:

It would be better if no such government-supported enterprises had been created in the first place and mortgages were in fact left to the free market. This bailout creates the expectation of future bailouts.

Phasing out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac would make much more sense than letting politicians play politics with them again, with the risk and expense being again loaded onto the taxpayers.

Jonah Goldberg, one the best political analysts today, supported the bailout but is rightly dropping scorn on both parties:

On Sunday evening, Republican House Minority Leader John A. Boehner explained his considered opinion on the $700-billion Wall Street bailout plan: It’s a “crap sandwich,” he said, but he was going to eat it.

Well, it turned out he couldn’t shove it down his colleagues’ throats. The bill failed on a bipartisan basis, but it was the Republicans who failed to deliver the votes they promised. Some complained that Democratic Speaker Nancy Pelosi drove some of them to switch their votes with her needlessly partisan floor speech on the subject. Of course Pelosi’s needlessly partisan. This is news?

The Republican complaint is beyond childish. Democratic Rep. Barney Frank, a man saturated with guilt for this crisis, nonetheless was right to ridicule the GOP crybabies on Monday. “I’ll make an offer,” he added. “Give me [their] names and I will go talk uncharacteristically nicely to them and tell them what wonderful people they are and maybe they’ll now think about the country.”

Goldberg’s conclusion sums up how I feel right now:

I loathe populism. But if there ever has been a moment when reasonable men’s hands itch for the pitchfork, this must surely be it. No one is blameless. No one is pure. Two decades of crapulence by the political class has been prologue to the era of coprophagy that is now upon us. It is crap sandwiches for as far as the eye can see.

It takes a misanthrope to see a bright side in all this, so here ’tis: the stock market is almost certainly going to drop, so now is the time to increase 401(k) contributions if you can.  Buying cheap and waiting for things to rebound is a good idea when you’re young.  If you’re old—well, talk to a professional (not me).

Hubbard posted this at 9:41 AM HKT on Tuesday, September 30th, 2008 as The Conservative Sowell, There Is Only One God And Jonah Goldberg Is His Prophet

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