There’s a reason Jonah Goldberg is called the Pantload. Take a gander at the latest LA Times column he’s fished from his adult diaper:
LORD KNOWS I have my problems with President Bush. He taps the federal coffers like a monkey smacking the bar for another cocaine pellet in an addiction study. Some of his sentences give me the same sensation as falling backward in one of those “trust” exercises, in which you just have to hope things work out. Yes, the Iraq invasion has gone badly, and to deny this is to suggest that Bush meant for things to turn out this way, which is even crueler than saying he failed to get it right.
Translation: I need to establish my contrarian cred prior to giving Bush a rimjob, and others have already broken ranks on these two issues, so I can be “contrarian” without actually sticking my neck out.
But you know what? It’s time to cut the guy some slack.
Translation: Commence rimjob!
Of course, I will get hippo-choking amounts of e-mail from Bush-haters telling me that all I ever do is cut Bush slack. But these folks grade on the curve. By their standards, anything short of demanding that a live, half-starved badger be sewn into his belly flunks.
Strawliberals set up as unreasoning, psychotic, vicious Bush-haters with no valid arguments whatsoever, making it easier for me to “prove” my points: check.
And then there’s Hurricane Katrina. Yes, the federal government could have responded better. And of course there were real tragedies involved in that disaster. But you know what? Bad stuff happens during disasters, which is why we don’t call them tickle-parties.
Yeah, shit happens. I’ll pretend it’s not newsworthy that an entire region of the country lies in ruins, and that the federal government hasn’t completely fucked up the recovery through foot-dragging and mismanagement and lack of funding. Any continuing misery in the region is not my concern, because if I granted any credence to the idea that the continuing misery of the Gulf Coast was more newsworthy than the JonBenet Ramsey case, I might have to actually concede that those vicious Bush-hating strawliberals are right.
The anti-Bush chorus, including enormous segments of the mainstream media, see Katrina as nothing more than a good stick for beating on piñata Bush’s “competence.” The hypocrisy is astounding because the media did such an abysmal job covering the reality of New Orleans (contrary to their reports, there were no bands of rapists, no disproportionate deaths of poor blacks, nothing close to 10,000 dead, etc.). It seems indisputable that Katrina highlighted the tragedy of New Orleans rather than create it. Long before Katrina, New Orleans was a dysfunctional city in a state with famously corrupt and incompetent leadership, many of whose residents think that it is the job of the federal government to make everyone whole.
Those Katrina victims should just shut up and remember that it’s all their fault for not growing gills in the first place:
SUPERDOME RESIDENTS [Jonah Goldberg]
I think it’s time to face facts. That place is going to be a Mad Max/thunderdome Waterworld/Lord of the Flies horror show within the next few hours. My advice is to prepare yourself now. Hoard weapons, grow gills and learn to communicate with serpents. While you’re working on that, find the biggest guy you can and when he’s not expecting it beat him senseless. Gather young fighters around you and tell the womenfolk you will feed and protect any female who agrees to participate without question in your plans to repopulate the earth with a race of gilled-supermen. It’s never too soon to be prepared.
Yeah, the MEDIA got it all wrong! Never mind that I’m part of the media.
Then, of course, there’s the war on terror. Democrats love to note that Bush hasn’t caught Osama bin Laden yet, as if this is the most vital metric for success.
Pay no attention to that “Dead or Alive” business.
Yes, it’d be nice to catch Bin Laden — no doubt Ramsey Clark, the top legal gun for both LBJ and Saddam Hussein, will be looking for a new client soon.
Ha! Ha! Liberals are terrorists!
But even nicer than catching Bin Laden is not having thousands of dead Americans in New York, Washington and L.A. Contrary to all expert predictions, there hasn’t been a successful attack on the homeland since 9/11.
We’ll just keep those anthrax attacks between us.
Oh, and let’s not mention that those thousands of dead Americans in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania happened on Bush’s watch. After he was specifically briefed that Bin Laden was determined to strike in the U.S. Using airliners. That was Clinton’s fault.
Political dissatisfaction with the president rests entirely on Iraq and overall Bush fatigue. The rest amounts to little more than Iraq-motivated brickbats gussied up to look like free-standing complaints. That’s how hate works: It looks for more excuses to hate in the same way that fire looks for more stuff to burn.
Even though it’s an overwhelmingly unpopular war that’s sucking up resources, breaking the military and the economy, destabilizing the entire Middle East, creating terrorists where there were none before, destroying America’s reputation abroad, and killing and maiming thousands of American service members and Iraqis — hey, it’s just a trifle.