The Future of Conservatism

While New Orleans was drowning, Jonah Goldberg joked about blacks rioting and fantasizing about enacting an Edgar Rice Burroughs scenario of domination and mastery. He was forced to retract his statements because of the cry of disgust that rang across the blogosphere, but as Jonah has little or no sense of honor or morality and an overload of spite, he can't even do that right.

Back when NPR and other news outlets were reporting that New Orleans had
“dodged the bullet” on hurricane Katrina I made an ill-conceived joke in The
Corner about how the Superdome was going to hell-in-a-hand basket. I wrote:
ATTN: 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.

I was mocking what at the time seemed like out-of-control media hype.
When things turned out to be worse than I — or most of us — ever could have
expected, I apologized.

That didn’t stop scores of blogs and hundreds of angry e-mailers from
tearing me a new one for my insensitivity. As the week progressed, however, a
lot of folks wrote me — half jokingly — to congratulate me on my prescience.
After all, except for the gill-growing and serpent-talking I turned out to get
it pretty much exactly right. If I’d only said I wasn’t kidding, I’d be in the
clear.

They were onto something. Because, you see, I hadn’t even raised the
possibility that, after just three or four days without food, blacks in New
Orleans would transform into Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dwellers.

On September 2, Randall Robinson, former president of Transafrica wrote
that “It is reported that black hurricane victims in New Orleans have begun
eating corpses to survive.”

Before we move on, let’s be clear about all the
components of this sentence. First, it is deadly serious. Indeed, its import is
such that it caused the man to lose all faith in America. Second, blacks are
eating the flesh of the dead to survive: Not “hurricane victims,” not “the
poor,” not “the refugees,” not “New Orleans residents,” but “black hurricane
victims” and black hurricane victims alone are feasting on the bodies of the
fallen. Second, it asserts as fact that “it is reported.” At the time I searched
Google News and Nexis and found not one story mentioning this fairly dramatic
piece of news.

Robinson has since retracted this single solitary assertion. But he
says he stands “behind everything else I wrote without reservation.”

We’ll get to “everything else,” but let us linger for a moment.
Robinson did not apologize for his error, he merely offered a retraction. So, in
other words, he doesn’t feel the need to make amends for the fact that he told
the world black people — and black people alone — were willing to eat their
fellow human beings after 72-96 hours without food (a
“fact” now reported as far away as Turkey). Moreover, he feels no shame for
believing it.

Imagine if I said, "Oh, you know those blacks — after a couple days
without food they start eating each other. White folks? They can go weeks before
they’d even consider such a thing. But if the food runs out on a Monday, zombism
will break out among the black population by Thursday." People would be
outraged. As they should be. Talk about the soft bigotry of
low-expectations.

(snip)

There’s an old axiom which says that extraordinary claims require
extraordinary proof. But Robinson was so keen on believing this allegation he
went straight to the megaphone after someone simply told him it was so. What
kind of person takes such news at face value? Let’s see: Racists surely would.
But that’s a bit of a stretch. Idiots would take it at face value. But I don’t
think Robinson is anybody’s fool. I’ve got it: He’s a fraud. Yeah, that works.
It’s not perfect, but it will do the job.

It's no stretch to call Jonah a racist, fraudulent idiot, it's the simple truth. Joanh knows very well that he is utterly unfit for his position. He has a degree from The Women's College of Baltimore, renamed Goucher College in 1910. Goldberg admitted he was a benefactor of affirmative action as the school went co-ed. His internships were with new services and a publishing house. Coincidentally, his father worked for new services and his mother worked in publishing. His first jobs were pretending to be a writer in Prauge for a year and working for the right-wing AEI think tank. He worked in tv for a while, including documentaries on gargoyles and Notre Dame. Then he spread comfortably into his job at NRO, where he can slip out to leisurely lunches, take in a movie, and tap out a column guaranteed to have a least two pop culture references, whether they are appropriate or not. He published his first book just recently, while in his late thirties.

This is a man who measures himself against the best thinkers of our time and finds them wanting. A man whose every step has been eased by money and influence. A petulant child with no humanity or humility or courage. And being a bigoted, fraudulent fool, he is naturally also a hypocrite.

"Fabulously Wrongheaded Prediction"? [Jonah Goldberg]
So says Salon about what I wrote on January 4, 2008:

"I think it's worth imagining a
certain scenario. Imagine the Democrats do rally around Obama. Imagine the media
invests as heavily in him as I think we all know they will if he's the nominee —
and then imagine he loses. I seriously think certain segments of American
political life will become completely unhinged. I can imagine the fear of this
social unraveling actually aiding Obama enormously in 2008. Forget Hillary's
inevitability. Obama has a rendezvous with destiny, or so we will be told. And
if he's denied it, teeth shall be gnashed, clothes rent and prices paid."

Not only do I stand by that, I know a significant number of liberals
who've said pretty much the same thing to me personally (not to mention some of
the nutjobs who wrote that there would be a race war if Obama lost). I stand by
that entirely.

Megan McArdle has taken to quoting Jonah, no doubt recognizing a kindred soul. The Age of Mediocrity has lingered too long, and there is nothing left but the idiot sons of the rich and the grasping, social climbing fools who long to move in the same circles.