Yes, the people who pick on poor Pantload are, let's face it, "deranged". It couldn't possibly be that Goldberg, like his wampeter, is simply a sloppy, incompetent thinker punching way above his weight in a big boys' game, that since some folks actually read and pay attention instead of trading bon mots with professional doofuses like Party of Death Pornmumu, we actually know what the hell we're talking about. And we don't even get paid for it! Imagine that.
I suppose Goldberg, a loyal ungulate if ever there was one, should be expected to huddle in for warmth in tough times, rather than stick his neck out and actually observe something other than his navel. And the defender he thanks has somewhat reasonable points to make, yet misses the forest for the one tree he fixates on.
The problem is not that Goldberg makes mediocre cultural arguments against universal health care. Hell, we pretty much expect that from him any given day. Americans are culturally less well-suited to big-gubmint programs than are Europeans. Well, no shit, Sherlock. But those tiresome delusions of rugged self-sufficiency, while endearing, are unsustainable. Would that it were not so, but it is, primarily because of waste and excess across the board.
But the point that the pro-argument was making was in using the Euro systems as examples of something that works, and is not in thrall to insurance companies and Big Pharma. That doesn't sound so bad, does it? With one in every six or seven Americans uninsured, and health care costs catastrophically high for no good reason, maybe it's time to hear some constructive ideas and options.
But Goldberg does not give the ideas any credence nor even consideration; he merely dismisses them with a flabby wave of predictable frog-baiting. He's got his, so the rest of you can suck on it or just go get better jobs already. Okay, so why exactly are we not supposed to pick on this shit and tear it down straightaway? It's deserving of -- begging for -- scorn and ridicule. It is a comfy exurban cubicle-rat posturing as a redneck by trashing ideas before they're even tried, on cultural grounds.
Culture changes all the time. Do I even need to say it? Apparently I do. Culture is a function of people's lifestyles and habits, just as language is, and as such, it evolves, it adapts. Wistful fantasies of middle kingdom exceptionalism aside, perhaps if people are presented a choice between: 1)paying hundreds of dollars for the simplest of treatments or a month's worth of private insurance, just so the shareholders' stock price upticks a quarter-point, or 2)getting decent health care at a reasonable price without getting hosed by rapacious HMO corporations, they might make that choice. They might trade off on what Goldberg thinks is a die-cast cultural trope. I think many won't, simply because they let people like Goldberg get their dander up with reflexive nationalist clichés. They tell themselves they're making it with their rugged individualism just hunky-dory, forgetting that chances are they count on friends and family for all sorts of shit.
But again, it's not just about this one silly frog-baiting article of Goldberg's masquerading as something useful in terms of either a culture debate or a health-care debate. It's about a well-established pattern of this type of nonsense. It's about a guy who picks fights with people who are a lot smarter than him, who are genuinely knowledgeable about complicated issues and have standing in their fields of expertise, and then retreats behind a bunch of smug weasel words when he's called on his bullshit.
It's about his bad habit of practically starting posts with the admission that he doesn't know what the hell he's talking about, lamely guessing, and then blegging readers to help him out. What the hell are they paying you for, pal? There are thousands of people out there who write circles around you for free.
It's about a smartass who flogs a still-unwritten book, whose cover depicts a smiley-face with a Hitler mustache, and whose title imputes that there is a clear connection between Hillary Clinton and Benito Mussolini. And whose author smugly declares that the book, whenever he gets around to actually writing the motherfucker, will be a paragon of careful reason and thoughtful argumentation. As if you couldn't tell from the title and the cover art.
Obviously, I enjoy genuine polemic and political satire, and Goldberg might even have the pop-culture chops to pull something like that off, if he actually wanted to. He could go in a more P.J. O'Rourke direction and at least maybe find the funny somewhere (though O'Rourke is sounding more and more like Dennis Miller these days, which is just sad). But as Pornmumu found out the hard way when Jon Stewart tore him a new one, if you write one of these stupid winger welfare books and then come out preening about what a thoughtful discursion it really is, it's clear that you're nothing but a rented jerkoff. And there is no indication that Goldberg's book -- again, if he ever finishes (or even starts) the damned thing -- will be any different.
I love it. This guy constantly snipes and defames people who disagree with his clownish assessments of serious issues, and then he wonders and whines about why we get fucking bent about it. I don't like being told I'm a fascist from the party of death, Chief, not even as some sort of smirky jokey-joke; that good enough for ya? But we accept that political discourse is nothing more than Calvinball with words, so we roll with it. And we respond in kind, or maybe even up the ante if we're feeling strong. And if you don't have a thick enough hide, Chief, then either grow one or sit down and shut the fuck up.
Look, as rent-a-hacks go, Goldberg is actually one of the more benign ones. I'll take a dozen of him over a Coulter or a Limbaugh any day of the week. But ultimately that is a matter of tone and degree; Goldberg simply has enough sense to realize that there's no upside for him to call John Edwards a faggot, whereas such mouth-breathing schtick is where Coulter and Limbaugh's respective bread gets buttered (ewww). Goldberg might at worst be more passive-aggressive about it and lob a "Breck girl" scud at Edwards.
In the end, the intellectual vacuity is essentially the same though, and they are certainly all serving the same masters. But I'll at least give Goldberg credit for having some notion as to where some boundaries lie, that it's fucked up to, say, mock Michael J. Fox to make a cheap political point. Still, he's as intellectually bankrupt as the rest of this modern strain of fake conservatives.
As a final example of just how poorly-reasoned Goldberg's arguments tend to be, just read his latest column, in which he implores fellow conservaschmucks not to forget about Poor Ol' Straight Talk (aka POST), he of the infamous Baghdad mallwalk with BFF Huckleberry "Ah got fahve ruhgs for fahve buhcks!" Graham.
McCain's been a consistent pro-lifer (which distinguishes him from pretty much everyone else in the race so far). Until recently, Giuliani argued passionately for partial-birth abortion as a constitutional right. McCain has voted to confirm every conservative Supreme Court nominee, including Robert Bork. He voted "guilty" in Bill Clinton's impeachment trial. He campaigned for George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004, even after Bush beat him. Giuliani says he was ideologically simpatico with Clinton, and he endorsed Democrat Mario Cuomo for governor of New York.
My point isn't merely to make invidious comparisons between McCain and Giuliani (heck, to liberals they're not invidious at all). I'm actually a fan of Giuliani, and I think the GOP and the country could do worse in a president and Republican standard-bearer. But the double standard on the right seems more than a little self-indulgent.
I thought self-indulgence was the Randian conservatives' calling card....at least for themselves. When libruls are self-indulgent, they're hedonistic sybarites living beyond their means on someone else's money, mind you; when self-styled conservatives live pointless, unearned lives of waste and excess on money they either inherited or stole, it's the magic of lucky sperm shaking the invisible hand of the free marketplace. Which can be messy if you think about it.
But I digress. Forget the noisome idea that, according to Goldberg, POST's strengths are that he voted to confirm Robert Bork for SCOTUS, and to convict Bill Clinton for getting his pole smoked. Just think about how useless and anachronistic those references are in the first place. Conservatives' loathing runs deep and wide for POST; he's bucked them one too many times over the years with his showy displays of maverickness. They're not going to change their minds because he voted to confirm Robert Bork. So just as an argument, this a non-starter.
What's worse is that POST's current track record, as well as his campaign, is a complete shambles. Yet the Los Angeles Times wastes space that would have been better used for lingerie ads for this nonsense:
In response, McCain has decided to slap conservatives out of their haze. In what his campaign is billing as major speeches, the first on Wednesday at the Virginia Military Institute, McCain plans to make his candidacy a referendum on victory in Iraq. It is a truly bold and courageous gambit. At a time when the polls advise running away from the war, McCain will embrace it.
This is cheap and disingenuous, and any intellectually honest person would know it before even writing it in the first place. "Polls advise running away from the war" is a tremendously hollow translation of "a majority of American citizens, who still at least notionally run their country, have clearly and consistently voiced their disapproval for the war, both in its conceptual flaws and especially in the unspeakably incompetent planning of the postwar occupation". The electorate has been abundantly clear about this, and McCain, like Bush, has no plan to "win", nor even a definition, he simply keeps reiterating that "losing" is catastrophic, apparently not realizing that it's already lost, the rest is just triage.
And Goldberg had the nerve to criticize Juan Cole's judgment.
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