Category: Jonah Goldberg

Red-Pilled at Last? ‘Reliably Anti-Trump People … Have Had It With Biden’

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Jonah Goldberg is not the worst of the #NeverTrump crowd. Bad, yes, but not as bad as Rick Wilson or David French. Trump Derangement Syndrome wrecked the minds of a lot of Respectable Republican types, and a lot of it had to do with Trump’s de facto repudiation of the Bush “Global War on Terror” (GWOT) legacy. Whether it’s fair to describe Trump’s policy as “isolationist,” his administration definitely sought to limit the “Permanent War for Permanent Peace” interventionist posture that prevailed when the arch-neocons were riding high in the saddle.

So there is a deep irony in the fact that the straw which seems to have broken the camel’s back for the #NeverTrump crowd was Biden’s threat to halt arms sales to Israel:

We reported earlier how Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin confirmed earlier reports of a a ‘pause’ in almost $1 billion in weapons shipments to Israel over its plans to invade Rafah, Hamas’ last stronghold where it’s remaining leadership and battalians are located, along with the hostages. Hamas has been firing rockets from Rafah, and killed four Israeli soldiers at a border crossing used to ship humanitarian aid.
In a CNN interview today, Biden went even further. He threatened that if Israel entered Rafah, the U.S. will halt all offensive weapons supplies to Israel . . .

Biden is pandering to the extreme left — the college “camp-out for Hamas” crowd — and in the process alienating more moderate voters, including ex-Republican neocons like Goldberg, some of whom hated Trump because of the perception that his coalition harbored anti-Semites. Well, that shoe is now on the other (Democratic) foot, and Goldberg’s like the once-reputable sorority girl doing the “walk of shame” after pulling a train with the varsity basketball squad.

Permit me to remark that not a few neocons advocated the invasion of Iraq on the grounds that Saddam was an existential threat to Israel, a claim that did not seem very credible to me at the time. The details of the basis for my skepticism are irrelevant, for this discussion; what is relevant is that so many of the Iraq super-hawks had a bad habit of assuming that any conservative criticism was motivated by anti-Semitism. Because I am the exact opposite — a philo-Semite and an ardent Zionist — I was offended by this assumption. You could be pro-Israel and hate Saddam and still have serious doubts about the wisdom behind the neocons’ Iraq project, i.e., occupying Mesopotamia with the professed goal of turning it into a “democracy.” But some of our neocon friends just couldn’t tolerate such nuances, and while it is true that some “isolationist” conservatives were (and are) actual anti-Semites, such questions of motive ought not distract reasonable people from a discussion of the valid policy issues involved. I won’t call you a “dual citizen” if you don’t call me a crypto-Nazi sympathizer, OK?

My basic feeling is that Israel is tough enough to handle its regional enemies, if the U.S. State Department will just stop meddling around in the Mideast trying to arrange a “peace” deal based on the belief that the Palestinians want peace, a belief for which there is no evidence.

If Trump wins in November, he could fire the entire staff of the State Department, replace them all with the children of Republican campaign donors, and nothing of value would be lost in the transaction. Not saying it would make the State Department better — because GOP donors have a lot of stupid kids — but I’m just saying it couldn’t make things worse. The State Department is decadent and depraved, and no random group of amateurs could do worse than the current “experts” at Foggy Bottom.

Well, I find I’ve digressed a long way, but I owe a hat tip to Ace of Spades, and you can go there to read his scornful mockery of the “NeverTrump Fatsos and Softcocks” who’ve been betrayed by Biden.



 

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Jonah Goldberg Blames ‘Elites,’ By Which He Means, Everyone But Himself

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In a year-end column about the failure of “elites,” Jonah Goldberg pretends to be surprised that the Democratic Party went too far in 2021. He makes a lot of good points, e.g., that the reason the Biden administration thought they could ram “Build Back Better” through Congress was that there was no real opposition to their early COVID-19 “stimulus” bill. But there was a pent-up demand for more “stimulus” in the electorate because (in case you’ve forgotten) Democrats had blocked efforts by the Trump administration to pass a second stimulus bill before the 2020 election. They didn’t want Trump to get a boost from this popular measure, and so it was delayed until after Dementia Joe was ensconced in the White House. Biden got “the crazy idea that he could govern like he was FDR,” Goldberg says, and “spent the spring and summer gamboling along thinking he could do no wrong.” If it hadn’t been for the total botch of the Afghanistan withdrawal,which cratered Biden’s approval numbers, this “gamboling along” might have continued, but the bloom was off the rose by late August, and so here we are, with Biden a virtual lame duck after less than a year in office, and Democrats desperate to avert a bloodbath in the November midterms.

Some of this was predictable, a repeat of 2009, which was the last time Nancy Pelosi got her hands on the Speaker’s gavel with a Democrat in the White House. Nancy represents a district no less liberal than AOC’s district, really, so she sincerely believes “the American people” are down for that agenda. The alleged differences between Pelosi and AOC are not meaningful, in terms of the actual policy agenda.

Could anyone have foreseen the Afghanistan debacle? Well, we know that Biden’s military advisers pleaded with him to maintain what we might call a “foothold” force — 3,000 to 5,000 troops to keep Bagram Air Base in operation, at least — and instead Biden insisted on a complete withdrawal, regardless of the predictable consequences. “Don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to fuck things up,” Obama warned, and no one now doubts the accuracy of that assessment. But what about Jonah?

How can a pundit maintain credibility — and shift the blame to “elites” — when he himself was part of the failure that he criticizes? Was it not the case that Jonah and the rest of his #NeverTrump cohort did everything in their power to ensure that Joe Biden became president?

Where is Jonah’s mea culpa? Where is the introspective examination of his own failure? Because most of us (using the first-person plural to speak of Republican voters in general) saw the 2020 election as a stark choice. We knew damned well that Joe Biden is a doddering idiot and that Democrats in Congress are swine, and if we did not foresee every consequence of a Democratic victory in 2020, we all realized it would be very bad. So we stuck by Trump, whatever his faults, knowing that he was the only thing standing between us and an absolute catastrophe.

Why couldn’t Jonah Goldberg see this? Or any of the other #NeverTrump pundits, for that matter? Why couldn’t they see what was so obvious to the rest of us? Why did they allow their visceral hatred of Trump to blind them to the predictable disaster that is the Biden presidency? Perhaps they simple don’t care. Perhaps they are just so selfish — so devoted to careerist considerations of their own reputations — that it doesn’t matter to them whether America is utterly ruined by the Democrats.

It ill behooves Jonah Goldberg to point the finger of blame at “elites,” when he refuses to take responsibility for his own part in this disaster.

Having begun the Year of Our Lord 2022 by paying attention to Jonah Goldberg, I’ll now return to my habit of ignoring that ruined man.

Once they go #NeverTrump, they never go back.




 

The Biden Administration’s Blame Game and the Sad Fate of #NeverTrump

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My colleague John Hoge points out that, no matter what goes wrong in the Biden administration, it’s never their fault. It is psychologically unhealthy to think of oneself as a victim of forces beyond one’s control. Good mental health requires a sense of agency — the belief that we are masters of our own fate, able to obtain success and happiness by our own efforts — and the opposite of this is the victimhood mentality, the belief that we are doomed to misery, because we are being sabotaged and betrayed by an evil “them.” The tendency of the Biden administration toward the victimhood mentality was observed by Jonah Goldberg, who seems to be sobering up from his five-year binge of Trump Derangement Syndrome, experiencing “buyer’s remorse” over the Biden presidency he helped foist upon the nation. Brett Baier had Jonah on Thursday:

BAIER: Jonah, I have to commend this piece that you wrote for “The Dispatch” about Joe Biden and the passive voice, and that is the portrayal that this is somehow passively happening to him as opposed to decisions that Biden is making and the consequences of them.
GOLDBERG: Yes. We heard this just tonight, the clip you had from Jen Psaki earlier in the show, where she says we are weathering storms. No, when you are weathering storms, you are not responsible for the weather. Storms are things that happen to you. Joe Biden says events in Afghanistan unfolded, events at the border have unfolded, as if he has no agency and no responsibility for these things. He has made choices, and we are seeing the consequences of his choices on a whole bunch of fronts. And the way the media and the way the White House spin it, it’s like poor Joe Biden is like Charlie Brown being followed by a rain cloud, and he has no responsibility for what the predicaments that his White House is in.

Go ahead, spit on the ground and curse Jonah Goldberg, but he is correct about this passive-voice tendency in the Biden administrations — events unfolded, they are weathering storms and facing challenges, always victims of forces beyond their control. Nothing that goes wrong is ever their fault, according to them, because they are incapable of admitting error. The whole point of the Biden presidency — their existential purpose, their raison d’être — is to be Not Trump, the antithesis of Trumpism, doing everything the opposite of what Trump did.

Now they are shocked by the discovery that this approach doesn’t work.

Why? Because, however much you hate Trump, the fact is that his policies worked. Prior to the arrival of the Wuhan vicus, Trump’s policies had the U.S. economy in overdrive, with record-low unemployment, and it was his administration that initiated “Operation Warp Speed,” which yielded the COVID-19 vaccines that Biden now wants to make mandatory. This is where Jonah Goldberg needs his own confrontation with reality. What was the point of “Never Trump” conservatism if, as we now can all see plainly, reversing Trump’s policies produces disaster?

Goldberg now bemoans the passive-voice victimhood mentality of the Biden administration, but what about you, Jonah? Do you and your #NeverTrump comrades bear no responsibility in this failure?

Last time I checked the official numbers, Biden was elected because he beat Trump in four states by a combined margin of ~60,000 votes. Is it possible that such narrow margins might have gone the other way had it not been for the constant attacks on Trump from Goldberg, et al.?

Unlike so many others on what Kurt Schlichter dubbed the “Ahoy” crew — Jen Rubin, David French, Charlie Sykes — Jonah Goldberg does not seem content merely to parrot the daily DNC talking-points. One gets the idea that Goldberg may be nostalgic for the days when people didn’t spit on the ground and curse the very mention of his name, as every decent and patriotic American must now do. But he could rectify this, merely by titling the name of next book, I Was Wrong.

Don’t hold your breath waiting for that confession of error, though.

By the way, am I the only one who noticed the weirdly ritualistic way in which Biden administration officials used the word “horrific” to describe the photos of Border Patrol on horseback rounding up Haitian illegal immigrants? What was so “horrific” about these images? You cross the border illegally, the Border Patrol catches you — this happens every day. Is it merely because these illegals happened to be black?

In making such an issue of this, obviously in an effort to quell outrage among the BLM crowd, I doubt the Biden administration has thought about how the Hispanic community might view the situation. Imagine you’re a Hispanic resident of Arizona or Florida, and you see the Biden administration jumping up and down to denounce the Border Patrol for rounding up Haitian illegals. Wouldn’t you be tempted to say, “Wait a minute — where was this hyperventilating outrage during all the decades when it was Mexicans being rounded up at the border?” Isn’t it possible that this will cost Biden some Hispanic support? I think so.

Joe Biden is about as popular as herpes nowadays, so of course he is lashing out at scapegoats, promising to punish them:

President Joe Biden berated American border patrol agents for using horses to confront migrants crossing into the United States on the Southern border, vowing they would be punished.
“To see people treated like they did, horses running them over and people getting strapped, it’s outrageous I promise you those people will pay,” Biden said, despite no publicly available evidence to back up his claims.

“Those people will pay” — the people who are enforcing the law are wrong, according to Biden, but as for the foreign invaders trying to violate U.S. law by crossing the border? Oh, nothing wrong with that.




 

Jonah Goldberg Only Steals From the Best

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Plagiarism — passing off someone else’s work as your own — is generally a career-destroyer in journalism, and what Jonah Goldberg has done in recycling an idea borrowed from Ace of Spades is perhaps not exactly plagiarism. Like, it’s not as if he cut-and-pasted entire sentences, but rather that he failed to attribute the basic idea to the guy who originated it. By his lack of attribution, Goldberg essentially cheated Ace of credit he deserved. The weird thing is that, less than three years ago, Jonah did acknowledge Ace’s authorship of the “political MacGuffin” idea in a May 2016 column about Trump’s campaign where the “MacGuffin” was the GOP nomination. But now in January 2019, Goldberg returns to the same idea — this time, with the border wall as the “MacGuffin” of the government-shutdown melodrama — and cheats Ace out of his proper credit. Maybe it’s not a career-destroying plagiarism scandal, since Goldberg had previously acknowledged Ace’s authorship in an earlier iteration of the same theme, but it sure as hell ain’t fair or honest.

By the way, my entire blogging career was stolen from Ace.

Circa 2005-2006, I was feeling trapped in the newsroom of the Washington Times and, in my idle moments, would toggle over to Ace’s and literally laugh out loud at his stuff. Ace was having fun, and I was like, “I want to do that for a living.” I met Ace at CPAC 2006, hanging around outside the Omni Shoreham Hotel smoking cigarettes, basically fangirling all over him like my daughter would behave if she ever met Harry Styles. Then in 2007, I recommended Ace to my friends at the Young America’s Foundation for a sort of blogger junket to their West Coast student leadership conference in Santa Barbara, which was nice. That was where I learned how seriously Ace takes his anonymity, by the way. He presciently understood that the Left would sooner or later want to destroy his life, and so he guarded his true identity to such an extent that he was actually registered in the hotel as “Ace of Spades.” Also, that 2007 West Coast YAF conference was the occasion when I got a Drudge-linked front-page scoop on a story based on Phillip Klein’s notes of an interview, but I digress . . .

When the Washington Times changed editors in 2008 and I took that as my cue to leave, I knew that blogging was a thing I could do, and the madcap “what’s-he-gonna-say-next” aspect of Ace’s work was my basic inspiration for this gig. And sometimes it’s demoralizing to me to realize how far short I fall of my original ambition. Ace is remarkably productive, and consistently so, and he somehow manages to stay focused on the daily D.C. melodrama in a way I simply can’t anymore. Like, I just don’t see any point in writing about whatever is the top-of-the-hour thing on Fox News. Why should anyone want to read my take on the Breaking New Development in the Ongoing National Crisis? What’s the point in adding my own voice to the incessant mooing of the Pundit Herd?

The fact that Ace is able to keep going, and is still a daily must-read, is remarkable. He’s been doing this for 15+ years, OK?

Thursday night, I took my daughter and one of her school friends out for a late-night snack at Sheetz and while we were sitting there eating our delicious MTO meals — Sheetz is da bomb — I was reading Ace on my phone and laughing out loud at his take on the Google “you-can’t-say-‘family’-because-that’s-homophobic” story. And rather than trying to explain what I was laughing at, I just handed the phone over to my daughter: “Read this.” She didn’t seem to get it, but that’s OK. My point is to illustrate what I mean when I say it’s demoralizing to compare myself to Ace. I’d seen the same Daily Caller scoop by Peter Hasson that Ace was commenting about, and had intended to comment on it myself, but was busy Thursday working on my American Spectator column and intended to get around to the Google story later. But once I’d seen Ace’s take, I was like, “Why even bother now?” Because he absolutely murdered it:

Hi, I’m a transexual weirdo in a polyamorous relationship with multiple other dregs. We hope to live together in a collective f–k-pile. We would like to be called a “family” like a boring heterosexual family of 2.5 kids and a dog. We hate stereotypes but it’s okay to stereotype heterosexuals because Breeders, Am I Right?

You’d have to read the whole thing to understand how funny that sentence was in context, because Ace has an impeccable sense of comedic timing that enables him to deliver that line just so. Now I’m doing the Harry Styles fangirling thing again, but Ace deserves more praise than he usually gets and this Goldberg ripoff situation reminds me how wrong it is to take Ace for granted. That ewok is a National Treasure, and if he were to keel over from a heart attack, it would be a loss as painful as Andrew Breitbart’s untimely death in 2012. So now I suppose the question is, what are we gonna do about Jonah Goldberg? How are we going to avenge the injustice Jonah has inflicted on Ace?

We don’t want to be like the Left, doxxing the guy and then assembling a mob to surround his house and frighten his children. Or do we?

One of the reasons Jonah felt he could diss Ace like this, you see, is because he is arrogant enough to think there won’t be payback. And I honestly don’t want to declare war on Jonah. Despite his recent transition to being a testosterone-deficient #NeverTrump soy boy, I still have fond memories of when Jonah was one of the Good Guys, even though there were always signs he might be a bit wobbly, like when NRO purged Ann Coulter over . . . what? It’s been so long I’ve forgotten, but that was one of those incidents that made me mark down Rich Lowry’s name in the “unreliable” column, and I seem to vaguely recall that Jonah played a role in the Coulter purge although, as I say, it’s been a long time and details of that incident are now very fuzzy in my memory. But I digress . . .

My point is not to recount the entire history of Goldberg’s slow-motion descent into an absurd parody of a controlled-opposition RINO, but rather to say that if this is the Franz-Ferdinand-at-Sarajevo moment that leads to all-out #WAR, I’m enlisting with the Ewok Army.

Of course, it’s still possible diplomacy can prevent the needless effusion of blood. There needs to be an “intervention” with Goldberg, to try to save him from turning into Rick Wilson or Tom Nichols or Max Boot.

Oh, dear God, why did I just write the name “Max Boot” and remind myself of his existence? The other day I saw a clip of Max Boot on CNN and there are no words to describe how creepy he is.

 

Somebody should show that clip to Jonah and ask him: “Is this who you want to be?” Is it your life’s ambition to become a cartoon caricature of an effeminate ex-Republican doing guest spots on CNN to feed their liberal narrative? Because that’s your ultimate destination if you keep hanging around the #NeverTrump crowd. Selah.




 

 

 

Fear and Loathing at the #NRISummit: Can We Survive the Sarcasm Deficit?

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Perhaps National Review‘s famed cartoonist Roman Genn can do a savage caricature of the donnybrook brawl I’ve been trying to incite for this weekend’s National Review Institute “Future of Conservatism” Summit at the Omni Shoreham Hotel in Washington, D.C.

Was it a smart career move to kick Jonah Goldberg in the knee? No, of course not, but there are a lot of things I’ve done over the years that could be characterized as the diametric opposite of “smart career moves.” I’ve always preferred the Eric Stratton Philosophy of Life:

Boon: I gotta work on my game.
Otter: No, no, no! Don’t think of it as work. The whole point is just to enjoy yourself.

Some readers misunderstood my purpose in subjecting Jonah Goldberg to the kind of blunt sarcasm I habitually aim at liberals. Do I want a fight with Jonah? Oh, hell, no — he’s the size of a linebacker, and I’m not enough of a journalistic celebrity to rely on the “David Gregory Loophole” in D.C.’s strict gun-control policy. So I’ll be unarmed and defenseless when I show up at the National Review Summit this afternoon.

Although I understand they’ve hired heavy security at the Omni Shoreham to deal with any troublemakers, what’s to stop Jonah Goldberg from slipping the guards $100 to look the other way while he pounds my head up against a brick wall?

No, I don’t want to go mano a mano with that savage giant. My point in depicting the NRI Summit as a conclave of effete snobs was to incite grassroots resentment, to inspire a populist mob to pay their $250 and show up at the Omni Shoreham howling for blood: Stir up some kind of controversy — “fireworks” as the headline-writers say — that will provide an approximation of actual news for me to report.

Readers who contribute to the Shoe Leather Fund aren’t paying me to go down to D.C. so I can write up the tedious proceedings of a series of panel discussions. No, the tip-jar hitters want some real news: At least a couple of angry shouting matches, if not indeed a brutal mob beatdown on Joe Scarborough. It was a smart idea to invite America’s Least Popular “Republican” TV Personality™ to this event, if only on the basis on the venerable principle that there is no such thing as bad publicity, except your own obituary. Speaking of obituaries . . .

When I told a certain investigative journalist friend of mine I was coming to town for the NRI Summit, he said, “You mean the one with the panel on ‘what’s wrong with the Right,’ where the answer to the question is, ‘The people on stage’?”

Panel: What is Wrong with the Right?
Moderator: Reihan Salam, National Review Online
Bill Kristol, The Weekly Standard
Yuval Levin, National Affairs
John Podhoretz, Commentary Magazine
Joe Scarborough, MSNBC’s ‘Morning Joe’
Ross Douthat, New York Times

Notice — and I hate to be the one to point this out — that there isn’t a single female or Latino on that panel? So there’s one answer to your question: “Intellectuals who are clueless about optics.” This is not to endorse a tokenistic system of affirmative action among the rightward intelligentsia, but when you exclude key demographics and the closest thing to a “youth” presence you can offer is 33-year-old Harvard classmates Reihan Salam and Ross Douthat . . .

Finish that sentence however you want.

If the proprietors of Conservatism, Inc., want to run their operation as an Old Boys Club for Ivy Leaguers, who am I to object? It’s a free country. My advice was never solicited, and it’s unlikely the heirs of the Buckley Legacy would listen if I offered unsolicited advice. So I kick ’em in the knee, give ’em free publicity, and hope maybe some of our readers will pay $250 for the right to ask a few pointed questions.

And, honestly, it won’t be a totally lame snobfest. A few of the participants in this weekend’s NRI Summit proceedings:

Mark Steyn, Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan, Charles Krauthammer, Laura Ingraham, Michael Barone, Kathryn Lopez, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, Mona Charen, Mia Love, Peter Thiel, Mark Krikorian, James Pethokoukis, Amity Shlaes, Kevin Williamson, Robert Costa, Jay Nordlinger, Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, John O’Sullivan, Larry Kudlow, Ed Whelan, Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, John Fund, Tim Phillips, Heather Higgins, Kellyanne Conway, Cleta Mitchell, Jim Geraghty, Jim DeMint, Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell, Arthur Brooks, Maggie Gallagher, Brad Wilcox and Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal

Maybe you think all of those people are part of the problem, and you can pay $250 to get in their face and tell ’em so. But surely any conservative could look at that list and see at least a few names that might be part of the solution, and you can pay $250 to show up and cheer them.

The point is that I’m not anti-NRI Summit. I am anti-boredom, however, and even if the angry dissent and controversy — “fireworks”! — are as dramatically phony as professional wrestling, we need some infighting and bloodletting and perhaps even random violence among the panelists, if only to justify my spending a weekend in D.C.

If you’re not going to pay $250 to attend this event, it would be absurd for me to expect you to hit my tip jar for $10 or $20 just so I could write up a bunch of intellectual navel-gazing and tepid policy discussions. No, you want some real live action for me to report:

WASHINGTON, D.C.
Conservative journalist John Podoretz is “expected to recover” from the critical injuries he suffered during a savage fistfight that broke out Saturday afternoon during a panel discussion on immigration policy at the National Review Institute Summit.
Podhoretz was “conscious and responsive,” said a spokesman at George Washington University Hospital, where the Commentary magazine editor was rushed by paramedics after he charged the stage during a presentation by Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies.
“It was totally unexpected,” said Krikorian, who was questioned and released by Metropolitan Police. “All I did was defend myself.”
Stunned witnesses said Podhoretz seemed to become agitated when Krikorian made several sarcastic references to the “open borders lobby” and “gutless neocons” whom he blamed for recent political setbacks suffered by the Republican Party.
“John started trembling and then his face became contorted by rage,” said Jim Geraghty, a National Review staffer who was moderating the panel. Geraghty said that Podhoretz shouted “anti-Armenian slurs” before charging across the ballroom at the Omni Shoreham Hotel and attempting to attack Krikorian, who responded by slamming Podhoretz into the floor. . . .

Could that really happen? We certainly can’t rule it out. Bad blood between Krikorian and the “gutless neocons” has been brewing for years. Everybody knows who he’s talking about. Podhoretz’s irrational Fear and Loathing of Armenians isn’t exactly a secret, either.

That’s why readers want to contribute to the Shoe Leather Fund and send me down to D.C. for the weekend: If there’s going to be trouble — and it’s at least an outside possibility these vicious internecine rivalries might lead to an all-out riot at the National Review Institute Summit — you’re gonna want me to provide an on-the-scene report of this epic battle. Because I’m strictly a Neutral Objective Journalist.





 

 


National Review Institute Summit: Will This Controversial Event Make Headlines?

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My decision yesterday to kick Jonah Goldberg in the knee promises to yield enormous dividends both ways. Goldberg has denounced my criticisms as “preening b.s.,” and he’s vowed to fire back at length later today, so I look forward to a (no doubt well-deserved) ass-chewing.

Do I expect Jonah to say nice things about me? No, but neither did I expected to be invited on a Caribbean cruise after the election. The world is generally divided that way: The cruise-worthy intellectuals and everybody else, and I’ve adjusted to life among the landlubbers.

Speaking of which, the National Review Institute “Future of Conservatism” Summit convenes next Friday at the Omni Shoreham Hotel in Washington, D.C., and it would be a terrible thing if the summit were to be embroiled in controversy because a lot of pissed-off conservatives showed up and started asking questions like, “Who was it that convinced us that nominating Mitt Romney would be a good idea?”

Who would pay $250 to go raise hell at the NRI Summit? Maybe the Ron Paul crowd would think that’s a fine way to spend a weekend. Did I mention that college students can attend the NRI Summit for free?

Our friends at the National Review Institute are providing a limited number of full “scholarships” for the upcoming “Future of Conservatism” conference this January 25-27 at the Omni Shoreham Hotel in Washington, DC. This covers the conference fee, which includes participation in all events, receptions, and meals. This is an excellent opportunity for a conservative college student to learn and network.

OK, so the “limited number” of scholarships probably diminishes the chances of Ron Paul supporters packing the NRI Summit with dopehead stooges yelling ugly things about “neocon warmongers,” but this doesn’t mean that there aren’t opportunities for headline-making controversy during the event. Everybody’s favorite MSNBC host Joe Scarborough’s going to be there, after all. For some reason, while Scarborough is an honored participant at the NRI Summit, they didn’t invite Rush Limbaugh or Mark Levin. Probably an accidental oversight . . .

So when the “Joe Scarborough’s OK, But We Don’t Like Mark Levin” conference convenes next Friday at the Omni Shoreham Hotel in Washington, D.C., maybe you’ll want to be there to raise hell. If there are angry shouting matches in the hotel corridors and fistfights in the lobby bar, that might actually be newsworthy.

And I’m strictly a Neutral Objective Journalist . . .

 


Jonah Goldberg, Professional Loser?

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“We lost. We are losers. . . . Our operatives are incompetent and we live in a dream world.”
— Rob Long of National Review, in an interview with Joe Hagan of New York magazine during a Caribbean cruise in November

Has National Review, an institution founded in opposition to liberalism, become part of the problem it was intended to solve? This thought has occurred to me with increasing frequency in recent years.

Last January, immediately after Rick Santorum’s stunning upset victory in the Iowa caucuses, I attended a debate-night event in Manchester, New Hampshire hosted by National Review and was stunned at their cheerful acquiescence in The Inevitability of Mitt Romney. The primary campaign had just begun, and it took another three months for Romney to lock up the nomination, yet the NR crowd were ready and willing to applaud the coronation of the GOP Establishment choice.

This apparent unwillingness to fight tough battles against long odds disturbed me then, and at Christmas, I was further disturbed to read the New York magazine account of National Review‘s post-election Caribbean cruise, which I summarized thus:

[A]n article you should read in its entirety, if you want to be thoroughly depressed about the uselessness of our conservative elite: Wonks, pundits, pollsters and consultants on a free tropical vacation paid for by elderly magazine subscribers who, we presume, were grateful to be in the intellectual presence of the presumed heirs of Bill Buckley.

Unless you consider pre-emptive surrender to be a clever strategy, there is clearly something wrong when a political movement’s flagship institution shows such a willing acceptance of defeat.

The problem is not merely that National Review was aboard the Romney bandwagon early, nor that Romney was subsequently defeated, but rather that no one at National Review seems ashamed of themselves for their roles in helping to bring about this disaster. If they are leaders of the conservative movement, and if the conservative movement has failed — which it quite obviously has, or otherwise Obama would not be ruling by executive fiat — where is the accountability?

While I’m not saying that Rich Lowry must commit seppuku, why is there no admission by anyone at National Review that they have failed the movement they presumed to lead? A contemplation of these dark thoughts was inspired by Jonah Goldberg’s latest column:

[The conservative] movement has an unhealthy share of hucksters eager to make money from stirring rage, paranoia, and an ill-defined sense of betrayal with little concern for the real political success that can come only with persuading the unconverted.
A conservative journalist or activist can now make a decent living while never once bothering to persuade a liberal. Telling people only what they want to hear has become a vocation. Worse, it’s possible to be a rank-and-file conservative without once being exposed to a good liberal argument.

OK, a few questions immediately come to mind:

  • Who are these “hucksters”? If they are merely “stirring rage, paranoia, and an ill-defined sense of betrayal” for their own selfish purposes, they must be eliminated. Name names, please.
  • How much of this “bothering to persuade a liberal” has Jonah Goldberg done? Where is this legion of converts to conservatism — the Goldbergites, as it were — to whom he may point as evidence of his successful persuasion?
  • To which “good liberal argument” do we need to be exposed? Because the very fact that an argument is liberal would seem to me sufficient evidence that it is wrong, and so I’m having trouble with the concept of arguments that are both liberal and “good.”

Perhaps I’m misunderstanding Jonah’s argument. Maybe I’m just a huckster “stirring rage, paranoia, and an ill-defined sense of betrayal.” However, Goldberg seems to be on more solid ground here:

To listen to many grassroots conservatives, the GOP establishment is a cabal of weak-kneed sellouts who regularly light votive candles to a poster of liberal Republican icon Nelson Rockefeller.
This is not only not true, it’s a destructive myth. . . .
It’s not that the GOP isn’t conservative enough, it’s that it isn’t tactically smart or persuasive enough to move the rest of the nation in a more conservative direction.

Because Goldberg is insufficiently explicit — he won’t name the “hucksters” — it is only by inference that we may deduce that this is a reference to the embarrassingly ineffective “Dump Boehner” movement that sought to unseat the Republican Speaker of the House. And if that’s the case, I agree: Boehner and the House GOP aren’t the problem. The real problem is the gross ineptitude of Senate Republicans, whose warped political judgment was manifested in the May 2009 decision of NRSC Chairman John Cornyn to back Charlie Crist over Marco Rubio, and which has been further evidenced in their multiple blunders of the 2010 and 2012 campaigns. But I digress . . .

While Goldberg’s vague jab at “hucksters” is likely aimed at those who organized the “Dump Boehner” movement, perhaps it is also retroactive excuse-making for National Review‘s Romney bandwagon trip that so disturbed me last January in New Hampshire. The unwillingness of the NR crowd to consider Santorum as a viable alternative to Romney bugged me then, and it still bugs me now.

Look at the exit polls: In Ohio, Romney got only 81% of the conservative vote, while Obama got 88% of the liberal vote. Thirty-five percent of Ohio voters called themselves conservative, as compared to 22% who identified as liberal. If Romney had gotten a larger share of the conservative vote, he would have won Ohio. Now, here are the truly frightening numbers: Obama got 44% of the Catholic vote in Ohio, and 29% of the evangelical (or “born again”) Protestant vote.

Is Jonah Goldberg willing to admit what seems obvious to me, namely that nominating a moderate Mormon contributed to the weakening of GOP support among conservative Christians? Isn’t it possible that an adamantly pro-life Catholic would have done better?

Understand that this isn’t an argument about “purity.” It’s an argument about competence: How do you win in politics?

The fact that the Romney campaign failed to win a sufficient share of conservative voters cannot be blamed on “hucksters.”

Scapegoating and blame-shifting are not attributes of responsible leadership, and if National Review claims to be leading a movement, shouldn’t the recent electoral catastrophe cause them to reflect on their own role in this defeat?

Losing makes me angry. It enrages me. Defeat is a humiliation that insults my sense of personal honor. And what I’m hearing from Jonah Goldberg and his National Review colleagues does not convey a similar feeling of outrage. They have been beaten, embarrassed and publicly shamed, and yet they don’t seem even slightly bothered by their current status as ineffectual laughingstocks, objects of scorn and ridicule.

Show me a good loser, and I’ll show you . . . a loser.

The National Review Institute Summit will convene Jan. 25 at the Omni Shoreham Hotel, Washington, DC., and while I deny any intention to stir up rage, paranoia and so forth, I sure hope some pissed-off conservatives will show up and ask tough questions of those who claim to be the rightful heirs of Buckley, Goldwater and Reagan.

Oh — did I mention Joe Scarborough will be there?

 


Jonah Goldberg Is Wrong

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He has made his peace with “compassionate conservatism” with an argument that bespeaks intellectual fatigue:

The evolving demographics of the country, combined with the profound changes to both the culture and the economy, demanded that the GOP change both its sales pitch and its governing philosophy.
Compassionate conservatism increasingly faded from view after 9/11. Bush ran as a war president first and a compassionate conservative second (at best) in 2004. Still, it’s worth remembering that Bush won a staggering (for a Republican) 40 percent of the Hispanic vote. Romney got 27 percent.
Moreover, according to exit polls, Romney decisively beat Obama on the questions of leadership, values, and economic expertise, but he was crushed by more than 60 points on the question of which candidate “cares about people like me.”
I still don’t like compassionate conservatism or its conception of the role of government. But given the election results, I have to acknowledge that Bush was more prescient than I appreciated at the time.

Exit polls, Jonah? You’re going to surrender to the Entitlement Culture on the basis of exit polls? If we have to start making arguments for limited government en Espanol, so be it, but first things first: Why did Romney lose the election?

Did Romney lose because of his policy positions? Or did Romney lose because the Obama campaign, with the eager assistance of what Andrew Breitbart called the Democrat-Media Complex, succeeded in portraying Romney as a stereotypical Clueless Republican?

That the Clueless Republican does not “care about people like me” is not really a matter of policy, but of perception, and a big part of that perception is about narrative arc.

People want many things in a presidential candidate, but one thing they pretty much require is that the candidate be able to tell a story about his life and career — who he is — in the context of how he intends to govern. The up-by-the-bootstraps biography of Ronald Reagan stood him in good stead throughout his political career which, in case you’ve forgotten, didn’t really begin until 1964 when Reagan was past 50.

Romney’s narrative arc didn’t work so well. Among the candidates for GOP nomination this year, only Herman Cain had the up-by-the-bootstraps Reaganesque biography. Of course, Rick Perry also came from humble origins, and Rick Santorum’s tales of his Italian immigrant father were inspirational, but both Perry and Santorum entered politics early in life which, generally, is a liability for a presidential candidate.

The “cares about me” question is a matter of perception, not policy, and is in large measure a proxy for “likeability,” which is a very superficial, instinctive reaction. George W. Bush’s “compassionate conservatism” barely enabled him to defeat the unlikeable Al Gore and the equally unlikeable John Kerry. In 2012, in addition to having the Allstate Insurance man as their candidate, Democrats also trotted out the unctuously faux-empathetic Bill Clinton. The Republicans, by contrast, gave primetime convention spots to egotistical blubberbutt Chris Christie and the disgruntled ramblings of Clint Eastwood.

Given the manifold advantages of the Democrats in the past campaign — and incumbency is an advantage not to be underestimated — and the various specific shortcomings and failures of the Republicans, the GOP defeat is not really difficult to explain.

Furthermore, and quite importantly, the election was actually quite close: A margin of 3 percentage points (about 3 million out of 110 million cast) in the popular vote, with Romney competitive in all the key swing states. Romney lost Florida by only 70,000 votes out of 8.3 million and lost Ohio by about 100,000 out of 5.1 million. These are not landslide margins. This was not a “mandate” election for Obama, no matter what anybody tells you, and for Republicans to let themselves be spooked by exit polls or to propose a wholesale reorganization of their party because of a panic about “demographics” is absurd.

Like I said, Jonah, I blame your endorsement of “compassionate conservatism” on intellectual fatigue. You wrote that when you were tired and discouraged. So are we all tired and discouraged. So let’s rest up, recover our morale, and try to think calmly about the future.

Also, Jonah, you should adopt my rule: Never talk strategy in public.

It has become entirely too common, in the “Smartest Guy in the Room” competition among pundits (and would-be pundits) to proclaim strategic insights to the public, and it’s just stupid. This  is comparable to an NFL coach putting up a message on the Jumbotron screen: “We’re going to run a play-action pass.” Democrats can read the Internet, you know. Hell, they invented the Internet.

Finally, Jonah, I think Rush Limbaugh is closer to the mark in analyzing the root causes of the GOP’s problem:

The things that [younger people] just assume are true, like there is no doubt whatsoever that we are destroying the planet with global warming, no doubt. They can’t even conceive of what you and I both know to be the truth, and that is, the whole global warming thing is a hoax. They do not even think it’s a political issue. They do not realize that everything they believe in has been totally corrupted by politics. What they think is science is nothing more than corruption by the left, but they don’t know any better.

Global warming? Democrats invented that, too. Like “homophobia” and the “War on Women,” Republicans are losing young “skulls full of mush” because of phony issues manufactured by the Democrats, issues skillfully marketed by the Democrats’ leftist allies in academia, the news media and the entertainment industry.