jonah goldberg talkin shit

By Jonah Goldberg

There's no substitute for a good pope. What other religious leader can start a global argument about theology? The Dalai Lama? Perhaps. The archbishop of Canterbury? Doubtful. Pat Robertson? Please.

Notice how the pope doesn't have a Muslim counterpart to “dialogue” with. It's the pope vs. 10,000 imams, scholars and other self-anointed spokesmen for Islam. It's a bit like Gulliver vs. the Lilliputians.

So, where is the Muslim pope? This question isn't often asked in the West. Particularly among left-leaning scholars of Islam, the search has been on for a “Muslim Martin Luther.” Martin Kramer's blistering 2001 study Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle Eastern Studies in America catalogued how for decades, scholars have been “so preoccupied with ‘Muslim Martin Luthers' that they never got around to producing a single serious analysis” of Osama bin Laden and his cause.

This quest for a Muslim Luther centered on the understandable hope that such a person could reform Islam toward liberalization and modernization, just as Luther supposedly did in Europe. The problem is he did no such thing. His gripe with Roman Catholicism wasn't that it was too reactionary and rigid, but just the opposite. He thought the church had become too worldly and licentious, selling “indulgences” — or divine do-overs — to the highest bidder and the like.

The early Protestants were hardly “moderates” and, normally, secular liberals are keen to make this point. When was the last time you heard a Western liberal pine for a return of Puritanism? Luther and his immediate successors were true believers. And, while enormous theological and historical differences shouldn't be overlooked, today's Islamic fundamentalists have quite a bit in common with these religious crusaders.

Many Protestant sects were as austere as bin Laden's Wahhabi faith. The doctrines that birthed the Amish were hardly “modernizing.” Other faiths were more violent. Mobs of Protestant iconoclasts rampaged through European capitals smashing “Catholic” sculptures and burning paintings that violated biblical injunctions against graven images.

In the early 20th century, Muslim zealots launched a remarkably similar project. For example, in 1925 Ibn Saud, a patriarch of the Saudi dynasty and a follower of the puritanical Wahhabi sect of Islam, ordered the destruction of the sacred tombs and mosques of Mohammed and his early followers. They razed Mohammed's home and the graves of the prophet's mother and first wife. The prophet's tomb was barely spared thanks to popular opposition. Today, Saudi authorities are in the process of destroying ancient art and architecture of Mecca and Medina out of the same puritanical zeal. A similar fanaticism inspired the Taliban to blow up the Bamiyan Buddhas, to ban music and even kite flying.

The West is surely indebted to Protestantism. But the idea that liberal secularism was born from it steals a few bases. Protestantism lent itself to being a state religion even more than Catholicism did. And while Christianity has long recognized the distinction between secular and religious authority, the reality is that secularism rests on a foundation of blood, not theology. The Reformation inaugurated an era of relentless religious wars. French Catholics slaughtered Protestant French Huguenots. Calvinists and Lutherans beat the stuffing out of each other. The bloodshed continued until, as British historian Herbert Butterfield put it, religious tolerance became “the last policy that remained when it had proved impossible to go on fighting any longer.” Secular tolerance, in other words, defined the terms of cease-fire.

What might be called the Muslim Protestant Reformation began with the demise of the closest thing the Muslim world had to a Catholic Church: the Ottoman Empire. Unfortunately, unlike the church, which was strong enough to fight back, the “Sick Man of Europe” just up and died, ceding the battlefield to zealots. Without the push-and-pull that birthed Western social compromise, Islam simply replaced religious authoritarianism with religious totalitarianism. Tellingly, Lebanon, which endured years of religious civil war, is an exception to this dynamic in the Arab world.

Today, Islam is chockablock with Muslim Luthers claiming to have a monopoly on the Quran's true meaning. Murderers can shop around for a fatwa endorsing the most horrific — and technically un-Islamic — barbarism like junkies searching for a corrupt doctor with a prescription pad for hire.

No, what the Muslim world needs is a pope. Large, old institutions such as the Catholic Church have the “worldliness” to value flexibility and tolerance, and the moral and theological authority to clamp down on those who see compromise as heresy. Pope Clement XIV's famous, or infamous, suppression of Jesuits in 1773 might be an example of both qualities. The Ottoman Empire played a similar, if imperfect, role before its demise. In its absence, Islamic Lilliputians run amok. Ironically, Muslims don't want this divisiveness. The jihadists strive to restore the caliphate as an Islamist thousand-year Reich. But even the moderates long for unity among the Islamic nations. They might one day forge the sort of compromise we in the West reached, but the road map there isn't well illuminated by our past.

hahahaha this guy is ignorant.

You have a lot of guts putting out that article in the USA Today. About 5% of Americans on a good day are even going to get what you are trying to say. Maybe half of those will agree. I think it's a pretty good thesis, myself, but if I hadn't been reading your stuff for years, I would have brushed you off as a weird crackpot.

It says so much.

From a reader:

Dear Jonah,
Clinton claimed that some republicans were accusing him of being obssesed with OBL while he was in his office. I just simply dont recall anybody accuisng him of that, do you remember anyone?

Me: I have no memory of any such thing whatsoever. Anybody else?

Update: A quick — and therefore imperfect — Nexis-Lexis search finds not a single story from 1998-2000 mentioning Bin Laden in which "Clinton" and "Obsessed" appear in the same sentence, except those mentioning "sex-obsessed" or obsession with his own legacy. None talk about obsession with Bin Laden, in other words.

in fact, from 1995-2001 the republican senate never once passed a resolution containing the exact phrase 'clinton is obsessed with bin laden' - looks like slick willie strikes again!!

I do not dispute that I often get things wrong, or even "quite" wrong. But I also try to correct the record. I'm not sure in this case what I've gotten "quite wrong."...

↑ New York Times, "Writer Declares She Was G.O.P. Spy in M'Govern Camp", August 19, 1973, p. 1

cant find it on google news/the nytimes site & no longer dating girl who has lexis-nexis (plz save coulter jokes) can somebody good at finding shit (i.e. noted black british journalist dastoor) dig this up for me?? i assume its about goldberg but wtf!

August 19, 1973, Sunday

SECTION: Page 1, Column 4

LENGTH: 221 words

Freelance writer L Goldberg says on Aug 18 that Nixon pol adviser M M Chotiner recruited and paid her $1,000 a wk to travel with press corps accompanying Sen G McGovern during '72 Pres campaign, and that she made daily repts on McGovern's personal and pol activities; says she used code name 'Chapman's friend' in calls to Chotiner over special telephone line in his Washington law office; says Chotiner paid her directly by personal check; says she had no connection with Com for Re-Election of Pres and does not know if Chotiner gave her repts to com; says 'implication was very strong' that Pres Nixon knew and approved of her activities, but that Chotiner never explicitly told her this was so; says she heard that other 'Chapman's friends' were planted in press corps traveling with Dem Vice Pres candidate S Shriver, and with Vice Pres Agnew; says Chotiner was especially interested in 'sexy' details such as 'who is sleeping with whom,' but that she never had access to that kind of information; says she saw job as opportunity to have unusual experience at nobody's expense; says she planned to write book about it; notes she told Chotiner she was going to reveal her spying activity and that Chotiner told her to tell 'the whole truth'; says she did nothing wrong and would do it again; illus of Goldberg and Chotiner

http://www.amazon.com/Liberal-Fascism-American-Mussolini-Politics/dp/0385511841

Check this out now, it probably won't be up long.

So much for the holiday season.

Apparently, advance copies are out, to the great sarcastic joy of some.

A sample:

Chapter 2: Adolf Hitler, Man of the Left

Chapter 4: Franklin Roosevelt’s Fascist New Deal

Chapter 5: The 1960’s: Fascism Takes to the Streets

Chapter 9: Brave New Village: Hillary Clinton and the Meaning of Liberal Fascism.

[...]

Chapter 10: We’re All Fascists Now

http://img227.imageshack.us/img227/1986/jonahpullquoteps0.jpg

does he script those automated spam messages I get? There seems to be similar logic working there.

You own the book, kingfish?

page photos have been all over the past few days!

the "war on smoking" is New Age?

Today's funny. I love the 'stolen base' comment because har har do you see etc.

"We're All Fascists Now" has a nice punky ring to it, i must admit. i'm sure it's an obvious reference to something my dulled brain is missing at the moment, but w/e

it might be making you think of McCarthy's "We Are All Bourgeois Now"?

i think the "we are all x now" phrase is pretty old but i don't know where it's from

He's such a cock.

'Dachau hosted the world's largest alternative and organic medicine research lab and produced its own organic honey.'

from fascist bees!

i don't own a copy; some of the lefty blogs are posting pics from the pages, since some of the shit is so fucked that you have to see it to believed that some publisher actually put down time & money to print up such madness.

f'rinstance, this bit about how the KKK were "ironically" called fascists, or this chapter list

They've been posted pages at http://www.sadlyno.com/

Dave Neiwert reviews the book well.

ornicus is one of my favorite blogs and my work filter now blocks it due to "racism/hate"

the angries, there are so many of them

in my hart

The Corner has been all about promoting that tract in the last two days. Jonah actually visited local bookstores to see where it was posted

haha essentially no one in a chain bookstore gives a shit about the dude's politics. front-of-store placement is driven by how many copies have been ordered/how much co-op money the publisher has spent, none of which goes on at the store level. no one outside of ny/dc stocked the book in huge quantities because no one knows or cares who jonah goldberg is. if he were a tall blond chick with an adam's apple, they'd stock more because that shit sells. for such a tough guy he sure loves playing the victim

ornicus is one of my favorite blogs and my work filter now blocks it due to "racism/hate"

can an rss reader get thru your filter? Also, he posts a good deal at places like FireDogLake.

Then again, there's always Google caches.

>>'Dachau hosted the world's largest alternative and organic medicine >>research lab and produced its own organic honey.'

This is the kind of lunatic statement which editors simply don't have the guts to decline to publish.

Actually, from the pages I've seen excerpted, you could simply take out all the references to liberals and his usual targets and substitute Republicans and it would work the same way.

F'r instance: Dachau played host to the most advanced, if unsanctioned, medical techniques in the west. It is well known that many people in the Republican party benefit from and support the cutting edge practice of medicine.

It's astonishing to me that the LA Times hasn't fired him from its editorial pages. It won't stand for anyone being called names and putting about half the population of the country in the same league as Nazis would seem to broadly fit the paper's list of no-no's. By his screwy book, many Jews in the entertainment industry must be closet Nazis, too.

In fact, most of the other columnists at the paper would have to be closet Nazi-Jews, too.

i've already seen several references to this shit in non-goldberg writings (DUH NATIONAL SOCIALISM IT'S GOT SOCIALISM RIGHT THERE GUYS!). gonna be a fun year.

oh teh lulz:

http://www.amazon.com/Liberal-Fascism-American-Mussolini-Politics/dp/tags-on-product/0385511841/

guys come on this is hilarious:

doughy pantload (140)
propaganda (117)
wingnut welfare (114)
editor promised cake (95)
i can has job mom (93)
conservative (47)
liberals bashing books not yet published (38)
censored by liberals (34)
censored by the left (34)
must read (34)
politics (34)
banged out by howler monkeys (16)
books written while high on cheeto dust (14)
the truth (10)
ten pounds of crap in a five pound book (9)
finally the truth (8)
true (8)
a fascist wannabe publishes his fantasie... (5)
if michelle malkin is over your head (5)
its not cheapening when we do it (5)
lunatic ravings (5)
relatives in high publishing places (5)
sadly no (5)
waste of a good tree (5)
wingnut (5)
bird vomit (4)
cheetohesque (4)
how not to design a book cover (4)
makes ann coulter seem sane (4)
oxymoron (4)
pathetic revisionism (4)
poor catnip substitute (4)
teh stoopid (4)
truth (4)
what a boat load of crap (4)
books by rubes (3)
cheetohnacht (3)
doughy (3)
doughy pantloads premiere (3)
excretory (3)
hate is good philosophy for idiots (3)
holocaust denial (3)
i can has funyuns (3)
innaleckshul wannabe wannabe wannabe lol (3)
jfk killed six million jews (3)
leftists (3)
ludicrous is too kind a word (3)
moron (3)
mother-boy (3)
pantsload (3)
pot kettle black (3)
revisionist history (3)
self-parodies (3)
vomit inducing (3)
wtf (3)
a dunce with an editor (2)
attend to luicannes bunions (2)
awesomest book evah11111111 (2)
blame the liberals first (2)
bored the stenographer to sleep (2)
bullflop (2)
bullsh-t (2)
ca ca (2)
code pink invaded poland (2)
conspiracy theory (2)
defectivebydesi gn (2)
delusional (2)
dialectic of cheetohlightenm ent (2)
doughbob loadpants (2)
failure (2)
fascism (2)
fiasco (2)
goldberg is laughing all the way to the ... (2)
hate is a good philosophy for idiots (2)
hatemonger (2)
homophobic insanity (2)
i laughed til i cried (2)
idiot (2)
ignorant liberals (2)
illiterate (2)
im more delusional than mom (2)
ishtar (2)
kook (2)
lame (2)
liberal moonbats exposed (2)
lodenhosen (2)
missed deadlines (2)
mmm bacon (2)
no pictures or crayons (2)
only a retard would read this (2)
polarizing garbage (2)
professional simpleton (2)
revisionist (2)
rewriting history (2)
social security is like treblinka (2)
spend your money on tragic legacy (2)
tag vandalism (2)
technically speaking fascism is an inher... (2)
teh funny (2)
unintelligent (2)

poor catnip substitute (4)
spend your money on tragic legacy (2)

My favorites.

doughy pantloads premiere (3) OTM

i don't get the 'cheetoh' meme, but i approve

YESYESYESYES

But only if you're willing to bring the lolz back to ILX afterward.

Kathleen Parker says things.

Jonah is annoyed.

Fun fun!

can we adapt "YAAAAH SCHISM YAAAAH" as an official meme now? (royalties to TOMBOT effective)

hahaha

The best part is that Kathleen is unrelentingly OTM.

More fun:

My email box runneth over with nice attaboys and more than a few interesting criticisms regarding my post about Kathleen Parker. Keying off some of the criticisms, here's one thing I want to know, as I sit here at the Whither Conservatism conference. What aspects of the Christian Right amount to oogedy-boogedyism? I take oogedy-boogedy to be a perjorative reference to absurd superstition and irrational nonsense. So where has the GOP embraced to its detriment oogedy-boogedyism? With the possible exception of some variants of creationism (which is hardly a major issue at the national level in the GOP, as much as some on the left and a few on the right try to make it one), I'm at a loss as to what Kathleen is referring to. Opposition to abortion? Opposition to gay marriage? Euthanasia? Support for prayer in school?

There are all sorts of legitimate positions on all sides of these issues and I don't necessarily agree with the conventional religious right view on all of them. And as a committed federalist, I'd like to see most if not all of them settled as locally as possible. But I think it's silly and offensive to describe the mainstream social conservative positions on these issues as "oogedy boogedy" stuff. Moreover, as a matter of political analysis it's beyond absurd to think the GOP can become a majority party by adopting a rhetorical tone toward religious conservatives usually found at the Huffington Post or the Daily Kos. I'm sure Bill Maher agrees with Kathleen. But normally, at least for people who call themselves conservatives, when Bill Maher agrees with you it's a sign that you took a wrong turn somewhere.

You aren't a martyr smoking your last cigarette. You're just another columnist, talented and charming to be sure, but just another columnist.

this reads like pulp lyrics

Oh Jonahpaws, let's start with the charming local priest who told his Catholic congregation that they would not receive Communion until they asked for forgiveness for voting for Obama and then work our way through a myriad of televangelists.

should be under the wiki for butthurtedness

this reads like pulp lyrics

I thought that you were joking / When you said "I want to see you
To discuss conservatism / and the future of our nation's heart and soul
Six o'clock, my place, DC" / Well I arrived just after seven
But you said "It doesn't matter" / "I understand your irritation
And your image, and I'm flattered / Oh and I'd just like to tell you
That I love all of your writings / Could you sign this for my editor?
She's on a cruise, her name is K-Lo / Now get down to the gist:
Do you want a line of this? / Are you a (sniff) / columnist?"

It reads like John Prine!

It can be all these things, and more!

But look at it through the eyes of a conservative. This is a Democratic city, run almost uniformly by liberals. While many of the problems most prominently on display can certainly be traced back to racism, racism itself is not a central issue in the Wire (nor is racism an inherently or historically conservative phenomena). These drug gangs and the poor souls in their orbit, are not trapped by racism so much as by a dysfunctional culture.

http://utdocuments.blogspot.com/2009/06/jonah-goldberg-converses-with-critic.html

"By the way, this email is not for publication."

Hilarious afterthought.

haha just heard some rightwing talkradio dbag refer to him as "the great jonah goldberg"

Someone wrote him a letter about jury duty.

<3 <3 <3

Airplanes can be used for good things and bad things. Some airplanes carry medicine or ice cream, but other airplanes carry bombs or bad people. But an airplane with bombs might be good because the bombs are for using on bad guys, and on the other airplane maybe the ice cream has melted.

Loved it. Looking forward to Goldberg's response: "I have no time to answer this – my daughter's getting her rabies shot."

TAKE THAT

http://www.nationalreview.com/tyranny-blog/299635/fair-enough#

Dear Jonah,

Even Hamilton would not have found this fellow to be duel worthy.

Those quotes from the book are amazing.

Loved it. Looking forward to Goldberg's response: "I have no time to answer this – my daughter's getting her rabies shot."

Well, you were close:

I’m not going to bother with most of this garbage since I have actual work to do

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_845ywsAF1Oc/R14KltELALI/AAAAAAAAAF0/hG8T6VV0uy4/s320/jonah_goldberg_in_car.jpg

"waddup alex. U gonna get urs. Jonah"

In which max plays Aaron Burr.

oh my god somehow i had never encountered that "the white male is the Jew of liberal fascism" line

what a horrible idiotic man

"the white male is the Jew of liberal fascism"

Genuine lol. I loved Alex's airplane analogy, too. So sad about the melted ice cream. It's not fair.

Jonah is mad at Joel Klein's review.

authors shouldn't respond to negative reviews IMO, it's undignified. in his post jonah proceeds to commit every sin he accuses klein of. i can't imagine reading an entire book by this assclown but that post illustrates his unique fusion of pseudo-erudition and juvenile putdowns. klein was too kind!

I suspect Jonah took Alex P's comment about him never addressing criticism to heart -- and this is the result.

as Pareene has noted, Jonah craves the affection of guys like Klein (who's a hack himself).

"We've invited Klein, Goldberg, Chris Matthews, Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly to this debate inside a vacuum-sealed tube we've dropped in the middle of the ocean. Now, an hour of gentle new age music."

otm

i don't think much of klein either. people like his book on woody guthrie but on politics he's always been a conventional-wisdom pez dispenser

don't forget this smug dickweed:

http://www.mediabistro.com/fishbowldc/files/2011/04/fineman-h.jpg

I can’t imagine a person dumb enough to actually believe that Jonah Goldberg had been seriously considered for a Pulitzer. (Well, OK, I can imagine one person dumb enough.)

A+ Klo zing.

I align myself with GK Chesterton, William F. Buckley, Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Friedrich von Hayek, Ludwig Von Mises and quite a few others on this point.

Don't forget Von von Vonvonvon

jberg is good evidence that all the advantages of an upper class, urban, educated, political upbringing cannot substitute for intelligence. he just seems really dumb idk.

pareene piece an excellent takedown to read sunday morning. my only complaint is that having already attacked goldberg it's unlikely pareene will follow-up with more goldberg pieces throughout the rest of the year.

Don't worry -- Jonah will provide more fodder!

tyranny blog

In short, I’m really not all that bothered by what I think are his unjustifiably low opinions of my work, but I really can’t abide his unjustifiably high opinion of himself.

riiiiiiiiiiiiiight

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DV8nPJ7WkAALKSW.jpg:small

ass chair in applied cargo shorts

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_sW65ilskOC8/SnDSeirAm7I/AAAAAAAAY9k/FEqUPL1gHjs/s400/JonahGoldberginCar.jpg

never gets old

You're the clown, Jonah...you have pissed your away all of your credibility as one of the most thoughtful of our generation.

Do you think that man deserved to be pushed like that?

— Thurman Tiler (@ThurmanTiler) February 25, 2023

ONE OF THE MOST THOUGHTFUL OF OUR GENERATION

I'd forgotten I'd forgotten this choad.

employed by tradcaths, starving hysterical naked

lol dlh A+