Jonah Goldberg: telling hippies to shove it is priority #1

By Heraclitus

In the words of Kim Deal, "I know you're a real cuckoo." My own take on the wingnuttery of Jonah Goldberg (and fellow traveller Dinesh D'Souza) is here. But now Goldberg has written a column admitting that the Iraq War was a mistake--albeit a "worthy mistake." His column is here, but life is short and Goldberg is an idiot. Instead, read Amanda Marcotte's truly brilliant annihilation of Goldberg's piece. It's hard to pick one quote as the best, but if I had to, it would be this one:

He’s admitted that the Iraq War was a “mistake”, but the main point he wants to get across is that none of this means you pot-smoking hippies were right. So quit gloating between puffs of your marijuana cigarettes. The notion that we non-dope-smoking, non-hippie liberals might have also seen right through Bush’s bullshit at the beginning is inconceivable to him. No, in Jonah’s world, when Bush ran around the country telling people, “Oh no, don’t believe the experts about whether or not Iraq has WMDs, believe a two bit asshole who you know for a fact will lie his head off it means he gets his way,” the only people who weren’t scared out of their minds must have been too stoned to care. No other explanation. None.

Meanwhile, what are we to think when even a rat like Goldberg is deserting the sinking GOP ship? Granted, he's hardly coming out as a Democrat (because that would make him a fascist, don'cha know), but when even Goldberg doesn't have Bush's back on the war, you wonder what's going on. Indeed, this string of GOP nincompoopery, so close to the election, makes one slightly paranoid. Is there some shadowy group, led by Cancer Man, who really controls the government, and has decided that they've had enough of W and the GOP?

Maybe, but maybe it's more likely that this just shows us that the GOP, and Bush and his cadre in particular, really don't know anything except how to play dirty. Many of the scandals are the inevitable result of the enormous power the Republicans have wielded over the past six years, but much of their problems come from the stubborn nature of reality, which refuses to contort itself into the shape required by their ideology (on W's underdeveloped reality principle, see here). That even someone like Jonah Goldberg is realizing the Iraq War can no longer be defended is a sign of just how bad things have gotten.