Jonah Goldberg, the zoomorphic hack, has a new reply to Juan Cole up at NRO, and what a squirmy flea-bitten piece of crap it is. Cole can and, I'm sure, will destroy the bulk of it, but I want to single-out one part.
Goldberg doesn't seem to realise that he will now be the poster child for rightwing cowardice and general chickenshittery. But he's a little worried, and so manufactures a strawman to rebut:
If only military veterans or active-duty personnel can legitimately express political opinions in favor of the use of force — the logical upshot of this whole chicken-hawk argument — then Cole & Co. are the real militarists, if not fascists. Are the liberals who supported Clinton's war in Bosnia chicken hawks too? And if they are, does that mean that war was wrong?
Now this is Goldberg's initial excuse, which he refuses to reprint:
As for why my sorry a** isn't in the kill zone, lots of people think this is a searingly pertinent question. No answer I could give -- I'm 35 years old, my family couldn't afford the lost income, I have a baby daughter, my a** is, er, sorry, are a few -- ever seem to suffice.
It gives the whole game away. Goldberg isn't forbidden to comment because he isn't in the military, but is rightly subject to censure for being so cavalier in advocating sending men to their deaths (and to cause many many more deaths). That his excuses for not doing such are so clueless and insensitive (how many national guardsmen would like to opt out of Goldberg's precious war for the reasons he stated, but were not allowed to because of Goldberg's Sainted Bush and Rumsfeld) show that, for him, this war is simply an ideological exercise and the troops are so many plastic soldiers in a miniature dirt war.
He also has the gall to co-opt Christopher Hitchens's defense of chickenhawkery, which he conveniently links to. Whatever Hitchens now is, he isn't in the same class as Goldberg, has actually been in war zones, actually offers intellectual reasons for supporting the war which are at least worth considering, and is, furthermore, nearly sixty years old. And, suffice it to say, Hitchens has forgotten more about the Middle East -- which even Goldberg concedes he's no expert on -- as well as general political history than Goldberg will ever know. Fact is that in Goldberg the chickenhawk image is at a whole diferent level -- it was just at a poster's level, now it's a flashing neon sign.
Jonah Goldberg is a fat yuppie, born into privilege who, not because he lacks credentials but because he lacks knowledge and sense, talks out his ass in the advocacy of the most serious act a nation can undertake. His blatant insensitivity to the men who, unlike Goldberg, must fight the wars he finds great entertainment and ideologically fulfilling, shows what kind of cowardly hack he is. It would be funny if a Draft Goldberg organisation were founded, but I suspect that even if he were forced to join-up (and here is a pop culture reference Jabba The Hack can appreciate) Goldberg would rapidly become the unserious-fatboy-turned-psychotic-dropout perfectly modeled by Kubrick in the character of Private "Pyle".
*Edit - Fixed typo and elaborated on the chicknhawk image, and substituted a modern word for an archaic and pretentious one. I try.
posted by RETARDO MONTALBAN @ 9:36 AM
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