Sunday, June 3, 2012

The Point of the Spear




Reported at Mediate.com, and mentioned by a number of bloggers and others, a youngster who has a nice writing gig at National Review, is a published author, and is the well indoctrinated son of a mother who was the behind-the-scenes manipulator of the successful Bill Clinton honey trapping (see, e.g., blue dress, thong, Monica Lewinsky, Linda Tripp, Ken Starr), has this to say:

Speaking at the American Enterprise Institute, Goldberg said that he thought the voting age should be raised and it was a mistake to lower it in the first palace:

“I am not particularly enamored with the youth,” said Goldberg employing air quotes. “I don’t think youth politics is something very special or enviable. Personally, I think the voting age should be much higher not lower. I think it was a mistake to lower it to 18, to be brutally honest.”

Goldberg said there is a “power worship” in the popular reverence for the youth vote. He said that “they’re going to run the country someday, so we should really explain to them why they’re “so frickin’ stupid about some things.”

“It is a simple fact of science that nothing correlates more with ignorance and stupidity more than youth,” Goldberg continued. “We’re all born idiots, and we only get over that condition as we get less young.”

He said that youth culture is possibly more powerful than it has ever been and that is “unhealthy for a society.”

Goldberg said that many young people view socialism as a viable alternative to capitalism and that is proof of “what social scientists call, ‘their stupidity.’”

“That’s something that conservatives have to work hard to beat out of them, either literally or figuratively, as far as I’m concerned,” Goldberg concluded.


The boy is careful to "employ air quotes," which I guess means that if anyone should successfully call him on this latest absurd posturing he can always just say, Can't you take a joke? I'm just an entertainer, the fall-back Maginot Line of circularity. He's already written a book so wrong that that is its claim to notoriety, Liberal Fascism. Now he's on the trail to hell, like the rest of the right-wing bloviators, and must toil to top himself, just like Ann Coulter, or eventually become yesterday's news. Still, there's nothing much stupider than this bit of bullshit (which proves I guess that Goldberg isn't yet "old,") Of all the arguments for lowering the voting age, surely none is stronger than "If you old enough to die for your country, then you're old enough to vote." QED, Mr. Goldberg. As certain as a geometric proof.

But while Mr. Goldberg deserves all the derision he gets, and possibly a literal thrashing at the hands of some well-trained 18-year-old killer from the 101st Screaming Eagles, particularly if Goldberg should have the youthful stupidity to try to "beat any sort of liberal notion" out of such a man, I think Goldberg's real problem is his lack of perspicacity.

Thing is, it is fairly obvious that Republicans (and other American "Conservatives,") have little respect for democracy or the process of voting. Right now, state by Republican-controlled state, all sorts of creative voter suppression laws are being enacted. There is no respect shown for actual voters, and none for the common sense fact that a law which will disenfranchise thousands of legal voters for the sake of one or two alleged fraudulent votes is patently a bad law--a law with another purpose its creators have been simply too slick to enunciate. This is old stuff. There used to be all sorts of "literacy tests" at the threshold of the ballot. After many decades, the Federal government finally got the gumption to outlaw this blatant voter manipulation. But Mr. Goldberg, in his youthful stupidity, doesn't seem to realize that some of this stuff isn't supposed to be ever talked about out in public.

And so, he reveals another bit of the plan his party undertakes--to undermine and destroy democracy and replace what we have in American with a ruling class of the monied. As Mr. Romney has said, no one should be allowed to run for President who hasn't got some business experience. Presumably he means successful business experience. And since Goldberg and his minions can't beat empathy and a sense of shared community out of kids who have just left the community of school, the next best thing is an effort to disenfranchise them, at least until harsher and harsher realities promulgated by their "leaders" beat all such notions out of them via the school of what was once called "hard knocks."

Of course, let it be said, Mr. Goldberg himself has little time for any hard knocks. Being the point of the spear isn't for him. He's just up for making some dough saying mildly shocking things to approving audiences. But he reveals the game a little too much. Perhaps Col. Alan West, who seems to dream of a life as the American Il Duce, will administer a little "talking to" to Goldberg back stage, something West has some experience in previous to becoming a politician.

[photo of the American Il Duce from tammybruce.com]

Update. Here's a nice idea:

http://wonkette.com/474213/why-i-am-challenging-jonah-goldberg-to-a-fight-for-charity-by-jamie-kilstein

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