Hunter Smacks Jonah

As a blogger at DailyKos, Hunter seldom disappoints. Today, he takes on second generation uber-wanker Jonah Goldberg, and his toxic waste dump of a LA Times column.

...But Jonah Goldberg has, in his own columns, a special gift. He manages, week after week, to cut through all the fluff of actual analysis or insight. From any conversation or controversy he can cleanly strip away all new information and ideas, all creative thought, all inventiveness, managing to debone both the substance and appeal of any argument as cleanly as a butcher dispenses with the carcass of a cow. If you want to know the mere husk of a conservative idea, without being subjected to any of the underlying logic, Jonah is the mind for you. If you want the thinnest, most translucent version of a conservative argument about any given issue or event, he can oblige. There is no brain-injuring analysis in a Jonah Goldberg column, no central core of facts, no calculated veneer of respectability painted onto the conservative arguments. Jonah is the conservative protopundit, the conservative that is so primal and simplistic in his analysis that you can see directly through to the innermost biases, unencumbered by evolution.

In his arguments, Jonah can peel an orange and toss everything but the rind, leaving a fascinating representation of what, in actual punditry, might have led to an actual moment of cleverness or insight. For Jonah the insights are mere bumps along his predetermined path. You can tell the destination of each column not just before it is read, but before it is even written: the arguments are that bland, the insults that predictable, the chosen topics that banal. And so when treated to a Goldbergian analysis of whether the liberal netroots are better accomplished online than their conservative counterparts, we can presume that the entire depth of the discussion will be reduced to an assertion of nuh-uh, and left at that.