First, an admssion. I read the LA Times every day. But I'm also an American every day, and I don't have to prove my loyalty to either institution. That's my right as a journalist in the case of the former and a citizen in the case of the latter. So first principles in my wing of reality dictate that when the facts, evidence and other data collected outside the realm of hyperreality say things aren't going badly, they're going nowhere...well, facts are facts.
Not so, according to Jonah Goldberg -- the hellspawn of Lucianne Goldberg, collaborator to Linda Tripp and a Jeff Gannon before her time. And one would have to venture to include the Los Angeles Times in that pack of rats. After all, Jonah's leaky logic loops are paraded in the Opinion pages of the Times. Every time I turn around, another one of his circular projections is tainting the media's screens and turning a routine perusal of the Los Angeles Times into a sanity test.
Take his recent column for example, a limp defense of the Bush administration's total failure at pretty much every level of government, excepting of course their unparalelled talent for rewarding their donors and backers. They do that better than anyone, which is in fact the only reason anyone with any healthy sense of the world defends them at all. They know the House always wins.
Goldberg's twisted diction and phrasing, as is always the case with propagandists, are instructive -- and as transparent as the recent White House attempts to tar its opposition as Hitler lovers. As self-appointed ministers of truth, Goldberg and the Bush administration he loves to coddle (and cuddle) a bit too much with have decided also that they, like propagandists before them, are also the stand-alone arbiters of truth. Which is a huge difference, but increasingly hard to notice in our hyperreal echo chamber.
Take the Iraq "invasion," which Goldberg admits (after asking himself, of course, like all the rightnuts like to do), is "going badly." But then, like a suspicious lover, he pulls back from the brink, arguing that it would be crazy to deny it hasn't, but that it would be "cruel" to argue Bush meant it to flop. Well, I know some Iraqis -- OK a whole country of them! -- who'd argue that one, and they live there. Last I checked, Goldberg does not. Reality strike number one.
As for Goldberg's projection metric -- which I invented to catalogue the ways in which the Bush administration ineptly transmits their core values without knowing it -- check his piece's initial straw-man paragraph, wherein Goldberg pretends to bash a man he has come to defend by using these loaded terms in succession: "problems," "Bush," "monkey," "cocaine," "addiction," "falling backward." That's not supposed to make you wonder? I'm just saying. Sifting this way, Goldberg's logic comes into view. It can be thus translated as, "Yes, the president is a cocaine monkey who can't stop falling down, so it would be cruel to argue he screwed Iraq and America on purpose." Much clearer, isn't it?
The fun continues with Goldberg inviting Bush-bashers to email him, disguised as a snarky toss-off about how much hate mail he'll get for arguing that America, whose majority has incontrovertibly stated that it thinks the Bush administration are tools and Iraq is over, should "cut the guy some slack." Of course, he never offers any concrete reasons for why anyone should call the guy who loves to be called Commander-in-Chief to account for nothing but failures, relying instead on establishing Bush's legitimacy by doing what Cheney and Rumsfeld -- or Chumsfeld, as I like to call that freaky two-headed hydra -- are doing now: trashing the opposition.
This time, it's the credibility of the "Bush-bashers," a diaphanous term which we can only guess translates as "anyone who disagrees with the president's administration" (the majority of America, to beat a dead horse), which is the problem. Why? Because the source for the Plame outing was Richard Armitage not Karl Rove. Goldberg's logic loops kick into overdrive here: "Now it turns out that instead of 'Bush blows CIA agent's cover to silence a brave dissenter' -- as Wilson practices saying into the mirror every morning -- the story is, 'One Bush enemy inadvertently taken out by another's friendly fire.'" Nice theory, but it misses crucial points, especially the fact that Armitage was in the employ of none other than Bush to sell, what else, the war in Iraq. Armitage's boss Colin Powell (remember him?) sold the war to the U.N.
So yeah, no dice there. After that, Goldberg goes off the reservation like a true neocon, locked in a self-constructed house of mirrors. Inside of it, his inner propagandist shines so bright that his inhumanity and illogic come into sharp relief:
On Katrina: "Yes, the federal government could have responded better. And of course there were real tragedies involved in that disaster. But you know what? Bad stuff happens during disasters, which is why we don't call them tickle-parties." How sensitive.
On Jealousy: "Democrats love to note that Bush hasn't caught Osama bin Laden yet." Good point. More fodder for the projection metric.
On Fantasy: "But even nicer than catching Bin Laden is not having thousands of dead Americans in New York, Washington and L.A. Contrary to all expert predictions, there hasn't been a successful attack on the homeland since 9/11....the U.S. is in fact winning the war on terror, thanks largely to Bush's policies."
On Optimism: "Things could obviously be a lot better. But they could be a lot worse too." Now that's taking a stand, Jonah!
Man, I haven't had that much fun reading an administration stooge fumble through the fundamentals of philosophy and credulity since Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf, Iraq's ex-Minister of Information, fed the same everything-will-be-alright bullshit to a Baghdad set to burn. Like al-Sahaf, like Chumsfeld, like all the Bush mouthpieces, Jonah Goldberg isn't doing anything else besides mixing and matching terms, phrases and premises and hoping that, like the neocon's Iraq fantasyland, it all holds together. Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Times is content to let an obviously fact-challenged dork rant for it on the regular. Does that amount to collusion, something that would tarnish not just the credibility of the LA Times, but of print media in general? (You can find a deranged loudmouth anywhere online.) Can anyone truly complain about Wikipedia's credibility after this type of back-scratching?
That's for you to decide, because you are the readers. Us journalists have to find jobs anywhere we can, and tell the truth or lies to people for a living, pretending it's not our bottom lines that matter. Which is where Goldberg's true motivation resides: He just wants a job. Like AT&T, Halliburton, Verizon, Wal-Mart and Custer Battles, he's throwing his money down with the house. Even if the house is burning down. He practically admits it himself, albeit in his own hidden way: "Here's a wacky idea: Maybe it's not all Bush's fault."
"Wacky." "Bush." "Fault." Like I said, projection.