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This is why we love Jonah Goldberg

Bookworm on Nov 07 2008 at 5:51 pm | Filed under: Uncategorized

To anyone who thinks about it, everything Goldberg says is true and obvious, but people don’t think about these things, and he writes so beautifully:

Ever since the primaries, Democrats have been promising to be “agents of change” (which kind of sounds like a brand of James Bond villain; watch out — he’s an agent of C*H*A*N*G*E). It’s a weird quirk of our television-soaked culture that we think change is a good in and of itself. The phrase “change the channel” is a ubiquitous explanation for voters’ desire to be done with President Bush. Fair enough, but change has no moral content. Winning the lottery is change, and so is catching a ball peen hammer to the bridge of your nose. The desire for change for change’s sake is the stuff of children and attention-deficit disorder.

Speaking of children, the national obsession with the “youth vote” is one of the great embarrassments of deliberative democracy. Why is the participation of youth so vital? According to “youth activists” themselves, it’s because they bring so much “passion” to politics. Passion, again, is not necessarily a good thing. Mobs and small children are passionate. There was a time when voting was supposed to be a matter for sober, mature reflection. Now it’s more like a fashion statement. “In America,” remarked Oscar Wilde long ago, “the young are always ready to give those who are older than themselves the full benefits of their inexperience.” The only difference now is they get to vote.

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10 Responses to “This is why we love Jonah Goldberg”

on 07 Nov 2008 at 11:08 pm 1sillielizzie

I’ve just started reading his book “Liberal Fascism”, and after one chapter, I’m electrified! Its like I’ve been seeing all the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle and now he’s putting it all together for me.
on 08 Nov 2008 at 9:12 am 2suek

When you’ve finished it, read “Shadow Warriors” by Timmerman. Completely different, but also electrifyingly enlightening.
on 08 Nov 2008 at 10:36 am 3Rounded up for Nov. 8, 2008 « Judson’s Corral

[...] that defined so much of the coverage discussion this year.” Yes, let’s. (hat tip: Bookworm Room) Hmmm. I wonder if Mr. Goldberg has read Charles J. Chaput’s Little Murders [...]
on 08 Nov 2008 at 11:59 am 4suek

Ok…I give up. Can’t find an appropriate place to plant this link. Still, it sort of fits in with “Shadow Warriors”…the undercover agents in strategic positions with an agend different from that which their position indicates it _should_ be….

http://directorblue.blogspot.com/2008/11/899mo-bmw-lease-payments-of-mediacrats.html
on 08 Nov 2008 at 2:32 pm 5BrianE

Oh, oh. The bloom is off the rose, the honeymoon is over. The left has seen the first glimpse of an Obama administration, and they don’t like what they see.

I read on one blog, “if we wanted these people, we would’ve voted for Hillary”.

They may be liberals and the bus definately careened left, but not enough for Obama’s primary base. Is that the sound of tires running over the far left?

Obama’s Change Leaves
By The Back Door

By Tom Eley

07 November, 2008
WSWS.org

Three days after Barack Obama’s election victory, the initial moves by the president-elect to prepare his administration already show that his policies will be determined not by popular expectations, but by the domestic and foreign policy interests of the American financial and corporate elite.

Obama and Democratic congressional leaders are well aware that these policies—further measures to secure the social interests and personal wealth of the financial aristocracy at public expense and the continued use of military violence in the Middle East and Central Asia—clash with the will of the electorate, which sought to reverse these policies by sweeping the Republicans out of power. That is why the Democrats are seeking to dampen expectations of a serious change of course.

The personnel of Obama’s transition team and his first major appointment stand in obvious contradiction to his campaign rhetoric about “change,” “new politics,” and “building a movement from the ground up.” The individuals selected are all fixtures of the political establishment, with close ties to powerful corporate and financial interests.

Obama’s transition team, which will assist in assembling his cabinet, is headed by John Podesta, former chief of staff to Bill Clinton and one of Washington’s most successful corporate lobbyists. Co-chairing the transition team are Valerie Jarrett, a long-time Obama advisor, Chicago real estate executive and influential figure within the Chicago Democratic Party machine, and Pete Rouse, a Washington insider and Obama’s senate chief of staff. (See: “A closer look at Obama’s transition team”).

Obama’s first appointee is Rahm Emanuel, who will serve as his chief of staff. The Illinois Congressman is a leading member of the right-wing Democratic Leadership Council. While running for Congress in 2002, he supported Bush’s bill to authorize military force against Iraq. A former investment banker, he has close ties to financial interests and is one of the biggest recipients of campaign cash from banks and investment firms.

Sources close to Obama have leaked names on the list of candidates for the position of treasury secretary—no doubt as a means of reassuring Wall Street. Included are former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, former Clinton treasury secretary and current Citigroup executive Robert Rubin, another former Clinton treasury secretary, Lawrence Summers, and Timothy Geithner, the New York Federal Reserve Bank president.

All of these individuals played leading roles in the deregulation of the banks and investment houses that facilitated the super-profits and massive CEO compensation packages of the 1990s and first half of the current decade, and contributed to the financial collapse that is now plunging the US and the rest of the world into the deepest recession since the 1930s.

http://www.countercurrents.org/eley071108.htm
on 08 Nov 2008 at 2:41 pm 6suek

Heh.

Be careful what you wish for – you might get it.
on 08 Nov 2008 at 2:42 pm 7Ymarsakar

Brian, Obama needs cash: organized crime always needs cash if they want to loot some place. Obama needs a lot of cash and a lot of favors from powerful people to loot America of her wealth.
on 08 Nov 2008 at 2:44 pm 8Ymarsakar

The thing is, Democrats are fine with corrupt elites. They are the corrupt elites after all. They are owned by the corrupt elites, intellectuals, and top 1% wealthy in this nation.

When they are told to do something by their leaders, they will do it. If any believed that they were deciding their own course in life by voting for Obama, they were just deluding themselves. They have elected a God and you cannot argue with your God.
on 08 Nov 2008 at 3:17 pm 9BrianE

From that same CounterCurrents article, profiling each of the insiders in the Obama transition team:

Valerie Jarrett

Jarrett began her political career in 1987 under then-Chicago Mayor Harold Washington. She became deputy chief of staff for Mayor Richard Daley and later served as Chicago’s commissioner of the Department of Planning and chair of the Chicago Transit Board.

Jarrett has also held leading positions on the Chicago Stock Exchange (member of the board from 2000 to 2007 and chairman from 2004 to 2007), the University of Chicago Medical Center (chairman of the board of trustees), the University of Chicago (vice chairman of the board of trustees) and the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry (board of trustees).

Jarrett is the CEO of The Habitat Company, a real estate development firm in Chicago. She has been a top executive at the company since 1995, becoming CEO in 2007. Habitat has worked closely with the Chicago city administration to oversee public housing, receiving millions in local and federal subsidies.

A Boston Globe article from June 27, 2008 (”Grim Proving Ground for Obama’s Housing Policy,” by Binyamin Appelbaum) describes the state of one 504-unit public housing complex, Grove Parc Plaza, located in Obama’s former state Senate district.

“About 99 units are vacant, many rendered uninhabitable by unfixed problems, such as collapsed roofs and fire damage. Mice scamper through the halls. Battered mailboxes hang open. Sewage backs up into kitchen sinks. In 2006, federal inspectors graded the condition of the complex an 11 on a 100-point scale—a score so bad the buildings now face demolition.”

“Grove Parc has become a symbol,” the newspaper noted, “for some in Chicago of the broader failures of giving public subsidies to private companies to build and manage affordable housing—an approach strongly backed by Obama as the best replacement for public housing.”

The Globe reports “thousands of apartments” throughout Chicago, overseen by Habitat, that are characterized by similar disrepair. The Habitat Company “managed Grove Parc Plaza from 2001 until this winter and co-managed an even larger subsidized complex in Chicago that was seized by the federal government in 2006, after city inspectors found widespread problems.”

There is some talk that Jarrett will be named housing secretary in the Obama administration.

This is too good to pass up. This may define the Obama administration.
on 08 Nov 2008 at 4:36 pm 10suek

In case you need photos to imagine this…

http://directorblue.blogspot.com/2008/11/souvenir-postcard-collection-celebrates.html