Posts By Author » Jonah Goldberg

Which kind of capitalism? A debate for Obama and Romney
23 May 2012 12:02 am

“This is not a distraction, this is what this campaign is going to be about,” President Obama said Monday at the NATO summit. The “this” in question is Mitt Romney’s tenure at Bain Capital and what it says about Romney’s economic vision for the country.
Team Romney should have seen this coming. If Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry were willing to rip Romney for being too capitalistic in the Republican primary, it doesn’t take a lot of imagination to expect that Obama and Vice President Joe Biden would happily do the …

Generation pap
18 May 2012 12:03 am

This is the season of generational twaddle. At graduation ceremonies across the country, politicians, authors, actors and businessmen take to the stage to tell young people they are fantastic simply because they are young. This year, the ritual is more pathetic than usual because there’s a presidential election in the offing. And because the current occupant of the White House won in 2008 in no small part due to his success with the “youth vote,” he is desperate for them to repeat their blunder.
At the all-women’s school Barnard College, President …

Romney’s media handicap
16 May 2012 12:01 am

Perhaps Mitt Romney played it right when he was meek and contrite in response to the Washington Post’s front-page allegations that he bullied a kid half a century ago in high school.
Romney no doubt feels embarrassed by the charges, even if most of us struggle to understand their relevance or gauge their veracity. But the time is coming for Romney to get angry, very angry, with what is increasingly, quaintly called “the mainstream media.”
The Post’s decision to play up the story as if it were major news — front page, …

‘Money primary’ pushes Obama to the left
11 May 2012 12:03 am

For most of 2012, President Obama has been running in the Democratic primary. I know that seems odd given that he’s essentially running unopposed. Though don’t tell that to West Virginia Democrats, who cast nearly half of their votes for Keith Judd, an inmate currently serving time in a Texarkana, Texas, prison. Judd received 41 percent of the vote. In 1968, Eugene McCarthy received 42 percent of the vote and forced incumbent Lyndon Johnson from the race.
But that’s not what I’m talking about. It’s important to remember that primaries serve …

Romney feeds the crocs
9 May 2012 12:02 am

“If Mitt Romney can be pushed around, intimidated, coerced, co-opted by a conservative radio talk show host in Middle America, then how is he going to stand up to the Chinese? How is he going to stand up to Putin?” So asked Bryan Fischer, a radio host with the American Family Association, after claiming credit for Richard Grenell’s scalp.
Grenell is the openly gay former foreign policy spokesman for the Romney campaign. Before that, he worked for Ambassador John Bolton at the United Nations, easily the most revered diplomatic official among …

Republicans have bad brains?
3 May 2012 12:02 am

“They do that because they were born that way.”
If you say that about homosexuals, you are tolerant and realistic. If you say it about blacks, you are racist (unless you’re black yourself). If you say it about women, you may or may not be sexist, depending on who is manning (er, womanning) the feminist battle stations. If you say it about men, you just might be a writer for Esquire. But if you say it about conservatives, you’re a scientist.
Over the past decade, a new fad has taken hold among …

The false modesty of ‘nerds’
2 May 2012 12:01 am

Washington is full of nerds. I know. I speak nerd, not fluently mind you, at least not anymore. But I certainly know more than a few phrases memorized from a Berlitz nerd-to-English phrase book. I can talk Dungeons & Dragons (both D&D and AD&D). I know about the Golden Age of Comics (as in comic books — if you thought that was a reference to Bob Newhart’s heyday, subtract 20 nerd points right there).
Anyway, if you spend any time in Washington you’ll find nerds. What happens is most of them …

My papers? No thank you
27 Apr 2012 12:03 am

With the Supreme Court taking up Arizona’s “show me your papers” immigration law, we’re once again thrust into a useful debate over the role of the government and the obligations of the citizen — and non-citizen. Rather than come at it from the usual angle, I thought I’d try something different.
If there were one thing I could impress upon people about the nature of the state, it’s that governments by their very nature want to make their citizens “legible.”
I borrow that word from James C. Scott, whose book “Seeing Like …

Obama’s tainted bundler
25 Apr 2012 12:01 am

Jon Corzine left Goldman Sachs with a net worth far exceeding even that of Mitt Romney today. Many accounts of his tenure at Goldman suggest he “failed up” the corporate ladder.
Pushed out of Goldman in a power struggle (sparked in part by his support for a government bailout of Long-Term Capital Management), he nonetheless pocketed somewhere between $350 million and $500 million when the company went public. He used the cash to buy himself a Senate seat, spending $62 million out of his own pocket.
After the Senate, he spent nearly …

Issues vs. ‘distractions’
20 Apr 2012 12:02 am

It’s going to be bait and switch for as far as the eye can see.
That’s how it looks now that the smoke has cleared after the recent “Mommy War” skirmish over Democratic operative Hilary Rosen’s comment that mother of five Ann Romney had “never worked a day in her life.”
There’s no need to re-litigate all of that again. If Rosen apologized any more she’d have to sever a digit Yakuza-style. And the White House couldn’t distance itself more if they dispatched the Secret Service to burn down Rosen’s house and …

Obama’s problem? His record
18 Apr 2012 12:01 am

“The choice in this election is between an economy that produces a growing middle class and that gives people a chance to get ahead and their kids a chance to get ahead, and an economy that continues down the road we are on, where a fewer and fewer number of people do very well and everybody else is running faster and faster just to keep pace.”
That’s Obama advisor David Axelrod on “Fox News Sunday,” explaining why people should vote for … Barack Obama.
Odds are this was simply poor phrasing. But …

In battle for young voters, Romney should play it uncool
13 Apr 2012 12:03 am

President Obama’s re-election largely hinges on his ability to play young voters for suckers — again — and whether Mitt Romney will let him.
In 2008, Obama won the youth vote by better than a 2-1 margin, 66 percent to 32 percent. Even more impressive, he actually expanded the share of young voters going to the polls by some 3 million. Those extra voters helped tip several swing states.
Obama owed his success to being a charming political unknown onto whom young people could project their hopes. His rhetoric was a hipsterized …

Free the markets, Mr. Romney
11 Apr 2012 12:02 am

In his Wisconsin victory speech last Tuesday, Mitt Romney said, “Washington has to become an ally of business, not the opposition of business.”
This to me is a more worrisome statement than his communications advisor’s gaffe about Etch A Sketches or Romney’s shout-out to NASCAR team owners.
Over the last few years, the country has been subjected to a tutorial about the role of government. Thanks to the efforts of the Tea Party and, of course, the teaching by example of the Obama administration, a lot more Americans understand the problems with …

Obama energy policy: very few of the above
6 Apr 2012 12:03 am

In his speech before the Newspapers Association of America/American Society of News Editors Wednesday, likely GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney accused the president of changing positions to get re-elected.
For instance, Romney charged that, “As president,” Obama “delayed the development of our oil and coal and natural gas. Now, as candidate Obama, he says he favors an energy policy that adopts an all-of-the-above approach.”
That’s not exactly right.
Yes, Obama still says he’s in favor of an all-of-the-above energy policy, but that hasn’t slowed him down in his pursuit of his very-few-of-the-above policy.
Back …

Obamacare will be Romney’s savior
4 Apr 2012 12:02 am

It looks as if it’s going to be Mitt Romney after all. With Paul Ryan, Marco Rubio and Jeb Bush endorsing the former Massachusetts governor last week, there aren’t any white knights left to play the role of GOP savior.
But that news hasn’t reached his competitors yet.
Psychoanalyzing the remaining contenders for why they are staying in the race is probably a fool’s errand. Ron Paul has never worked under the assumption he might be the nominee, never mind the next president. Newt Gingrich often seems like he wants to shake …

Conservative interpretations
30 Mar 2012 12:03 am

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg likes the Indian Healthcare Improvement Act and other ingredients of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, aka “ObamaCare.” Why, she asked toward the end of three days of hearings, shouldn’t the court keep the good stuff in ObamaCare and just dump the unconstitutional bits?
The court, she explained, is presented with “a choice between a wrecking operation … or a salvage job. And the more conservative approach would be salvage rather than throwing out everything.”
“Conservative” is a funny word. It can mean lots of …

Playing the race card again
28 Mar 2012 12:01 am

“White Hispanic.” That’s how the New York Times, Reuters and other media outlets have opted to describe George Zimmerman, a man who would simply be Hispanic if he hadn’t shot and killed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin. The term, rarely if ever used before this tragedy, is necessary in telling the Martin story in a more comfortable way.
What’s the comfortable way? It’s the way the blame for Martin’s death belongs squarely at the feet of “the system.” And “the system” is a white thing, don’t you know.
For instance, in a remarkably uncritical …

A Fawlty slip of the tongue
23 Mar 2012 12:03 am

There’s a great old “Fawlty Towers” scene (if you’re unfamiliar with the 1970s British sitcom, hie thyself to YouTube!) in which Basil Fawlty (John Cleese), an innkeeper, welcomes some German patrons. He gives explicit orders to everyone: “Don’t mention the war!” He then proceeds to mention the uncomfortable subject of World War II over and over again.
In one scene, after blurting out references to the war a dozen times while seating the Germans at the restaurant, he says to his wife, “Listen, don’t mention the war! I mentioned it once, …

The federalist solution
21 Mar 2012 12:02 am

The bleating about broken government and partisanship continues. “Why can’t those boobs in Washington agree on anything?” We’re constantly told that the way to fix the country is to dethrone the left and right and empower the middle. Americans Elect, No Labels, the Gangs of Six and Fourteen, conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans: Handing things over to these middling mincers and half-a-loafers is supposed to be the answer to all of our problems. It’s as if we should just put Nelson Rockefeller’s mug on the dollar bill and be done …

Politics: A never-ending game of ‘hot potato’
16 Mar 2012 12:03 am

Warning: What you are about to read is a deeply cynical view of the 2012 election. If you’re looking for puppies and rainbows, check back with me another time.
Many conservatives feel like this is the most important election in our lifetimes because we desperately need to reverse the damage done by the Obama administration and get the economy moving again.
Indeed, each of the remaining GOP hopefuls makes some version of this argument. They will fix what Obama (or Washington) has broken. The president, meanwhile, like a little kid smashing a …

Who Is Brett Kimberlin?

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