Jonah Goldberg needs to get a life. He seems to have nothing to ponder besides why liberals hate America. In his latest angst-ridden, rambling diatribe, Goldberg remarks on a PEW survey that found fewer Americans today think America “stands above all other countries in the world.” Naturally, he blames liberals, saying that, “The polling data only proves what has been obvious for a while,” which (wait for the drum roll), is that liberals aren’t proud of America.
What’s obvious, is that Goldberg is ignoring the point that the survey found the decline to be “particularly acute among Republicans.” That doesn’t jibe with Goldberg’s long-held world view that liberals hate America, so Goldberg jumps from his selective reference to the Pew survey to taking Georgia Rep. John Lewis to task for saying that, “If the Civil Rights Act was before the Congress today, it would not pass, it would probably never make it to the floor for a vote.” Goldberg slyly implies that Lewis, who risked his life multiple times challenging Jim Crow laws in the South, is applying reverse racism against Republicans, although even Goldberg is hard pressed to do this without at least mentioning congressional gridlock. I have news for Mr. Goldberg, not only would the Civil Rights Act not pass, it isn’t even surviving Republican efforts to dismantle it at the federal and state levels.Showing his remarkable dexterity with hyperbolic prose, Goldberg leaps to the Supreme Court’s decision in the Hobby Lobby case and rants about Hillary Clinton’s “shocking, inarticulate” criticism of the decision and lumps it together with the “glib anti-Americanism” of liberals generally, who have the temerity to call the decision partisan, sexist, and religiously motivated, and who not only hate America, but seemingly love soccer, which is doubly bad, because America is clearly not exceptional at it.
The idea that Americans should consider soccer seriously more than once every two years during the World Cup (the women play, too, and won the championship twice, but only liberals care about that) is the strange segue for Goldberg’s next foray into liberals’ denial of “American exceptionalism.”Goldberg lambasts President Obama for his remarks during a foreign policy speech at West Point during which he said, “I believe in American exceptionalism with every fiber of my being. But what makes us exceptional is not our ability to flout international norms and the rule of law; it is our willingness to affirm them through our actions.” According to Goldberg, American exceptionalism is, “a complex concept describing the uniqueness of the American founding and American character,” and Goldberg resents the President reducing the concept of American exceptionalism to the idea that actions speak louder than words. Of course he does, because Goldberg is all about words; words thrown out helter-skelter as in this piece in the hopes of hitting a responsive conservative chord.
Least he fail to hit that chord in the first 17 paragraphs of his 19 paragraph polemic, he throws in this dally in his final two, to wit, the Tea Party is full of patriotic Americans, who are thwarting liberals attempts to impose European style socialism in America and “liberal resentment over that fact is palpable.”Yeah, and soccer isn’t real football, either!
