The Goldberg Variations

While going back and forth with Jeffrey Goldberg, Mr, Sullivan said the unintentionally funniest damn thing I have heard in weeks:

And what he means, by the way, by "will not be argued with" is, from my perspective, that I will not be bullied by a single colleague into not writing things I believe are true. And he is right about that. But argue? I argue till the cows come home. I live for it. With anyone on most anything.

C'mon, Andrew.  This is bullshit and you know it.

There is one Very Large Subject you "...will not touch. Not today. Not tomorrow. Not wearing a HazMat suit. Not with a 20 foot barge pole."

You will not, will not, will not step into the arena over the simple, factual history of the American Conservative Movement -- a cause to which you have devoted so much of your adult life -- because you simply do not have the guts.  Because -- like so many Conservatives -- the simple truth terrifies you.

 A year ago I wrote --

...

Sullivan-style Conservatism rests on a foundation of overt dishonesty and a highly mythologized past, which is constantly refreshed and extended by the hilariously dodgy assertions being made by people like Mr. Sullivan.

This scam is abetted by a compliant press which is simply too cowardly to turn an honest and critical eye to the real record of Conservatism for the last 30 years, and its spokesmodels -- people like Mr. Sullivan and Davis Brooks -- who make absolutely sure they never get cornered in a venue where there is the slightest chance some goof will stand up and confront them over the many, many inconvenient truths that are always threatening to blow their own Conservative consensual hallucination apart.

Both [Sarah] Palin and Sullivan (and Brooks, and all the rest) rode to financial success and cultural prominence on the back of Fake Reagan and Fantasy Conservatism doing battle with Imaginary Liberals, and now neither Palin nor Sullivan (nor Brooks, nor all the rest) can afford to have people tugging at the bright, clear, awkward loose ends of the fictions on which they have built a living. 

...

-- which, as regular readers of this blog know, is one of literally hundreds of essays I and others have written about the Long Con being run by apostate Conservatives like Mr. Sullivan and Mr. Brooks.  I have written about how instantly they revert to lying or evasion and/or snotty condescension (or hilariously terse, hair-splitting emails to third-parties instead of directly to me) on those exceedingly rare occasions when someone catches them out in the open like hermit crabs scrambling between shells with a question about one of those "inconvenient truths that are always threatening to blow their own Conservative consensual hallucination apart."

So why bring this up now?

First consider this short, ugly recap of the history of Jeffrey Goldberg (from Glenn Greenwald/Salon in 2010):

The Jeffrey Goldberg Media

BY GLENN GREENWALD

...

Numerous commentators immediately noted the supreme and obvious irony that Goldberg, of all people, would anoint himself condescending arbiter of journalistic standards, given that, as one of the leading media cheerleaders for the attack on Iraq, he compiled a record of humiliating falsehood-dissemination in the run-up to the war that rivaled Judy Miller’s both in terms of recklessness and destructive impact.

Except unlike Miller, who was forced to leave the New York Times over what she did, and the NYT itself, which at least acknowledged some of the shoddy pro-war propaganda it churned out, Goldberg has never acknowledged his journalistic errors, expressed remorse for them, or paid any price at all.  To the contrary, as is true for most Iraq war propagandists, he thrived despite as a result of his sorry record in service of the war.  In 2007, David Bradley — the owner of The Atlantic and (in his own words) formerly “a neocon guy” who was “dead certain about the rightness” of invading Iraq  — lavished Goldberg with money and gifts, including ponies for Goldberg’s children, in order to lure him away fromThe New Yorker, where he had churned out most of his pre-war trash.  

One of his most obscenely false and damaging articles — this 2002 museum of deceitful, hideous journalism, “reporting” on Saddam’s “possible ties to Al Qaeda” — actually won an Oversea’s Press Award for — get this — “best international reporting in a print medium dealing with human rights.”  Goldberg, whose devotion to Israel is so extreme that he served in the IDF as a prison guard over Palestinians and was described last year as “Netanyahu’s faithful stenographer” by The New York Times’ Roger Cohen, wrote an even more falsehood-filled 2002 New Yorker article, warning that Hezbollah was planning a master, Legion-of-Doom alliance with Saddam Hussein for a “larger war,” and that “[b]oth Israel and the United States believe that, at the outset of an American campaign against Saddam, Iraq will fire missiles at Israel — perhaps with chemical or biological payloads — in order to provoke an Israeli conventional, or even nuclear, response,” though — Goldberg sternly warned — “Hezbollah, which is better situated than Iraq to do damage to Israel, might do Saddam’s work itself” and “its state sponsors, Iran and Syria, maintain extensive biological- and chemical-weapons programs.”  That fantastical, war-fueling screed — aimed at scaring Americans into targeting the full panoply of Israel’s enemies — actually won a National Magazine Award in 2003.  Given how completely discredited those articles are, those are awards which any person with an iota of shame would renounce and apologize for, but Goldberg continues to proudly tout them on his bio page at The Atlantic.

Despite all of those war-cheerleading deceits — or, again, because of them — Goldberg continues to be held out by America’s most establishment outlets as a preeminent expert in the region.  As Jonathan Schwarz documents, Goldberg is indeed very well-”trained” in the sense that establishment journalists mean that term:  i.e., as an obedient dog who spouts establishment-serving falsehoods.  That’s why Goldberg is worth examining:  he’s so representative of the American media because the more discredited his journalism becomes, the more blatant propaganda he spews, the more he thrives in our media culture.  That’s why it’s not hyperbole to observe that we are plagued by a Jeffrey Goldberg Media; he’s not an aberration but one of its most typical and illustrative members.

So...whatever else Mr. Goldberg might be, he is also a smearmonger and war pimp.

Got it?

A smearmonger and war pimp with whom Andrew Sullivan has been agreeably consorting for years and years.

A smearmonger and war pimp who Mr. Sullivan is now absolutely Shocked!Shocked! to discover would drop a full payload of lies and slander on Mr. Sullivan's head when it became convenient to do so.

Honestly, if one sentence could sum up Mr. Sullivan's career it might be --  a man who simply could not stop lying down with various right-wing ideological dogs...and who always expressed the same, stunned surprise when, each time, he got up covered with ideological fleas.

Me?

I regularly take Mr. Sullivan to the woodshed with what could fairly be described very blunt and vivid language.  I do not do it gratuitously, or out of pique: instead I genuinely belief that this subject -- vivisecting the cancer of the American Conservative movement, and honestly discussing exactly how the modern Right was created and unleashed --  is vitally important to our future as a democracy.

This is a Movement with which Mr. Sullivan has been deeply involved for decades -- a Movement which he crossed oceans and continents to join -- a Movement to which he completely owes his career -- and a Movement about which he refuses to argue honestly.  And unlike Mr. Goldberg, however sharp my language might be, I do not lie about Mr. Sullivan.  I do not impute to him positions her has never taken or words he has never written.  I simply bring up a subject -- over and over again -- which makes people like Mr. Sullivan very, very uncomfortable.

Which brings us back to the matter at hand:  Mr. Sullivan's assertion that he will gladly "...argue till the cows come home. I live for it. With anyone on most anything."

Really?

Since moving to the "Daily Beast", here is the level of engagement Mr. Sullivan has afforded his longtime Neocon running buddy, Jeffrey Goldberg, even though -- as Mr. Sullivan has apparently failed to notice until just right now -- his buddy is a rather notorious smearmonger and war pimp:

Which is an incredibly high number, even when you factor "Jonah Goldberg" out of the search total.

 ...and factor in the term "Goldblog" (Jeffrey Goldberg's nickname for his site)...





Of course, even this amazingly high level of engagement is dwarfed by the amount of traffic Mr. Sullivan drives into the arms of his good friend David Frum:  the neoconservative and former George W. Bush speechwriter.




which is neither here nor there, except that is underscores the point that Mr. Sullivan clearly has no compunction engaging some sketchy and often dishonest people -- on a large and sustained basis. -- as long as those people shared the same Conservative stinkhole with him back in the Fifth Column glory days.

But those days are over, and those people were wrong.  Brutally, spectacular wrong, for a long time and about a lot of very important things.

So how does Mr. Sullivan deal with those who ask the next, logical questions?  Questions about how these fools ever got to run anything to begin with?   Questions about how  the long, long, bloody, bigoted downward arc of the Modern Conservative movement was ignored by its leading intellectuals decade after decade?   Questions about how those who were so complicit for so long still command the loyalty of their colleagues long after their actual words and deeds should have flunked them out of any decent person's good graces?   Questions about why those who were right all along are still treated as pariahs?  Questions about who runs the American Conservative movement -- about exactly how the modern Right was built and set in motion?

Because there are those who ask those questions, Mr. Sullivan.

Who ask them again and again and again.

For smearmongers and war pimps the door is always open.  The microphone always live.

For us who ask the serious questions that terrify you

only silence.