“There’s always a trade-off,” announces the National Review’s Jonah Goldberg—sounding a bit, to my ears at least, like Jane Austin remarking on the marital inclinations of single men in possession of good fortunes1—“in calling attention to trollish, attention-seeking writers who don’t deserve a response on the merits.”
Well, with a throat clearing like that, you know that old Jonah is about to administer an extended, disingenuously jocular yet in fact violently ill-tempered beatdown to a trollish, attention-seeking writer, said writer being in this case Emerald Robinson, whom Jonah helpfully identifies for me as “a White House correspondent for the cable-TV network One America News,”
Emerald has published, in the American Spectator, which I will continue not to read, an essay titled “The Collapse of the Never-Trump Conservatives”, so trollish that in fact it asks the question “Who’s that trip-trapping over my bridge?”
The gist of Emmie’s jive is that so-called conservative folks like Jonah who won’t get on the Trump train are a pack and passel of sissy-britches old losers, limp of wrist and limp of dick, as well as limp of brain. “Who isn’t amused by the poindexter pretentiousness of George Will’s bow-ties,” she snickers, before descending into the sub-basement of shameless invective by scoffing at “the pseudo-scholarly piffle of Jonah Goldberg’s byline.”2 Oh snap, nez pah?
Well, there’s more, from both sides. For Emmie, there’s only one virtue: kissing Trump’s ass 24/7 and saying it smells like roses. For poor Jonah, well, he knows Trump’s ass doesn’t smell like roses, but he can’t quite bring himself to say that it smells like shit. And besides, the Democrats are just as bad!
Afterwords I
As I’ve said many times before,3 even “honest” Never-Trumpers like Bill Kristol and George Will, who oppose Trump consistently and without apology, unlike Jonah, who’s on again off again, spent decades unscrupulously ridiculing and lying about the Democratic Party and all its works, confident that the foundations of American democracy were so strong they could endure any amount of abuse. They were wrong. And now they have their reward.
Afterwords II
Ninety percent of the back and forth between Emmie and Jonah is of the “Am not! You’re another!” sort that doesn’t merit discussion, but here’s one “insult” from Emmie that I find just as offensive as Jonah does: “The greatest disconnect [between Trumpers and non-Trumpers] is religious and cultural: the Republican Party is overwhelmingly Caucasian and Christian and traditional on social issues, while its pundits skew Jewish and agnostic and libertarian.” So it’s “bad” to be Jewish, Emmie? And bad to be “non-Caucasian” as well? I guess you take that “One America” stuff pretty literally, don’t you?
UPDATE: Jonah not a “Never Trumper”. He just can’t stand Trump.
In his “Reply to Emmie”, referenced above, Jonah Goldberg denies being a “Never Trumper”—“a label I rejected after the election”, he tells us—but in his latest exasperated outburst, “The Trump Doctrine Is Trumpism Writ Large”, Jonah doesn’t sound much like a Semi Trumper: “The Trump Doctrine is taking form in a series of tweets, glandular outbursts at press conferences, and a series of seemingly inchoate policy rollouts.”
That’s about the size of it, Jonah.
- For Jane, of course, more polite than the Wife of Bath but just as practical, there was only one definition of a “good fortune”. ↩︎
- It’s particularly piquant, if not perfectly pleasant, to see neocons accused of being pantywaists, when that’s precisely the same insult they’ve been hurling at Democrats for the past umpteen years. ↩︎
- If these aren’t enough, go here or here. ↩︎
