The World O' Crap Archive

Welcome to the Collected World O' Crap, a comprehensive library of posts from the original Salon Blog, and our successor site, world-o-crap.com (2006 to 2010).

Current posts can be found here.

Monday, February 21, 2011

The Winter of His Discontent

While sitting in his office with the door closed, fantasizing about his new intern bringing him a late night pizza and then flashing her thong, Jonah cast about for an insight on the post-election landscape, and settled on this:


Yes, after the shellacking Jonah’s team received at the polls, partly from angry Latinos and blacks, he concludes that the best way for the Republicans to shed their image as the party of white privilege is to attack affirmative action.

Really. He does. Because like the criminal who always returns to the scene of the crime, pundits like Jonah — who are all as hollow as a cheap chocolate Easter bunny — invariably return to the same bankrupt themes. This week, it’s “just as water always finds its own level, blacks should also be allowed to stagnate and breed mosquitos if they ever hope to graduate from law school.” To buttress his argument, Jonah quotes Peter Kirsanow, a member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, and a man who cares so deeply about the subject that he testified in favor of Sam Alito’s nomination to the Supreme Court, and warned Arab-Americans at a meeting in Detroit that if terrorists launch another successful attack on American soil, “and they come from the same ethnic group that attacked the World Trade Center, you can forget about civil rights.”

So basically, Civil Rights Commissioner Kirsanow is Edward G. Robinson in The Ten Commandments, tauting Charleton Heston’s Moses, “Where’s your Bill of Rights now?” Or, maybe he’s just incredibly bad at winning friends and influencing people, as Max Blumenthal hinted when he wrote in the Huffington Post:
Kirsanow continued by urging his [Arab-American] audience to drop their opposition to the Patriot Act. After all, he said, if Arabs attack the U.S. again, “not too many people will be crying in their beer if there are more detentions, more stops, more profiling.”
If this represents the quality of “sources” quoted in Jonah’s “book,” then I just might have to load up on G-strings and French cut briefs and take the intern job myself; because the footnotes promise to be a hilarious wonderland of verdant skies, pink unicorns, and Ann Coulter-shaped toadstools.  But in all fairness, Jonah doesn’t need some political appointee with the diplomatic finesse of John Bolton to make his points vapid and self-contradicting; he can handle that himself, thank you very much:
Today’s diversity doctrine was contrived as a means of making racial preferences permanent.
As opposed to, say, evolving as a means of maintaining social homeostasis in a country which has traditionally benefited from foreign cultural influences, and which is undergoing tectonic shifts in demographics.  Nah, I’m sure Jonah’s right, and the whole thing is just a scam designed to keep Jesse Jackson in zoot suits.
After all, affirmative action was intended as a temporary remedy for the tragic mistreatment of blacks. But as affirmative action drifted into racial preferences, it became constitutionally suspect because racial preferences are by definition discriminatory. If I give extra credit to Joe because he’s black, I’m making things just that much harder for Tom because he’s white.
Man, it sucks being white.  Mostly it just grinds you down; it’s exhausting, all the extra effort you have to expend just to perform some simple, ordinary, everyday task, like pledging Skull & Bones, or applying for a job at Dean Witter, or getting elected to Congress.  You look around and what do you see?  Nothing but other white faces!  The competition is frigging ridiculous!  No wonder we all look the same to them.  You gotta pity that poor bastard Tom, not having the luck and foresight to be born a poor black child.
When the University of Michigan’s admissions policies were being reviewed by the Supreme Court, former school president Lee Bollinger explained that diversity was as “as essential as the study of the Middle Ages, of international politics and of Shakespeare” because exposure to people of different hues lies at the core of the educational experience. That’s another way of saying that racial preferences are forever, just like the timeless works of the immortal bard. That business about redressing past discrimination against blacks is no longer the name of the game.
Emphasis mine.  So, Jonah gets to define “diversity “in his own Humpty Dumptian way, then when the rest of the world acts as though that word might have another, more generally accepted meaning, he’s allowed to get huffy and accuse them of being deceitful, ’cause his Mom said he was!  Hm.  What is the name of that game?
Oh.  That’s right.  Calvinball.
There was a time when condescension, discrimination, arrogant social engineering along racial lines and the like were dubbed racism. And, to paraphrase Shakespeare, racism by any other name still stinks.
And if I had to pick a Shakespearan character whom Jonah most reminded me of, it would probably be Richard III; not because of his lousy posture, but because, like the Duke of Gloucester, Jonah is apparently, “deformed, unfinished, sent before [his] time into this breathing world, scarce half made up.”  In other words, he’s as underdone as the Pillbury Doughboy, and should crawl back into the Bronson Canyon Cave-like birth canal of his mother and not come out again until he grows a soul.
Or better yet, he should read this brief, but brilliant post by Doghouse Riley.  SFW*.  NSFtS**.

*Safe For Work.
**Not Safe For the Soulless.

16 Responses to “The Winter of His Discontent”

So Lucianne Goldberg’s son is lashing out against the unfairness of affirmative action?
At least Richard III did his own dirty work to become king.
While affirmitive is a double-edged sword, it’s only a short-term answer. If we could improve the conditions of poor, Black neighborhood and eliminate racism (good luck with that), there’d be less need for it.
And if people like Jonah Goldberg could recognize that need they might be able to write intelligent commentary on the subject. (note I don’t say people such as Jonah.
It doesn’t matter whether there’s anything filling the slot where Goldberg’s conscience should be. Anyone with the least familiarity with the history of racism and sexism in this country would not prop up the “reverse discrimination” argument just because some white kid suffers a (theoretical) minor disappointment. We can find a trillion bucks to kill us some brown people, but making an effort to correct 400 years of vile mistreatment of minorities on this continent, like providing adequate medical care, nutrition, or competitive schools is anathema, because somebody, somewhere might get something he doesn’t deserve.
Michelle Malkin and Glenn Beck should remind Jonah that white people are becoming a minority in this country and soon he’ll be able to benefit from affirmative action.
(Man, having that sentence in my brain even long enough to type it killed thousands of cells.)
because somebody, somewhere might get something he doesn’t deserve.
Like nobody does.
Oh, wait…
You were talking about white folks! Oops.
OK, since nobody seems willing to go… there, I guess I gots ta! This is all everyone else’s fault, damn it, so blame yourself. Or, each other. Feh.
Y’know, if this awful affirmative action stuff keeps up, some day black men will be able to claim “a certain sexual confidence befitting a former cheerleader at Ole Miss.”
Gah. Now I must go blow my brains out.
.
(not really, but GAAAAAAAAHH!!1!!)
Yes, Marq, that elusive, “certain sexual confidence” was not available to Jonah Goldberg, since he was one of the first male students at Goucher College.
To know that my hometown newspaper kicked out Robert Scheer in favor of the Doughy Pantload makes me want to gouge out my eyes with a ballpoint pen.
Ah, nothing like a lazy writer invoking “Shakespeare” as his source of instant pseudo-moral authority.
Pantload as Richard III? I see him more as Dogberry–a clown absurdly puffed up with delusional self-importance, and to everyone else, clearly “an ass.”
Well, jp, it’s a good choice: Jonah is the dog’s berries. But the Constable is loveable in his incompetence, holds a position of authority, and probably got that on his own merits. So my choice is Le Beau, from As You Like It: the hereditary sycophant, full of wind and a lover of wrestling, which matches well with Jonah’s sci-fi fanboy pursuits. Though he does commit an act of conscience towards the end which would have to be ignored.
Stop slagging on Jonah – he’s down with the bruthas. Don’t you remember his ground-breaking (or was that wind-breaking) album from the ’90s, Fear of a Black Pantload?
Shakespeare’s Richard III is a caricature — much like a biography of Bill Clinton written by The Dick Cheney. But actually, that makes comparing Jonah to him much better than if you compared Jonah to the real Richard III. Cartoon characters deserve each other.
More seriously: why does Jonah think that a couple of decades of half-assed attempts to redress injustice to black people, fought every step of the way by him & his ilk, mean that affirmative action has totally succeeded and isn’t needed any more?
If i’ve said it once, I’ve said it a hundred times, if Jonah is the result of how she was gonna use it, God should have never given Lucianne Goldberg a uterus
Let’s hope Lyndon Bane(s) Johnson Junior can overcome the wicked, immoral oppression that is holding back so many deserving krackers. Poor thing, born on third base and thinks he hit a triple – not that a defibulator would get him to home plate.
Crapture, if it’s any consolation, I’m sure popping that giant load of nothing was extremely painful for her.
GAAAAHHHH!!1!1!!!!! Mental image!!!!1!! Mental image!1!!!1!! GAAAAAAAAHHHHH!!!!1!!
Being born was no picnic for Jonah either. It took years for those head-to-foot tooth scratches to fade.

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