Pareene on Goldberg

No one has ever said it’s hard to completely destroy Jonah Goldberg. But it doesn’t mean that doing so isn’t fun. Alex Pareene must have enjoyed writing this. In part:

From a 2010 column on the supposed “Ground Zero Mosque”:

Here’s a thought: The 70% of Americans who oppose what amounts to an Islamic Niketown two blocks from ground zero are the real victims of a climate of hate, and anti-Muslim backlash is mostly a myth.

Calling that “a thought” is pretty generous. The “Islamic Niketown” line is never explained, presumably because Goldberg found it to be a self-evidently funny joke. (I beg someone to tell me what it means. Failing that, I beg someone to find me the editor who allowed it to remain in the column.) Other self-evidently funny things to Goldberg include Asians and Pacific Islanders with HIV/AIDS and poor conditions in public housing and a lack of affordable housing … for people with AIDS.

As he’s aged, and begun wearing his fancy “best-selling author” smoking jacket around the house, Goldberg has supplemented his “Battlestar Galactica” references with references to philosophers and scholars — Burke, Hume, etc. — in order to appear serious. The effect is similar to that of a chimp wearing a top hat and monocle. His need to be taken seriously is forever doomed by his addiction to lazy generalities. That tension was apparent in the reception that greeted his first book, and his reaction to that reception.

….In comments, Mark F notes Goldberg’s response. My favorite line: “I think what confuses some people is that while I don’t take myself all that seriously, I do take ideas seriously.” Ha ha ha.