Thank you, Jonah Goldberg, for this new Internet Tradition

I’ve already kicked a downed Goldberg while having a laugh and taking a piss on him today, so you know that I wouldn’t target him again unless he wrote something so exquisite his nuts left my knees no choice.

Which is exactly what happened.

According to Jonah in the article the Other Scott linked, Niall Ferguson should be forgiven because he “was trafficking in an old theory that was perfectly within the bounds of intellectual discourse not very long ago.” Not since “a very serious, thoughtful argument that has never been made in such detail or with such care” has Jonah provided us with a sentence of such valuable vapidity.

Consider its lack of specificity: the “old theory” is “old,” but there’s no indication as to how old it is; not that its age matters, mind you, because this “old theory” wasn’t merely acceptable back then, it was “perfectly within the bounds” of polite society; moreover, “not very long ago” this “old theory” wasn’t merely “perfectly within the bounds” of decorum, it belonged to the “intellectual discourse,” meaning that the right kind of people discussed this “old theory” all the time, whenever that happened to be.

Thanks to Jonah’s brilliant formulation, conservatives can now blame recent historical “traffic” — of an unspecified age and purview — for every vile thought that leaks through their lips. It’s not their fault we’re unfamiliar with social etiquette from whenever it was.