Saturday, May 25, 2002

Speaking of Jonah Goldberg, he's just a goldmine of brilliant insight into the values and methods of "conservatives." Goldberg is quoted prominently in John Nichols' update of Cynthia McKinney's April 12th call for a full investigation of 9-11. It looks like it took about a month for McKinney to go from radical to prophet. McKinney's initial calls for an investigation of what Bush knew prompted a storm of criticism. "McKinney has made herself too easy a target for mockery," Atlanta Journal-Constitution editorial page editor Cynthia Tucker announced in April. "She no longer deserves serious analysis." After Bush aides condemned McKinney's "ludicrous, baseless views," National Review Online editor Jonah Goldberg diagnosed her as suffering from "paranoid, America-hating, crypto-Marxist conspiratorial delusions." Barely a month after the McKinney-bashing peaked, however, the Journal-Constitution headline read: "Bush warned by US intelligence before 9/11 of possible bin Laden plot to hijack planes," while Senate Intelligence Committee vice chairman Richard Shelby, an Alabama Republican, said, "I believe, and others believe, if [information on threats] had been acted on properly, we may have had a different situation on September 11." Check out Democrats.com for their We Believe Cynthia! button and full coverage. 8:46:54 AM

In the process of predicting that blogs will have little effect on Big Media, Jonah Goldberg, editor of National Review Online, also summarizes what being a "conservative" means for him. Now, I'm a small-c, big-C and even a bouncy-c conservative. And one requirement for being any kind of conservative is that you have faith in the adage "there's nothing new under the sun." It is this faith that has always made me a bit of a skeptic about the Internet, even though I make my living from it. Believing there's nothing new under the sun doesn't mean I can't recognize the great technological marvels of history [^] the wheel, the printing press, the rising-crust frozen pizza. These were all new and wonderful things. Indeed, it was a conservative, St. Augustine, who essentially invented the idea that history is the story of technological innovation. But, Augustine noted that while the doohickeys keep changing, human nature and the laws that govern it remain constant. And this gets to the heart of why I don't think there will be a blogger revolution. As a full-time conservative and part-time media critic, I am in total sympathy with the idea that Big Media is bloated, smug and less responsive than it should be. But, because human nature remains constant, we can also count on the fact that most people are lazy [~] in a good way. Surfing among thousands of bloggers is harder than reading one or two newspapers. This explains a lot, doesn't it? I mean, I know Goldberg doesn't speak for Bush and Co., exactly (although arguably he is part of the "Co."), I'm sure there are many "conservatives" who wouldn't disagree with what he's saying here (and who, in fact, rely on Goldberg and TNR to tell them what it means to be a "conservative"). At any rate, it's hard to look at the last 20 months or so (since the 2000 presidential selection) and say Goldberg's wrong. The American People have been letting Bush and Co. do pretty much anything they want. Why? Is it because the American People are lazy, as Goldberg argues? And if the people are "lazy," is that their "nature"? Or do people act lazy when they're told that's how they naturally are? Let's see, who benefits the most from the idea that the American People are "naturally" lazy? Hmmm.... I'm more than a little wary of the conservative claim to know or understand "human nature" and "natural laws." I can't forget, for example, that not so long ago it was considered "natural" to enslave people whose skin, language, and cultural history differed from yours. Those people were "naturally" inferior, weren't they? According to Goldberg, "human nature and the laws that govern it remain constant." So why is race slavery now illegal in the U.S. and condemned around the world? If people were wrong about "human nature" 150 years ago, how can Goldberg be so sure he's right now? 8:46:04 AM