9 thoughts on “Don’t Stop Believing”

  1. There are a lot of those In this house we believe yard signs.

    I am looking for the sign, “Hate has no home here, and if you don’t believe this, you are a deplorable.”

    1. I am thinking of having a yard sale and getting rid of some old Republican memorabilia sold in small lots. So the sign will say: “Baskets of Deplorables / $1 ea.”

    2. Tom Lehrer: “I know that there are people who do not love their fellow man, and I hate people like that!”

  2. I really can’t believe I was enamored with that guy just six short years ago. Not that I’m dripping with experience in consuming his output since my enamorement subsided but I just can’t get more than a paragraph in anymore without a gag response.

    Now, I don’t mean she [Maddow] was right to instantly think anyone without a mask was a selfish, COVID-denying threat. I mean she’s right that she and a great many of her viewers are going to have to get over that. And she’s right to say it to her audience.

    What in the absolute f*ck is the point of that fat-free mayonnaise of English Jonah? You’re not saying she was wrong to say what she did (which she definitely was), but she was right to recognize she’s an idiot, and she was right to tell her audience they’re idiots too. Is that the point there? And I love the preciousness of the initiating “Now,”, comma and all.

    A lot of the people dunking on Maddow seem to have forgotten that, when the pandemic began, there were plenty of people on the right who believed that mask-wearing was a window into your soul, too.

    When the pandemic began the frapping CDC was telling everyone that masks were unnecessary and, you know, don’t wear them. Whose “soul” are you referring to?

    Then we get references to a Washington Times piece from early April, something Rush said, and “literally” a Trump initiated superspreader event from October. Then this:

    It would have been good if the Rachel Maddows of the right pushed back on this stuff more—or at all—at that time in the same way that Maddow is now.

    I guess he thinks Rush would qualify as a “Rachel Maddow of the right” but really? That puddle of intellectually-absent goo is on an internationally broadcast TV network multiple times a day. And then “at that time”. WHAT time Jonah? April? October? What? Oh, sorry, just supposed to skip that. I didn’t get the memo, my apology.
    And how in hell is she “pushing back”? “I’m an idiot. You’re an idiot. But by admitting that we’re pushing back.”
    My head hurts.

    it was obvious that the left’s embrace of the pandemic as a vehicle for the culture war would elicit a similar culture war response from the right.

    No it wasn’t obvious at all. The response from the right has almost always involved some aspect of humor. As in “look at these leftist kooks, they’re laughable”. I actually watched that Maddow clip. I’m sure that if a momentarily off-guard cameraman had been spotted giggling at the preposterousness of it all he’s have found himself needing to explain how he just got the joke someone told him last week.

    I think the populist response to hectoring and mask fetishization was often an equally unhelpful counter-overreaction to the initial progressive overreaction.

    I think my favorite there is “unhelpful”. Jonah’s had a hard-on for “populism” for awhile now, at this point it’s probably hard-wired.

    But the right-wingers had a kind of self-awareness that progressives didn’t, because the progressives assured themselves they were the data-driven devotees of science.

    Jonah permits himself to recognize lack of self-awareness in the left, then decides it’s because they assure each other they’re data-driven. I just really… can’t even.

    1. Goldberg seems stuck on “that’s not to say the right isn’t wrong too here” for quite some time now. Even the columns that have nothing to do with conservatives have to have a line or two pointing out that the left isn’t solely guilty of what he’s talking about.

      I think he suffers from the TDS that he contracted from all the Trumpist hate mail he got. He’s trying to lay the intellectual ground work for purging Trump supporters from the national conversation. Meanwhile, Grampa Simpson is running the country into the ground. That doesn’t seem to bother Jonah as much as there might be people who still support Trump.

      1. Jonah “The Peasants Are Revolting!” Goldberg doesn’t seem to like Populists or Anarchists — too Plebian for his sensibilities.

      2. “I think he suffers from the TDS that he contracted from all the Trumpist hate mail he got.”

        There is a high likelihood that he was a target in an information warfare op run by the Democrats and some corrupt government workers that sought to wedge Republicans like Jonah and the base.

        Did genuine Republicans criticize him? Sure. But without a doubt Democrat trollfarms and bots targeted him and social media companies amplified what he was seeing in his timeline to present him a false sense of reality.

        Jonah wasn’t the only target. NeverTrump wasn’t organic.

        1. No one should be relying on social media as a projection of reality, not in any way, shape or form.

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