Poor Jonah Goldberg. That's gotta smart. As Scott says:
If you ever want to explain to someone what "disingenuous" means, I would suggest "analogizing someone to the famously anti-Semitic Charles Lindbergh in the context a discussion of whether a particular line of political discourse is anti-Semitic while claiming that the analogy doesn't imply an attribution of anti-Semitism." As we can see, even Goldberg can't possibly believe that nonsense.
It's all pretty wack. For a bit more on this, Goldberg's LA Times column describing the controversy must be read to be appreciated.
First, Yglesias argued, "everything" Clark said "is true" and "everybody knows it's true" so it can't be anti-Semitic. And, second, given that Israel's defenders will call any criticism anti-Semitic, there's no point in getting worked up about it.
The first is a rich and fascinating claim. Truth is a defense against slander, but is it a defense against bigotry? Liberals rarely agree when it comes to defending honored members of the coalition of the oppressed. Just ask former Harvard President Lawrence Summers, who questioned whether innate ability explained why fewer women succeed in math and science and who was defenestrated from Harvard as a sexist for his troubles.
And so forth. The column, could have seriously engaged a pretty serious argument, but it mostly contents itself with pointing out hypocrisy among PC-types, even though I don't remember either Wes Clark or Matt Yglesias helping to "defenestrate" Summers. What's so rich about the attack, though, is that Goldberg pretty clearly believes the focus on the legitimacy rather than the content of Summers' remarks was a bad thing, but has been awfully dedicated to deploying precisely such a strategy here. He's made the occasional attempt to argue with weirdly distorted, strawman versions of the claims, but has mainly been interested in connecting Matt and Clark to Buchanan and Lindbergh, both of whom are largely known for being anti-semites.
In the end, this has always been a fairly simple argument: There are some powerful, wealthy, Jewish lobbying associations and funders that exercise a lot of power on the foreign policy front and are pushing towards a decidedly hawkish stance on Iran. It's really not an accident that both Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich have called AIPAC the most effective lobbying organization in town.
Now, as a lobbying organization, AIPAC has every right to try and convince folks to invade Iran, and everyone else has a right to notice that they're doing so. But if you disagree, I'd think you could make one of two legitimate arguments: Either they're not pushing a hawkish agenda against Iran, or they are pushing that agenda and it's not a bad thing. Conversely, comparing the speakers to Charles Lindbergh and Patrick Buchanan -- even as you distance yourself from those who call Lindbergh an anti-semite -- is not a useful approach. It's one that hijacks icons of bigotry and tries to refocus the conversation on whether the speaker is anti-semitic, rather than whether their claim is true. Now, maybe Goldberg has had a conversion to PC-sensibilities and in fact believes there are true things that no one should be allowed to talk about without being smeared, and today's column was a roundabout way of expressing that epiphany. People change, I guess.
Update: Sam has more on the unbearable lightness of Goldberg's approach.
