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Over at Crooked Timber, Rich Pulchasky comments:
[Jonah Goldberg] expects his book to be considered because it has right-wing propaganda pushing it, and because his handlers appear to have chosen to tell him to go for publicity through Coulteresque overstatement.And whenever someone writes yet another one of these “Isn’t Goldberg stupid? Watch me not consider his book!” pieces, he’s proved a little more correct. There is no such thing as bad publicity. The total number of words written about Goldberg’s book probably adds up to the sum of all other words written about political books on blogs for the last year.Quite true. Jonah's book, for all its failings, evinces a very sharp understanding of the way commentary works. Very good arguments are not worth much more than, at best, a post or column telling readers that this is a very good argument, so good, in fact, that I can't really think of what to say about it. To get linked, whether for a blog post or a book, you need to give other writers something to write about. You can do that by bringing new and politically potent facts to the table. Or you can do that by writing something so controversial and/or dumb and/or offensive that lots of folks want to trash it themselves. That's what Jonah's done, and quite effectively. It would be good, of course, if we writers could figure out a better way to publicize better books. It's hard, though, But take Alex Stille's The Sack of Rome, a book about Berlusconi's rise to power that's really about the unsettling intersection of money, media power, corporate heft, and political success. It's a brilliant book, thought-provoking and insightful, and it's about much broader, more potent trends than whether liberals or conservatives are bad. Take this bit towards the end, when Stille considers how commercial values have come to overwhelm civic values in modern political life:
