Thursday, May 5, 2016

I Can Name That Idiot in One Note!


Jonah Goldberg has a new piece out, entitled Denationalizing our politics would help draw us together. Thanks to the title alone I feel like mocking it, but I don't really feel like reading it, so instead I'm going to try a little experiment:

My hypothesis is that the first sentence of any given article by Jonah contains more impacted stupidity than can be found in an entire 800 word column by, say, David Brooks or Ross Douthat. While depressing, this may become important later on, if we find that our strategic stupidity reserves have been depleted by too many lofty think pieces on the Trump campaign; and therefore it's my contention that the pundit class could conserve and stretch those dwindling resources by aping Jonah's use of rhetorical starch and powdered cheese, a technique known in journalism schools as "Stupidity Hamburger Helper."

Let's begin, shall we?
Nationalism and socialism are in full gallop in America today while conservatives are without a horse.
You might think that many of those espousing nationalism are conservatives, but look at that sentence again:
Nationalism and socialism are in full gallop in America today while conservatives are without a horse.
Now, remove the word "and" and toss it away, because conjunctions are basically just foam packing peanuts for sentences, designed to keep the subject and predicate from banging into each other and getting damaged in transit. Okay, what do we have?
Nationalism socialism are in full gallop in America today while conservatives are without a horse.
And who were National Socialists? Nazis! And what were Nazis? Liberals! As proven in Jonah's book, Liberal Fascism, Or: How to Randomly Combine Adjectives and Nouns Like You're Playing Mad-Libs.

I think we're getting somewhere! Let's keep going...

The next noun is "gallop." And what is a gallop? It's an organization that skews polls to make it appear liberals are winning. Therefore, going the "full gallop" means predicting a Hillary Clinton victory in the 2016 election, because only Nazis want her to be President.

Now we come to the last half of the sentence, "conservatives are without a horse." Why is this important? Because right wing activist Neal Horsley ran a website called the Nuremberg Files, identifying and targeting abortion providers -- essentially trying them in the press. And who else was tried at Nuremberg? That's right -- Nazis. And what else was Neal Horsley most famous for? Admitting that he liked to have sex with mules, which is sort of an off-brand horse. So basically, Jonah is saying that Hitler is rigging the presidential election for Hillary because Republicans can't get laid with farm animals, probably because of PETA.

Well, I think that's about all we're going to get out of it. I skimmed ahead through the rest of the article, but it's mostly stuff Jonah stole from some other guy's book, and what's the point of Second Hand Stupidity, if you don't get the nicotine buzz, just the cancer?  But feel free to pick your own sentence from his opus and overanalyze it in the comments.

ADDENDUM FROM S.Z.:  I am impressed and delighted with your Goldberg deconstruction (although I've heard that hydrofluoric acid will get rid of the rest). But I have one possible addition: some women with a certain facial type are called "horsefaced." And if you Google this term, whose name comes up most commonly? No, not Ann Coulter (she is not commonly associated with anything mammalian). It's Sarah Jessica Parker. So, an alternate reading is that while Hitler had his Eva Braun, and Matthew Broderick has Sarah Jessica, Jonah's wife is leaving him to campaign for Hillary. Or maybe she already has - I haven't kept up with Jonah's personal life.

3 comments:

Hank said...

No, not Ann Coulter (she is not commonly associated with anything mammalian).

Except when she unhinges her jaw, so she can swallow a puppy in a single gulp.

But really, I feels for ya, Johah: Trump must be causing a fair amount of cognitive dissonance for the author of Liberal Fascism. Oh ... right: There has to be the cognition, before you can have the dissonance.

meanie-meanie, tickle a person said...

All Jonah's faaaaaaarts are in G-flat.

And I think what he suffers from might be called Cognitive Disownance...

Izzy Klein said...

If it wasn't for that horse, I wouldn't have spent that year at Trump University.

Damn that horse.

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