Grinding my teeth at the goddamn chutzpah of this guy

I'd like to get around someday to talk about things that I like, things that I love, things that make me happy.  But goddamnit, Roy Edroso points out in this tweet https://twitter.com/edroso/status/477889362445623297
that Jonah Goldberg wrote another column, which, according to Roy's law means, it is the stupidest thing ever written.

The column is pretty standard horseshit.  Any of the dozens conservative critics of the Obama administration who have a national platform could have whipped this out over a short lunch break.  Anyone of those partisan hacks whose job it is to find fault with him for everything short of ending human suffering forever, and they'd probably throw a tantrum about that too- regularly writes a similar line of condescending "Democrats are weak on foreign policy" column filler.  I can excuse that... Jonah is deep in the grip of the Dunning Krueger effect, entranced with the idea that because he is paid to spew his uninformed drivel on the pages of newspapers nationwide, he is clearly a respected figure of authority and not a textbook example of the kind of public boob whose entire career is based on nepotism and sustained by the hothouse of the wingnut welfare system and so to ask him for just one occasion to do some research, talk to informed sources and compose a reasoned criticism is as far beyond him as any demonstration of journalistic integrity would be.

 It looks dead easy to crap out this bafflegab, (and it is) but I encourage all (which is to say 'both') of my readers not to quit their day jobs to seek a seat on the gravy train unless they too have a family tree drooping under the weight of assorted professional toadys and lickspittles and a social circle full of the kind of terrible billionaires that hire out fourth rate propagandists to justify their life of avarice.

In any case, Jonah's column is fairly unsurprising bad advice to the president until he writes these sentences:

A better option would be a time machine. That way today’s President Obama could go back and give first-term Obama the benefit of his experience. He could tell him that foreign policy should define his talking points, not the other way around.

He just can't fucking help himself.  As if in the history of American dealings with the middle east, the worst mistake; the first option of anyone with a time machine would be to give Obama a stern talking to about the pitfalls of getting out of Iraq.  As it wasn't transparently obvious that he'd rather talk about the time travel movies "X-men: Days of future Past" or "Edge of Tomorrow" than Iraq again, the subject about which he has so consistently revealed his laziness, his blood lust and his ignorance since 2001.

I have to write this or the rage would make my head explode.  The history of the US in the middle east has been a litany of foreign policy failures.  At every turn the search for profit and to a far lesser extent the fight against communism, have dictated policy and the welfare of the average Arab or Persian or Kurd or Turk on the street has never once been a motivating concern. From supporting Britain and France's colonial dissection of the Ottoman empire, to toppling the democratically elected government of Iran, to supporting every single murderous thug that claimed to be anti-communist, to enriching fundamentalist theocratic despots to gain access to oil, there's basically no foreign policy mistake the US hasn't made and then repeated over and over again.  And in this litany of failure the biggest mistake that Jonah wants to avoid is getting the hell out?  What.  The. Actual. Fuck.

I realize that once again, Jonah wins.  He gets paid for making me and anyone else who can spare five minutes to read the history of the middle east on Wikipedia furious, and he wins when I link to his column to prove that I'm not making shit up when I quote him.  He's a brand, a media personality and unlike people who work for a living, he is only punished when he is boring, never when he is publicly, obviously, fundamentally, wrong.  Still, I can't help but wish that his employers had held out until they could afford a third rate propagandist.