Jonah Goldberg’s first column in the Times: a rank embarassment

Already famed for his puerile, insensitive and asinine Waterworld-to-New Orleans analogy, Jonah once again makes himself and his new bosses look like complete fucking idiots with his first effort in the Los Angeles Times, by arguing that even if Bush is a liar, it’s okay, because it just means Bush-is-like-FDR, who he argues is another liar.

Luce, a Republican, had insisted that FDR “lied us into war.” And this, the Journal editorialized, was a “slander” many paranoid Republicans took to their graves.

My friends at the Journal are right to suggest that some Bush critics are paranoids, but here’s the thing: Luce wasn’t slandering Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Indeed, the evidence that FDR lied is far greater than the evidence that Bush did.

Goldberg hitches his wagon to the weak horse of revisionist historians, who claim that FDR, rather than preparing the United States for the war he knew was inevitable, somehow deceived America into it. He pushes a lame war plan argument:

Just three days before Pearl Harbor, on Dec. 4, 1941, the Chicago Tribune and Washington Star-Ledger broke the story that FDR had already drafted a plan for war with Germany, a plan that entailed a 10-million-man army invading Germany by the middle of 1943.

Yeah, and for 40+ years we drafted war plans for fighting the Soviet Union, and never intended to start a war. In both cases, it kind of made sense where an aggressive, hegemonic tyranny was intent on dominating the world, no?

The argument that FDR “lied us into war” has a little problem, stemming from the fact that Japan attacked us, and both Japan and Germany declared war on the United States, whereas in Iraq we launched an undeclared war, which was not immediately precipitated by any hostile act of similar magnatude by Iraq. Goldberg slithers around this by arguing that the Japanese attack and German declaration of war simply “rescued” FDR from having to start the war he was going to lie us into anyway. Got that? Okay, so FDR didn’t start the war, but he would have if he’d had the chance. That’s just as good as lying us into a war, isn’t it? And we know this because . . . . revisionists and Republican Isolationists say so!

As if this isn’t asinine enough, Goldberg follows that twaddle with this incomprehensible gibberish:

Now, you might say that Iraq was no WWII, Saddam was no Hitler, and 9/11 was no Pearl Harbor. Those are all fair arguments with varying degrees of merit. But WWII wasn’t “the good war” in our hearts until after Pearl Harbor and even until after the Holocaust, and a lot of Hollywood burnishing.

This is, of course, absolute bullshit. During the Second World War, the American people were unified as never before, a unity which was unmatched until 9/11. There was no serious opposition to the war — even from the isolationists who previously and later attempted to villify FDR in the same stupid, hamfisted way Goldberg is trying to replicate. Maybe Jonah is borrowing a page from Buchanan’s book — those Nazis really weren’t so bad, and it was the Rooskies we should have been fighting.

Today, the large majority of American people recognize the Iraq war for what it is: a costly mistake of vast proportion, which presents intractable problems from the standpoint of ending our involvement. Moreover, we know now that Iraq had no WMDs, and posed no serious threat to us whatsoever. In 1942 , German submarines were sinking American ships within sight of our shores, Japanese forces were invading American territory, and killing American troops in large numbers.

The Bataan deathmarch was not mere “Hollywood burnishing” and Goldberg is a stupid, pompous ass for suggesting that the American people can’t distinguish a just and unavoidable war from a tragic, unnecessary one.