Here. Cole is someone who actually knows something; Goldberg is a right-wing shill at the home of know-nothingness, The National Review. This is not an even fight, but it is amusing nonetheless.
UPDATE: More fun with this disgraceful creature here.
ANOTHER UPDATE: The slaughter continues; a taste:
In the end, I am saying that Goldberg's punditry is empty. All he has to offer us is a party line and a strongly held opinion. Not all pundits are in this category. Goldberg is particularly unsubstantive.
Then one of my readers suggested that if he was so in favor of killing people abroad, he might want to make the sacrifice to go do it himself instead of sending others. He replied that his family needs the money he gets from his work and that he has a daughter! This response made me embarrassed for him.
Although I do not believe that everyone who advocates a war must go and fight it, I do believe that young men who advocate a war must go and fight it. Goldberg was in his early 30s in 2002, and the army would have taken him. An older colleague who was at Harvard in 1941 told me about how the freshman class rushed to enlist. That was the characteristic of the Greatest Generation-- they put their money where their mouths were. Goldberg's response was insulting to all the soldiers fighting in Iraq who have suffered economically and who are remote from their families.
I don't think there is anything at all unpatriotic about a young man opposing a war and declining to enlist. But a young man (and this applies to W. and Cheney too) who mouths off strongly about the desirability of a war is a coward and a hypocrite if he does not go to fight it.
But Goldberg is just a dime a dozen pundit. Cranky rich people hire sharp-tongued and relatively uninformed young people all the time and put them on the mass media to badmouth the poor, spread bigotry, exalt mindless militarism, promote anti-intellectualism, and ensure generally that rightwing views come to predominate even among people who are harmed by such policies. One of their jobs is to marginalize progressives by smearing them as unreliable.
The thing that really annoyed me about Goldberg's sniping was it reminded me of how our country got into this mess in Iraq. It was because a lot of ignorant but very powerful and visible people told the American people things that were not true. In some instances I believe that they lied. In other instances, they were simply too ignorant of the facts to know when an argument put forward about, say, Iraq, was ridiculous....[T]here was [for example] all that hype about Iraq being 2-4 years from having a nuclear weapon, which was either a Big Lie or a Dr. Strangelove fantasy. Khidir Hamza appears to have been paid by someone (and got big royalties from the American Enterprise Institute) to spin a web of complete lies about the Iraqi (non-existent by then) nuclear program. Goldberg in particular pushed that line, with his North Korea comparison, on a number of occasions. His current excuse is that other people were wrong, too. D'oh....
Goldberg says his judgment is superior to mine. But I said Iraq was not a danger to the US. I ridiculed Colin Powell's UN performance. Goldberg said Iraq was near to having nukes. Whose judgment was superior?
The corporate media failed the United States in 2002-2003. The US government failed the American people in 2002-2003. That empty, and often empty-headed punditry, which Jon Stewart destroyed so skilfully, played a big role in dragooning the American people into a wasteful and destructive elective war that threatens to warp American society and very possibly to end the free Republic we have managed to maintain for over 200 years. Already severe challenges to our sacred Constitution have been launched by the Right. Goldberg is a big proponent of "profiling," which is to say, spying on people because of their ethnicity rather than because of anything they as individuals have done wrong. That is only the beginning, if such persons maintain their influence on public discourse.
Addendum:
I am reprinting the message below by permission:
Subject: asses and killing zones
Date: Sun, 06 Feb 2005 02:15:03 -0500
From: James Finkelstein
To: [email protected]
Dear Mr. Goldberg,
Here's a compromise to your dilemma as to whether to get your ass into the killing zone (more accurately, the be killed, be shot, or be blown up zone). Go to the nearest Veterans Hospital you can find, go up to some soldier or Marine who lost a limb in Iraq because his reserve or National Guard unit wasn't equipped with body armor or armored vehicles, and explain to him why we had to go to war in Iraq on March 20, 2003, and why we couldn't (a) wait to see if actual evidence of WMD's ever surfaced, and (b) wait until our military was properly equipped for the war.
By the way, I'm one of those parents who had to go shopping at home to send essential items to my son's Marine Corps Reserve Unit. And I, like most intelligent people with more than an ounce of common sense, knew without a shadow of a doubt that there was no military threat to the U.S. from Iraq, imminent or otherwise, when this war was launched.
Jim Finkelstein
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