Under the headline "Not a Parody," Jonah Goldberg highlighted a piece on Mark Halperin's crotch reference on Morning Joe. The writer is Michelle Goldberg (no relation), a "senior contributing writer for The Daily Beast/Newsweek." She insisted the D-word was bad, but "His far greater sin: being so cowed by conservatives that he’s offended by Obama’s mild poke at the GOP." He touted the introduction:
Here's why Mark Halperin is a disgrace. It's not because he used a mild obscenity to describe our president on Morning Joe, disrespectful as that was. Rather, it was the circumstances of the slur. Right now, the Republican Party is threatening to blow up the world economy unless Democrats agree to savage cuts in spending while refusing any of the revenue increases that all serious economists say are necessary to actually address the national debt. Obama, whose greatest fault in office has been a misplaced faith in the GOP's capacity for reasonableness, went on television and chided the party for this stance. Apparently, this struck Halperin as unreasonable. His response embodies all that's rotten and shallow about D.C.'s pundit class, which fetishizes bipartisanship even as it only demands it of one political party.
Jonah noted "It’s funnier if you try to read it aloud with as much drama as possible)." He added: "I love — love — this part: Obama, whose greatest fault in office has been a misplaced faith in the GOP’s capacity for reasonableness…"
He also could have suggested a dramatic reading of the final paragraph:
Because Halperin is so determined to bend over backward for the right, he can't come to grips with the central fact of modern politics -- the death of Republican moderation. Today's GOP is a congeries of Birchers, fundamentalists, nativists, and gold bugs that considers longtime conservatives like Bob Bennett and Orrin Hatch unacceptably left-wing. Right now, it is playing a game of chicken with all of our financial futures, counting on the widespread fear that it really is crazy enough to unleash financial Armageddon, and the knowledge that the Democrats are not. The president tried, in a very mild way, to address his opponents' dangerous intransigence. What kind of political journalist regards that as wildly inappropriate? Halperin has given us the answer.
Goldberg is touted as "author of The New York Times bestseller Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism." Earlier this week she appeared on the radical-left Pacifica Radio show Democracy Now to discuss her journalistic crusade against Michele Bachmann.
