Tuesday July 28, 2009

GOLDBERG RETURNS! Jonah Goldberg is back from a European vacation, where I imagine he made Clark Griswold look like Bernard Berenson, to bring some life to The Corner with a breathtaking series of inane posts. There's one in which he compares the Henry Louis Gates case to the Tawana Brawley case -- the only evident similarity between them being that the principals were black -- and concludes that liberals don't care about the truth. There's another in which he says Obama's taste for golf betrays a "double standard," though the only clue as to what he might mean is that "poppa Bush's golf outings during a very minor recession hurt him terribly in his reelection bid," which would make the holder of the double standard the U.S. electorate.

I would be embarrassed to mention his admission of germ paranoia if he hadn't brought it up himself. Be warned; it leads to a series, ending with reader reminiscences about how they couldn't get enough wiping paper in foreign countries. There's a psychology paper in this somewhere.

Eventually he is made to focus on the current events analysis that has justly made him famous. John J. Miller comes in complaining that from what he's seen, the new G.I, Joe movie doesn't have enough American military uniforms to suit him, not to fulfill Hollywood's historic mission of "public diplomacy of creating goodwill abroad." (I should think they'd be grateful to us just for the loud, ugly crap to watch on dates.) You know Goldberg couldn't resist this, and gasses about the commies in Hollywood trying to make our fighting men look bad, and in so doing makes a passing comment about the Bourne movies that spurs a reader to remark that the anti-American content is present in the Bourne novels as well. Another reader says Hollywood totally anti-Americanized the property. This puts Goldberg into a fog, from which he is stirred by Jonathan Adler, who asserts that "There's plenty of evidence Hollywood leans left, but the Bourne movies are not among them."

Goldberg grasps the nettle, which is on a rose bush in an entirely different county:

Jonathan - You write: "There's plenty of evidence Hollywood leans left, but the Bourne movies are not among them."

To the extent I understand your argument, it seems to be that because they made a good movie from a good book, and despite the fact it is a leftwing interpretation of the book, it cannot count as proof that Hollywood is left-leaning. How does that work?

As Goldberg is a legacy pledge, and because they are both talking gibberish, Adler is obliged to respond with the slightly exasperated deference of bearded doctors in Three Stooges shorts ("My point [perhaps inartfully made] is that the decision to make the Bourne movies is not evidence of Hollywood's ideological leanings..."). Fortunately for him, it's getting late and Goldberg has a date with the director's cut of Road House.

I'm glad to see him back. The Corner is pretty tedious without comic relief.