“The Insecurity of Jonah Goldberg"

President Donald J. Trump and First Lady Melania Trump are seen in their Official Christmas Portrait on Saturday, December 15, 2018, in the Cross Hall of the White House. (Official White House Photo by Andrea Hanks)

A skirmish has broken out between Ed Morrow, a writer who regularly contributes to the online publication, American Greatness, among others, and Jonah Goldberg, who writes for the National Review and is a fellow at the heavily neocon American Enterprise Institute.

In the paleo-conservative oriented online version of The American Spectator, Morrow calls out Goldberg’s insults toward American Greatness, and reminds readers that the publication looks to inform those Americans who feel wariness towards the Washington D.C. “wizards.”

I include myself in that group of Americans who is thoroughly displeased with the set in Washington who believe there is little regular Americans can offer to good governance. Golberg’s slams on American Greatness are perhaps indicative of his fear of alternative viewpoints. Morrow writes:

American Greatness is a publication oriented toward readers skeptical of the Great Wizards of Washington. That makes it a threat to people like Goldberg, and his hate burns from the page. Consider a few quotes:

“[Buskirk’s column is evidence of] the bizarre need of some of Trump’s biggest fans to be dumb or dishonest in his defense.”

“The problem conservatism faces these days is that many of the loudest voices have decided to embrace the meanness while throwing away the facts. This has been a trend for a long time now. But Donald Trump has accelerated the problem to critical mass, yielding an explosion of stupid and a radioactive cloud of meanness.”

“It’s as if people have decided they should live down to Hillary Clinton’s ‘deplorable’ epithet.”

“American Greatness [is] a journal whose tagline should be ‘Coming Up with Reasons Why Donald Trump’s Sh** Doesn’t Stink 24/7.’”

And:

“Not every contributor to American Greatness is dedicated to the art of turd polishing, but that is the site’s larger mission.”

So, American Greatness writers are stupid, lying, mean, fact-avoiding, deplorable, sh** stink appeasers, who write for a feces polishing website with the President of the United States presumably the “turd” to which Goldberg’s eloquence refers. I guess we can count on him for an objective view of the Trump administration. It’s the sort of garbage you’d get from some masked professor out looking to padlock-bop a guy wearing a MAGA hat.

I have had the privilege to have been published in American Greatness. I’ve also published in National Review Online. I was very pleased to have done that, too. Somehow, I don’t think William F. Buckley had Goldberg’s fecal word play in mind when he launched his enterprise.

I don’t like scatological rhetoric but since Goldberg has brought us down to it: Mr. Goldberg could polish himself for a thousand years, but even then, he would still only be useful to make a small patch of grass greener.