Jonah Goldberg: wanker

Jonah Goldberg thinks you're stupid. In fact, he thinks you're too stupid to make proper judgements for yourself. It's not that he thinks you're particularly dim-witted or that your mental horsepower barely rivals the human equivalent of a Geo Metro (though he may actually think that). He just thinks you don't know enough about this country's government to make smart judgements about only semi-related issues. Don't know who the Senate Majority Leader is? Well then why should we care if you think Alberto Gonzales should be fired. Etc.

[W]e are supposed to believe that two-thirds of Americans have studied the details of the U.S. attorney firings and come to an informed conclusion that they were politically motivated — even when Senate Democrats agree that there is no actual evidence that Gonzales did anything improper. Are these the same people who couldn't pick Pelosi out of a lineup? Or the 85% who couldn't name the Senate majority leader? Are we to imagine that the 31% of the electorate who still — after seven years of headlines and demonization — can't identify the vice president of the United States nonetheless have a studied opinion on the firing of New Mexico U.S. Atty. David Iglesias?

This is a particularly grating abuse of logic for at least a couple reasons. The first reason is that, as far as his main example (Gonzales) goes, he actually seems to agree with the supposedly suspect conclusions  of public opinion. ("Oh, before we proceed, let me make clear: This isn't a column defending Gonzales. This administration should have long ago sent him out of the bunker for a coffee-and-doughnut run and then changed the locks.") Which means this column only serves to assert that most people know less "things" than Jonah knows. (This is a column about how confused and at times idiotic the United States is about polls, public opinion and, well, democracy itself.") This is safe, I suppose, because everyone knows that, in journalism, liberals are the elitists. It's good to be a conservative pundit, eh? 

But it's not just the condescension. The flipside of Jonah's argument, of course, is that people with detailed knowledge of the government will generally have wiser opinions about broad matters of statecraft. Detailed knowledge. Wiser opinions. Sounds reasonable, right? Except that, um, one of those people--the guy making the point, even--is Jonah Frickin' Goldberg.