Getting to Know Conservative-Libertarian Jeff Goldstein and Protein Wisdom

Getting to Know Conservative-Libertarian Jeff Goldstein

Jeff Goldstein is a real piece of work, a posterchild for the inferiority complex and resultant over-compensation issues delineated in Adlerian psychology. As is so often the case, the inferiorities he feels are both real and, simply, perceived. There’s nothing wrong with being a Mr. Mom or failed academic, yet Goldstein’s behavior indicates he feels differently — he’s so very touchy about it. On the other hand, there is something wrong with being a chickenhawk coward, a paste-eating cretin, and a talentless hack. Hence his overcompensation in the form of obnoxious aggression (often to the point of violent threats), pseudo-intellectual windbaggery, atrociously banal “short-fictions”.

To the casual observer, Goldstein might seem to be a garden-variety internet wingnut, a suburban douchebag whose sad and petty hatreds, frustrations over stagnated ambitions and innate cowardice lead him to adopt a sort of Walter-Mitty-As-Rambo-As-Whackjob-Blogger schtick, whereby all his fantasies of action and genocidal crusade and manly-man aggression are sated through internet jackassery. Of course if Goldstein really wanted some adventure, he could go to the recruiting office, but — hahahahaha — everyone knows that ain’t gonna happen. And yeah, all of this is common enough on the WingNet, although Goldstein has a curiously ambitious drive to be the biggest jerk of them all, and he very nearly succeeds. Added to this drive and his deep, abiding fear that he might be a weenie is his status as “Literature Wingnut” and the unique salad of sex and violence issues which reside in his otherwise empty brainpan; Goldstein’s a hell of a case study.

His sex and violence issues I’ll deal with first; if by the end you’re not also convinced that Goldstein is certifably crazy and that, therefore, he ought to be straitjacketed and shot-up with elephant tranquilizers, then you should be drubbed to death with a giant dildo.

A Little Penis Fixation

Jeff Goldstein has without a doubt the biggest macho complex at least since George Thorogood’s. Which is why the “chickenhawk” epithet is so injurious to him. (Goldstein is so discombobulated by the Chickenhawk label that he, like Jonah Goldberg, has to rely on Christopher Hitchens’s argument against it; both are too stupid or dishonest to acknowledge that Hitchens was revising himself; and of course none of this prevents Goldstein from turning right around and applying a derivative of the term to Rod Dreher.) Like all the rest of the 82nd Chairborne Brigade, his affected stance is broadly swaggering, hypermasculine, chock-full of bravado and chest-thumping — all of which is not only self-serving, but also a distended reaction inspired by how Goldstein sees the Left: as a collection of wimps. The irony of course is that if Goldstein were really so tough and so confident of his pro-war righteousness as all his rhetoric insists, he’d be in Iraq. But then he, like all chickenhawks, regards such moral logic as unreasonable and impossible. Actually, the very idea of 101st Keyboarders putting, so to speak, their money where their mouth is, is liable to make them terrified to the point of incontinence. And though I’m fairly sure that Goldstein’s barcalounger has more than its share of urine stains, the Left’s perception that Goldstein isn’t heroic material inspires in him a great deal more than that. Goldstein the Chickenhawk is reduced to violently asserting that he too is a macho man!Reduced to soiling himself not in fear but in anger! To asserting that he is more manly than any lefty, to be sure, (despite what his adenoidal, wimpy voice sounds like, which he is always quick to say is the fault of technology, not lack of testosterone!) and it is with monomaniacal fixation on his genitals and those of others that he means to demonstrate his ultimate masculinity. Thus Goldstein-Chickenhawk becomes Goldstein-Cockvulture and his garden-variety wingnut resentment becomes a thematic demonstration of his unique insanity.

This is only about a quarter of a well done post about one of the more evil denizens of the internet and radical Right politics. There are more details, with some graphic language at the link. The language is graphic and unsettling because it is the kind of language that JG uses. Maybe he is a sociopath, a nut, a freak, weirdo, an assclown. The psychological analysis is up for debate. Judging purely by his words, there is no doubt he is evil. This fact based, rational column by the WaPo's Ezra Klein is the reason for one of of Goldstein's latest dives in the the unhinged depths of anger and depravity. I'm just posting part of it so that anyone can see, it is the kind of column that one can agree with, find some disagreement or depending on  one's politics, dismiss it because it does not advance your agenda. It is hardly something to read and turn into Joesph Goebbels over, The scandals are falling apart by Ezra Klein

Things go wrong in government. Sometimes it’s just bad luck. Sometimes it’s rank incompetence. Sometimes it’s criminal wrongdoing. Most of the time you never hear about it. Or, if you do hear about it, the media eventually gets bored talking about it (see warming, global).

But every so often an instance of government wrongdoing sprouts wings and becomes something quite exciting: A political scandal.

The crucial ingredient for a scandal is the prospect of high-level White House involvement and wide political repercussions. Government wrongdoing is boring. Scandals can bring down presidents, decide elections and revive down-and-out political parties. Scandals can dominate American politics for months at a time.

On Tuesday, it looked like we had three possible political scandals brewing. Two days later, with much more evidence available, it doesn’t look like any of them will pan out. There’ll be more hearings, and more bad press for the Obama administration, and more demands for documents. But — and this is a key qualification — absent more revelations, the scandals that could reach high don’t seem to include any real wrongdoing, whereas the ones that include real wrongdoing don’t reach high enough. Let’s go through them.

1) The Internal Revenue Service: The IRS mess was, well, a mess. But it’s not a mess that implicates the White House, or even senior IRS leadership. If we believe the agency inspector general’s report, a group of employees in a division called the “Determinations Unit” — sounds sinister, doesn’t it? — started giving tea party groups extra scrutiny, were told by agency leadership to knock it off, started doing it again, and then were reined in a second time and told that any further changes to the screening criteria needed to be approved at the highest levels of the agency.

The White House fired the acting director of the agency on the theory that somebody had to be fired and he was about the only guy they had the power to fire. They’re also instructing the IRS to implement each and every one of the IG’s recommendations to make sure this never happens again.

If new information emerges showing a connection between the Determination Unit’s decisions and the Obama campaign, or the Obama administration, it would crack this White House wide open. That would be a genuine scandal. But the IG report says that there’s no evidence of that. And so it’s hard to see where this one goes from here.

2) Benghazi: We’re long past the point where it’s obvious what the Benghazi scandal is supposed to be about. The inquiry has moved on from the events in Benghazi proper, tragic as they were, to the talking points about the events in Benghazi. And the release Wednesday night of 100 pages of internal e-mails on those talking points seems to show what my colleague Glenn Kessler suspected: This was a bureaucratic knife fight between the State Department and the CIA.

As for the White House’s role, well, the e-mails suggest there wasn’t much of one. “The internal debate did not include political interference from the White House, according to the e-mails, which were provided to congressional intelligence committees several months ago,” report The Washington Post’s Scott Wilson and Karen DeYoung. As for why the talking points seemed to blame protesters rather than terrorists for the attack that killed the U.S. ambassador and three other Americans? Well:

    According to the e-mails and initial CIA-drafted talking points, the agency believed the attack included a mix of Islamist extremists from Ansar al-Sharia, a group affiliated with al-Qaeda, and angry demonstrators.

    White House officials did not challenge that analysis, the e-mails show, nor did they object to its inclusion in the public talking points.

    

    But CIA deputy director Michael Morell later removed the reference to Ansar al-Sharia because the assessment was still classified and because FBI officials believed that making the information public could compromise their investigation, said senior administration officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the internal debate.

So far, it’s hard to see what, exactly, the scandal here is supposed to be.

One assumes that Goldstein belongs to the Benghazi conspiracy theory camp. As is the tradition of evil and it's practitioners, they would much rather rant and deflect the facts, than embrace rationalism and ethics. Goldstein seems to have some loyal followers - judging from his comment section. Throughout history, evil has always had it's appeal.