Jonah Goldberg: At the Heart of Matters

[Barrett808]

At the Heart of Matters
Seeing things through in Iraq.
By Jonah Goldberg

“Good Lord! You sliced that man open from his neck to his belly! You've cut out his heart! You're sucking out his blood, you ghoul!"

These are just some of the things you might say if you stumbled on a surgeon conducting a heart transplant.

Of course, you wouldn't actually say it because you'd see the men and women in their gowns and masks, along with all the medical doodads including "the machine that goes 'ping'" — as they say in Monty Python's The Meaning of Life.

...

Still, at this point, there's simply no disputing that Iraq reconstruction isn't going well, though not as badly as many think.

Much of the country is doing just fine, especially the Kurdish north. But the confusing mess in Fallujah, the outrageous prison-abuse story, the fact that Muqtada al-Sadr isn't in chains yet, the seemingly deteriorating security and the less than encouraging public opinion data from across non-Kurdish Iraq suggest that if the "new Iraq" were a patient on the operating table, the ping machine would be going kerplunk.

(more)

http://www.nationalreview.com/goldberg/goldberg200405050844.asp

[chelsea0011]

1. HMMM? See how well the Kurdish north does when they demand independence

That should make Turkey happy.

[bemildred]

2. JONAH GOLDBERG, BOTTOM FEEDER

For some things, Justin is the best.

...

That Jonah Goldberg's facile punditry masks a
truly nasty nature seems beyond dispute: after
all, here is someone who made his reputation,
such as it is, retailing sex tapes surreptitiously
recorded, "leaking" a trail of slime that
eventually slipped up a President. A more
fitting symbol of the Clinton era conservative
movement - a gaggle of remarkably
unattractive character assassins, bereft of ideas
and fixated on filth - would be hard to
imagine. Now, in his syndicated column, the
little twerp takes out after Pat Buchanan for
his now famous remark about "Soviet
Canuckistan" - but not directly. Instead,
Goldberg hisses:

"I make reference to Buchanan's remark solely
because I am positive 99 percent of you didn't
know he said it. Pat made the comment on the
unwatched program Buchanan and Press on
America's Most unwatched network, MSNBC."

Except this turns out to be not quite true.
Goldberg admits "a quick Nexis search reveals
that Buchanan's remark has been mentioned
or discussed in over 100 newspaper articles."
Gee, it looks like somebody is watching, even
if it's only a bunch of Canadians. But the
whole point of Goldberg's little riff is to not
only repeat the litany of canards flung by our
touchy northern neighbors, but to relay the
news that:

"Some Canadian newspapers tried to link the
phrase 'Soviet Canuckistan' to a website run by a racist and Holocaust-denier."

http://www.antiwar.com/justin/j111102.html

[Miss Authoritiva]

3. By far the vast majority of Iraq is doing fine. Right.

File under empty reassurances: Conservative commentators always say that much of Iraq is doing fine. Are they talking in terms of hectares of sand flea-infested desert? It's only the urban centers -- you know, where people actually live -- that are problematic, right?