Does anybody REALLY read this guy?

I had never heard of Jonah Goldberg until his column suddenly appeared in my local scratchsheet, yet another right wing commentator on an editorial page already over-burdened with them (which the wingnut residents of my town pillory regularly in the letter pages for being too liberal). I read his column once and was immediately outraged. It reeked of narcissism, and a toxic dose of neocon arrogance. It is now shunned, along with Cal Thomas, and Bill "Never-met-a-lie-I-didn't-like" O'Reilly.

I just don't get it. How can someone with better than half-a-brain continue to be an apologist for the worst presidency in American history, an administration with a pathological aversion to the truth that has done more to trash the ideals of this nation than any of its predecessors, an administration whose arrogance and incompetence would be laughable were it not for the fact that hundreds of thousands of innocents have died because of them?

Justin Raimundo said it pretty well on his blog: "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."

And Juan Cole hoisted the fool by his petard a few years ago when Jolly Jonah was still one of the Iraq invasion's biggest cheerleaders. But what really gets my goat is the sense that Goldberg pontificates without any direct, firsthand experience of most of the things he writes about. Or, to quote a reader of Mr. Cole's: "He looks to be of military age. Ask him why his sorry ass isn't in the kill zone."

How does he sleep?