Oh, Jonah

He did it! Godwin's law has been upheld yet again. Jonah Goldberg took the Cindy Sheehan discussion to a predictable conclusion, and realized along the way that he had dug himself quite a hole. Watch him backtrack here and here.

A very weird aspect of his latter post is where he decries the left doing guilt-by-assocation with groups such as the so-called "Minuteman" (the border vigilantes), when that is precisely what he's trying to do with Sheehan. It seems that his own follow-up point argues against his original post. I emailed him with that point and he promptly responded:

not really. the point is that when the left does it, as in that example, it's
unfair.

So, to summarize Jonah: implying that a grieving war mother is in cahoots with Nazis is okay, but questioning the motives of border vigilantes is crossing the line. Or, a more concise summary: it's only wrong if you're on the left.

Jonah is actually one of my favorite conservative writers, along with Andrew Sullivan, but like Sullivan he feels obliged to make at least one bat-shit crazy post per year.