(Guest post by Greg Forster)
Jonah Goldberg lets fly today on NRO with an absolute slam dunk:
And yet when you listen to these endless seminars and interviews on NBC and its various platforms, I never seem to hear Matt Lauer or David Gregory ask “Isn’t the education crisis a failure of liberalism?” After all, liberals insist all social problems can be reduced to root causes. Well, they’ve been in charge of the roots for generations and look at the mess they’ve made. Look at it.
Largely because of the Iraq war, Katrina and Bush’s unpopularity, a host of liberal intellectuals pronounced conservatism to be dead. The decrepit state of American education is a far more sweeping, profound and lasting indictment of the very heart of liberalism and yet the response from everyone is “Let’s give these guys another try!”
HT Jeff Reed @ FEC
BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!!!!!!
I hate when we use the word liberalism to mean progressivism.
Given the far reaching implications of Goldberg’s remarks, I believe the BOOM in this case might even merit a slight modifier. KABOOM!!!
Yes, there’s a difference.
It is amazing that liberals never get called on it. Hell, liberals have politically owned most of Americas decaying cities for quite some time and they never get called on that either. Poor people are just like slaves on the plantation doing their masters bidding.
I love the automatically generated posts. This one’s great for Goldberg fans.
http://usjamerica.wordpress.com/2010/04/27/jonah-goldberg-an-authoritarian-with-a-dunce-cap/
It seems that Jonah Goldberg’s twisting and over-applying of a label does not result in a compelling or constructive argument. In countries that have achieved more success in education results, has “liberalism” been completely purged? Perhaps Matt Lauer and David Gregory are more interested in real factors … structural, cultural, economic, etc … involved.