Leave it to a heartless Neocon, one Jonah Goldberg, to pile it on, and with malice, too! Reeling from the horrific effects of the devastating storm, "Hurricane Katrina," the city of New Orleans, on Aug. 29, 2005, came to a full stop! Thousands of its most helpless residents, many of them the poorest of the poor, mostly African-Americans, were left to their own meager devices in order to survive. As a temporary fix, emergency measures were imposed. One of them was a decision by officials to house many of its citizen/refugees in the Superdome, a stadium, that has been the home in the past to a number of NFL Superbowl games. Here is what the means-spirited Goldberg, a columnist, wrote about that relief effort:

"ATTN: SUPERDOME RESIDENTS – I think it's time to face facts. That place is going to be a Mad Max/thunderdome Waterworld/Lord of the Flies horror show within the next few hours. My advice is to prepare yourself now. Hoard weapons, grow gills and learn to communicate with serpents. While you're working on that, find the biggest guy you can and when he's not expecting it beat him senseless. Gather young fighters around you and tell the womenfolk you will feed and protect any female who agrees to participate without question in your plans to repopulate the earth with a race of gilled-supermen. It's never too soon to be prepared." (1)

Goldberg's grossly insensitive crack can be found on a blog, entitled, "The Corner." It is maintained by the "National Review Online," which itself is connected to the William Buckley-founded magazine, "National Review," (NR). It's a bastion for mostly Right Wing and Neocon zealots, like Goldberg. He is the editor of "NR Online" and a contributor to its printed version.

This is the same nasty Goldberg, who back on Jan. 25, 2003, viciously denounced the French people "as liars," made fun of their accents and even their skill at "cheese-making." He had gone totally ballistic over the fact that the government of France, led by President Jacques Chirac, had refused to go along with the Bush-Cheney Gang's scheme to launch an unjust and immoral war against the peoples of Iraq based on a pack of damnable lies. Goldberg also chided the French for working to lift the genocidal UN sanctions then being imposed on the Iraqi government. (2) He claimed that the sanctions hadn't really worked because of the French efforts "to undermine them." He added that the French "shame" themselves by advocating containment against Iraq, just because it had worked "in the Cold War." Goldberg then blasted France's "cry for peace," as being motivated by "a desire for oil." (3) And, did you know, that Goldberg also had once suggested that the U.S. should "bomb Canada?" (4) What a half-demented, war-mad smear artist this guy is!

Getting back to the revolting "NR" blog above. A blogger, described as "Professor Doc Bainbridge," did attempt to bring Goldberg to task for his crass remarks. But, this is how the wiseguy Neocon replied to him: "Perhaps Professor Bainbridge – of whom I am a fan – thinks something really awful will befall the denizens of the Superdome and therefore making a joke at their expense is wrong. My guess is that it will simply be a really unpleasent [sic] time for the remainder of the day, but hardly so unpleasent [sic] as to sanctify them with refugee or some other victim status. I assumed the reference to gill-growing and what not made it clear where I was coming from. I'm sorry if we don't always fulfill the good professor's expectations around here. But it can't be all brandy-snifters and Latin puns in the Corner," Goldberg sarcastically wrote. (1)

Later on, Goldberg did offered this belated apology for his massive exercise in boorishness: "To those who lost lives, loved ones or property in the hurricane yesterday. After sleeping on it, I decided I probably could have waited longer for the levity." (1) Meanwhile, on that same blog, his boss at the "NR," editor Richard Lowry, had actually come to Goldberg's defense. He wrote: "Personally, I thought the Jonah Superdome riff was funny and clearly was poking fun at the media frenzy around Katrina at a time when it seemed especially over-blown." (1) Here are my questions: What is in the coffee that these Right Wing blockheads drink at the NR? And, is it the same coffee that is regularly consumed by other ultraconservative looney types, like Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity and Michael Savage?

Goldberg, an unrepentant Iraqi War hawk, wasn't finished with his spiel about Katrina and its effects. He chirped in with his sick thoughts, too, on how the city and state authorities were responding to the crisis. Incidentally, the city and state officials got little or no help, especially early on in the emergency, from the federal government, headed by the outrageously incompetent George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. (5) The pompous Goldberg wrote, "I saw the Louisiana Governor try to sound angry last night. She declared that what really makes her angry is that normally disasters bring out the best in people but this is bringing out the worst in some people. I can't be the only one who thought she sounded like a second grade teacher telling the kids how disappointed she was that they were misbehaving on a class trip. This woman isn't fit to carry Rudy Giuliani's (or Margaret Thatcher's) clipboard." (1)

In the best of times, there are always going to be spiteful characters like Jonah Goldberg, lurking around in the back alleys of any society. Generally, they are restrained from exposing their darkest thoughts by the public's high regard for tradition, reason, civility, truth and justice. Unfortunately, today, in the U,.S., we are living under the corrupting influence of "The Age of Bush-Cheney," where those standards have been seriously eroded. This means that a repulsive Jonah Goldberg, a merchant of junk, can not only mock the thousands of the innocent victims of Katrina (6); urge the U.S. to bomb our great neighbor to the north, Canada; and gratuitously insult our oldest ally, France (7), but that he can, most regretfully, do all of the above with absolute impunity!

Notes:

1. corner.nationalreview.com/05_08_28_corner-archive.asp
2. www.commondreams.org/views/070700-103.htm
3. "France's Latent Motivation" by Jonah Goldberg, Washington Times, 01/25/03.
4. www.nationalreview.com/preview/preview112502.asp
5. www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/01/AR2005090102428.html
6. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Katrina
7. See, "The Campaign That Won America: The Story of Yorktown," by Burke Davis; and "Lafayette," by Harlow Giles Unger.

© William Hughes 2005.

William Hughes is the author of “Saying ‘’No’ to the War Party” (IUniverse, Inc.). He can be reached at liamhughes-AT-comcast.net.