We are all descended from cavemen who broke the skulls of their enemies with rocks for fun or profit. But that hardly mitigates the crimes of a man who does the same thing today. I see no problem judging the behavior of the Islamic State and its apologists from the vantage point of the West's high horse, because we've earned the right to sit in that saddle.
Jonah GoldbergThe logical upshot of liberalism's hatred of hypocrisy is that it is better for the liar to champion lying, the glutton to advocate gluttony, the adulterer to celebrate adultery, than for someone to preach the right thing if he himself occasionally does the wrong thing. Better to let your failings define you and be happy about it, than to let your ideals define you but then fall short of them, for that opens you up to the charge of hypocrisy.
Jonah GoldbergWe are a species that must try to impose and find systems - systems of thought, ways of organizing and categorizing reality.
Jonah GoldbergWhen I started criticizing Donald Trump when he got more popular on the right, one of the most things that I discovered was how many people were mad at me for not living down to their expectations. There are a lot of pundits on the right who think their job is to be a cheerleader for their team. That is not my job. My job is to tell the truth as I see it, and that is gotten a lot of people angry.
Jonah GoldbergIn Europe and America alike, voters increasingly recognize that the benefits of the green revolution aren't worth the costs, particularly when the revolutionaries don't have a clue what they're doing.
Jonah GoldbergBut there's a fourth interpretation: Obama can't leave his comfort zone. No president since Woodrow Wilson has been as enamored of abstract ideas or more sure that disagreement with him is proof of ignorance, bad faith or dogmatism. As a candidate, he insisted his real opponent was 'cynicism,' and in his address last week, he returned to this trite formulation, insisting again he was bravely battling the cynics.
Jonah Goldberg