Fashionable Babbling

by digby

Following up tristero’s Dear Joe letter below, here’s Jonathan at A Tiny Revolution:

For years Peter “Pe-Nart” Beinart has attempted to speak in complete gibberish. And he’s gotten close—70% gibberish, 86% gibberish, 93% gibberish. But it’s only in a recent Q & A with Kevin Drum about Beinart’s book The Good Fight that he’s reached his goal of 100% (reg. req.):

Jihadism sits at the center of a series of globalization-related threats, including global warming, pandemics, and financial contagion, which are powered by globalization-related technologies, and all of which threaten the United States more than other countries.

This is outstanding work. The only way his point could be improved would be to put it like this:

Gerbil narcolepsy sofa-bed detritus squanders Bigfoot. Crapulent snurf machine? Crapulent snurf machine knob knobbler! Groucho lithe koala traipsing noreaster flange mucus. Mithril acne fluffernutter shamus fling-ding-a-ling-doo!

Seriously: in what sense can jihadism be said to “sit at the center” of global warming, pandemics, and financial contagion? In what possible way can these all be claimed to be greater threats to the U.S. than to other countries?

You may wonder, then, why Beinart’s saying something so blatantly absurd. The answer is that the “liberalism” he espouses is incoherent. The Cheney platform—Let’s Rule The World By Hate And Fear—at least has an undeniable internal logic. So too does a radical evaluation of U.S. foreign policy. They both tell coherent stories. But the mushy tale “I, Peter Beinart, will run the planet except I’ll be nice” simply doesn’t make sense. Thus he doesn’t have any alternative to saying preposterous things.

What’s this talk about incoherent gibberish? We’re at war! I know some say that terrorism isn’t responsible for global warming. I disagree. We’re fightin’ evil. Global warmin’ is evil and America is good. Like that bird flu thing. It’s anti-American. It harbors terrists. We’re gonna have tah bring it tah justice. Financial contagion? Unless we repeal the death tax the terrists will’ve won. Everybody knows that.

Thank the good lord for reasonable liberals like Peter Beinert, that’s all I can say. At least he understands that there has never been a threat like terrorism in the whole history of the world and unless we stop them, they are going to take over the planet and eat our children with a knife and fork! And that’s after they take all our money and give us sunburns with their secret global warming death ray.

What’s incoherent about that?

.