Jonah Goldberg
Americans are very smart about the things they care about, and ignorant about the things they don't.Collection: Smart
[Progressives] think the Constitution is like Felix the Cat's magic bag: Look in there long enough and hard enough, and you can find anything.Collection: Cat
I have always seen the Clinton Foundation - yes, they do a lot of charitable good works. But by my lights, the charitable good works were a cost center like the electric bill. The reason why the foundation exists wasn't to do good work. It was to serve as sort of a place to park lugubrious sycophants like Sidney Blumenthal and other henchman, a place to serve as a super PAC, a place park her campaign while they were a government in exileCollection: Reason
The problem is I think Howie is exactly right, is that Donald Trump would rather be at the center of a media controversy in a negative way than allow the limelight to move to Hillary Clinton and let her actually take heat in the public - in a public arena. And it just sucks up all of the oxygen.Collection: Moving
When 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.Collection: Jobs
Historians write favorably, you know, for example, about Stalin because he was doing big things.Collection: Writing
Whenever a Republican gets in office, all of a sudden progressives realize that federalism and state's rights aren't necessarily only about defending slavery or Jim Crow. They're actually about maximizing freedom.Collection: Rights
A lot of the things that Trump needs to do to be a popular president requires annoying his biggest fans.Collection: President
Governing involves choosing and making choices between competing goods.Collection: Choices
Let's treat politicians like Twinkies. They have to disclose their ingredients - i.e., where their money is from - but beyond that, let the buyer beware.Collection: Ingredients
I think there needs to be a meeting to set an agenda for more meetings about meetings.Collection: Thinking
I like vengeance as much as the next guy, if the next guy likes vengeance a whole lot.Collection: Guy
When activists say we need to move past the partisan divide, what they mean is: Shut up and get with my program. Have you ever heard anyone say, "We need to get past all of this partisan squabbling and name-calling. That's why I'm going to abandon all my objections and agree with you"?Collection: Moving
Three explanations dominate speculation about what Obama is up to. The first is that he's trying to lay the groundwork for his successor, presumptive nominee Hillary Clinton. The second is that he's trying to pad his legacy. The third is that he's trying to 'troll' or bait the GOP into debating his agenda rather than pursuing its own. All are plausible, and none necessarily contradicts the others.Collection: Trying
You know those Navy SEALs, they weren't Democrats and Republicans. They were just doing what was best for America. Wouldn't that be a great country if all of you Americans were just like that? You followed orders, you marched in step and you followed my agenda.Collection: Country
Capitalism is the greatest system ever created for alleviating general human misery, and yet it breeds ingratitude.Collection: Misery
I don't think twice about picking up my dog's poop, but if another dog's poop is next to it, I think, 'Eww, dog poop!Collection: Dog
Keep Hope alive, particularly if Hope is the name of a very cute puppy and not some ill-defined abstraction that is in fact code for big government.Collection: Cute
You can see why the Marxist left would resist the idea that Hitler was a revolutionary. Because if he was, then either Hitler was a force for good, or revolutions can be bad.Collection: Ideas
John Kerry is a sphincter. Okay, that's a bit juvenile.Collection: John Kerry
Why is it fair game to question conservatives' love or loyalty to children or to their fellow man, but beyond the pale to question liberals' love of country?Collection: Loyalty
Bill Maher is anything but an impartial host. He sucks up to Hollywood liberals because A) he needs to get them back on the show, B) he usually agrees with them, and C) they tend to be wildly ignorant.Collection: Ignorant
Hollywood's martyr-mythology leaves out the fact that the famed Hollywood Ten, for example, were in fact members of the Communist Party, which advocated the violent overthrow of the U.S. government in violation of the Smith Act and which took orders directly from Moscow.Collection: Party
Hypocrisy is bad, but it's not the worst vice in the world. If I declared “murder is wrong” and then killed somebody, I would hope that the top count against me would be homicide, not hypocrisy. Liberal elites ' particularly in Hollywood ' believe that hypocrisy is the gravest sin in the world, which is why they advocate their own lifestyles for the entire world: Sleep with whomever you want, listen to your own instincts, be true to yourself, blah, blah, blah. Our fear of hypocrisy is forcing us to live in a world where gluttons are fine, so long as they champion gluttony.Collection: Believe
Progressivism, liberalism, or whatever you want to call it has become an ideology of power. So long as liberals hold it, principles don't matter.Collection: Long
Those who say they dislike dogma, or 'certainty', tend to be liars, hypocrites, or simply wrong. What they really dislike is the dogma of those they disagree with. A society that was certain, certain beyond all certainty, that putting its citizens in death camps was wrong, would never put people in death camps. Such things are only possible when you're open to new ideas.Collection: Liars
The 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.Collection: Liars
If you think shrinking government and getting it less involved in your life is a hallmark of tyranny it is only because you are either grotesquely ignorant or because you subscribe to a statist ideology that believes the expansion of the state is the expansion of liberty.Collection: Believe
Of course, it's a mystery to me why any American who can't be bothered to pay attention to politics unless Pamela Anderson is discussing it should be welcome in that conversation.Collection: Attention
Dissent is morally neutral. You can correctly call yourself a dissident because you like to kick puppies, but at the end of the day, you're just a jerk who likes to kick puppies.Collection: The End Of The Day
The mainstream perception that conservatives are close-minded and dogmatic while liberals are open-minded and free-thinking has it almost exactly backward. Liberal dogma is settled: The government should do good, where it can, whenever it can. That is President Obama's idea of pragmatism and bipartisanship: He's open to all ideas, from either side of the aisle, about how best to expand government and get the state more involved in our lives.Collection: Thinking
We’re all born idiots, and we only get over that condition as we get less young.Collection: Idiot
As a broad generalization, big businesses have no moral objections to being whores. Getting into bed with Uncle Sam is all a question of price, not principle.Collection: Uncles
Not reassuring when weathermen say 'Today will be terrible but don't worry it won't be as terrible as tomorrow or Friday.Collection: Friday
Science is wonderful at explaining what science is wonderful at explaining, but beyond that it tends to look for its car keys where the light is good.Collection: Keys
In crude Marxist terms, liberals have a theory of infallible government that is constantly at war with the reality of life.Collection: War
(T)he most important reason American leftists love France is that French elites say bad things about America. French intellectuals call us racist, stupid, imperialistic, simplistic, etc. ' and that alone is proof of their intellectualism. So long as you call America “racist,” you could add that an enema is as good as a toothbrush and some professor of “communications theory” would applaud.Collection: Stupid
It was in the 1960s that the left convinced itself that there is something fascistic about patriotism and something perversely "patriotic" about running down America. Anti-Americanism - a stand-in for hatred of Western civilization - became the stuff of sophisticates and intellectuals as never before. Flag burners became the truest "patriots" because dissent - not just from partisan politics, but the American project itself - became the highest virtue.Collection: Running
A rising economic tide is bad for people who live off of the poverty of others.Collection: People
When I see hipsters wearing Mao hats or Lenin T-shirts, I'm grateful. It's like truth-in-labeling. For now I know you are: Woefully ignorant, morally stunted, purposively asinine, or all three.Collection: Hipster
I'd like to know why sociologists can't decide whether movie sex and violence has any effect on children, but there's a universal consensus that even a glimpse of a Camel will force children to become lifelong smokers.Collection: Sex
There is no - let me repeat - no example in the last quarter-century of a large, complex economy that has been successful with high taxes.Collection: Successful
Yes, I know liberals are more empirical because Jonathan Chait says they are, but my empirical studies of liberal empiricism keep spitting out contradictory findings.Collection: Study
But 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.Collection: Real
I think what we're seeing on a lot of parts of the right is people bending their positions and their principles on account of the fact that Donald Trump won.Collection: Thinking
...associational ad hominem attacks remain the left's favorite rhetorical strategy for undermining opponents.Collection: Rhetorical Strategies
If you're uncertain when life begins, why not give the unborn the benefit of the doubt and oppose abortion?Collection: Life
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.Collection: Horse
A week after his State of the Union address, political observers are still trying to figure out what President Obama's game is. That's because rhetorically and substantively, he seems to be in another world.Collection: Games