"As he wrote a couple of weeks ago"

The most predominant mentality in right-wing discourse finds expression in this form: "I am part of/was born into Group X, and Group X -- my group -- is better than all others yet treated so very unfairly" . . . . Here again we find the same adolescent self-absorption: the group into which I was born and was instructed from childhood to believe is the best [] is, objectively, superior. It is so much better than everyone and everything else that even to suggest that we have flaws comparable to others is to engage in "false moral equivalencies." To do anything other than emphatically proclaim my group's objective superiority is to treat my group unfairly.

And perhaps we ought to have a little of what he wrote only the day before yesterday, Friday 27 June 2009, as well:

UPDATE III: Goldfarb replies ... with the full array of textbook neoconservative platitudes. The only point worth noting is that he agrees with the observation I expressed last night that Goldfarb's views (like those of most neoconservatives) "ultimately come down to nothing more complicated than: what we do is Good and Right because we are superior and because they are inferior." Goldfarb admits he thinks torture is tolerable when we do it to Them but not when They do it to us because -- as he puts it -- "Of Course We Are Superior and They Are Inferior" (that, of course, is the very definition of "moral relativism," which Goldfarb and his allies like to pretend they oppose even as they exemplify its core premise). And -- other than a view that Muslims generally are inferior -- what possible ground is there for claiming moral superiority over the numerous detainees at Guantánamo and elsewhere who, even by the Bush administration's reasoning, were guilty of nothing? (...) Goldfarb's reply is a pure expression of that warped and self-glorifying mentality.

And then there was Señorito Miguelico de Goldfarb

itself. Apart from what Mr. Prosecutor has already been quoted as quoting, there is a little bit of miscellaneous self-wunnerfulness worthy of notice:

... Greenwald thinks I'm guilty of applying a double standard -- concern for the treatment of uniformed hostages and ambivalence toward the treatment of terrorist detainees. Well, guilty as charged. I really don't care about the rough treatment to which men like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed were subjected even for the chance of gleaning valuable information. Gilad Shalit, on the other hand, is a uniformed combatant entitled to all the rights and protections afforded by the Geneva Conventions.

Obviously Mr. Greenwald thought and said nothing of the sort. After that ringin’ declaration of self-superiority in its headline, the neocoward chickens out rather remarkably by pretendin’ that the WUNNERFUL US on behalf of whom it self-superioritises is really nothin’ more excitin’ or controversial than WAUC, the World Association of Uniformed Combatants. Sure. Of course. Right!

The señorito elaborates its irrelevant alibi at considerable length:

The United States, Israel, and the rest of the civilized world do not target civilians, do not hide weapons in mosques, do not use our own children as human shields, do not send our own children to their deaths as suicide bombers, do not seek the extermination of an entire race of people. Terrorist groups like Hamas and Hezbollah, and the regimes that sponsor them, do. That is why we are morally superior to them, and they are morally inferior to us. And that is also why I'm confident that Gilad Shalit would give anything to have spent the last three years at Gitmo -- playing soccer, watching TV, getting three squares a day -- instead of being a prisoner of Hamas. Because even though they don't deserve it, we still treat our detainees better than terrorists treat theirs.

Everybody must decide for himself, Dr. Bones, but personally I do not feel my pulse rate much stirred by honoris causâ promotion to membership in what a Neocomrade M. Goldfarb is pleased to define as the civilised world. ’Tis a pity, though, that the irrelevant WE into which customers of The Weekly Standard get dragooned on this occasion should be called "the civilised world" and not rather "Western Civilisation." If China and Peru cannot be reliably counted on to care far less for human life than WE do, well, times have certainly changed at Wingnut City! Probably it was just an accident, though: the señorito was, after all, hastily changin’ its standard from a uniformed combatant Wunnerful Us to a civilisation-based Wunnerful US. If suitably cross-questioned, I daresay it would be willin’ enough to include a few Huntin’tonian Clashist™ refinements omitted in the scramble.

’Twas probably a technical misjudgment to stick in "do not target civilians": the Tel Avîv government’s political assassinations are no secret. If this señorito were in a different mood, or in a different polemical pass, very likely it would positively boast thereof. ’That nifty plan is ever so much more cost-effective than bumpin’ off a whole lot of lovely native ladies and cute local kiddies under the rubric of "Damage, Collateral", don’t you know? Anyway, that’s the theory of it at Tel Avîv. And Father Zeus knows best how it works out in practice....

Omitting what the novoseñorito has to say against Jimmy Crater, I arrive at its bottom line:

I wrote that Israeli public opinion was Obama's "best leverage" over Netanyahu. Greenwald may not support Israel, but most Americans still do, which means that withholding or threatening to withhold aid, weapons, or diplomatic support from Israel is lousy politics for an American president, even if it would be a dream come true for Greenwald.

Though it is scarcely a secret that weekly standardisers and commonterrorisers think such threats in private, they do not often actually emit them. Miguelico really ought to have looked at a mirror to make sure it was properly attired to address the Naked Public Square™!

What the specimen actually does in that sentence is rather hard on public opinion in the Tel Avîv statelet, nicht wahr? In what I skipped, it spoke of JC as a ‘dupe’ and "an annoyance to presidents of both parties for decades." A large number of run-of-the-mill Jewish Statists are evidently a Carter-like annoyance to the weekly standardisers: Barák Husáyn Obáma is only too likely to trick them into attitudes and behaviours that must prove counterproductive from the alone true jewishstatist perspective.as promulgated de haut en bas from Castle Podhóretz.

Mr. Greenwald’s "Group X" analysis is admirable as far as it goes, yet when it restricts itself with "into which I was born and was instructed from childhood" it runs off the rails to some extent. Nobody was ever born a militant extremist vanguardite of the Commonterror magazine type. As to instruction, there is no need to assume that Pipes Minor and Kramer Minor and Podhóretz Minor and Kristol Minor and all the rest of the novoseñorito element were deliberately brought up to be what they are like a whole gaggle of John Stuart Mills. No real aristocracy ever worked that way; to suppose it of this sham neoteric crew is perfectly gratuitous.

Indeed, if one were to take "into which I was born and was instructed from childhood" in earnest, the entire Hate-’68 Movement would become unaccountable. The neogentry’s favourite prefix, after all, proclaims that they arrived at their present illiberal and antidemocratic faith precisely by breakin’ with all that sad palæorubbish that they were born into and instructed about. To be sure, now that Hate-’68-ism is into its second or even third degeneration, this is not literally the case with its novoseñorito element. Specimens like M. Goldfarb were presumably born into their self-wunnerful neotericity, but surely they had no need to be specially instructed in it. They will have seen how the servants and the peons defer to their Daddy and drawn the obvious conclusions quite informally and maybe even quite unconsciously, just as (say) a certain Louis de Bourbon had supposedly managed to do by the age of five in 1643. [1]

Happy days.



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[1]

When young Louis was four, his father fell gravely ill with tuberculosis. Knowing that he was about to die, the king ordered that his eldest son be baptised (which normally would have taken place when the prince was seven). At the ceremony the boy was given the name Louis Dieudonné, or "Gift of God," because his birth had seemed so miraculous. Afterward he was brought to his father's deathbed. "What is your name?" Louis XIII asked. "Louis XIV," the little boy replied. "Not yet, not yet," said the king."