For close to a year, I’ve been listening regularly to the NYT’s podcast “The Argument,” starring three of the paper’s op-ed writers.
There are two people on the left — David Leonhardt and Michelle Goldberg — and one on the right, Ross Douthat.
That may sound a bit lopsided, and for me it is, but not in the way you think. Week after week, I agree to varying degrees with liberal Leonhardt and conservative Douthat, and get really frustrated and turned off by the views of Michelle Goldberg.
One reason for that is that she’s always dissing my man Joe. It started before he got into the race last year, with her strongly expressing her wish that he NOT get in the race. After that, she continued to be a prominent voice among the nattering nabobs of the left competing to see who could be more dismissive of the former VP.
It’s not that she hated him. It’s just that she, you know… dismissed him. She was all like, Oh, good old Uncle Joe; he’s a sweet guy and I can put up with him at the family gatherings, but we all know he’s past it, and he has no business getting back in the game — the poor guy’s going to break a hip or something. And he just doesn’t get the world of today…
And as I walk about downtown listening to these podcasts, I’m like, No, YOU don’t get it…
But today, I finally got around to listening to yesterday’s podcast, which was about Joe’s triumphs of the last few days, and finally, she got it! She was awesome in the degree to which she got it, and how well she expressed it. I had to go back and listen again to write down some of the great things she was saying, starting with…
Michelle Goldberg
So much of what we’ve been talking about the last few months, especially in the debates, has been irrelevant.
People… care less about the details of, you know, how we’re going to pay for universal healthcare, or Medicare for all vs. Medicare for all who want it.
There are people who really care about that stuff. But what most people care about is, you know, the house is on fire; how are you going to put it out, not how are you going to rebuild afterwards….
Yes! Absolutely! I’ve been so impatient with all the idiots out there talking about this process in terms of who got off the greatest zingers in last night’s debate, or how Elizabeth “I’ve got a plan for that” Warren was going to pay for those plans, or whatever…
Who cared? I didn’t. Because the house is on fire! Stop talking about rearranging the furniture!
Also, too many people fail to get that the problem isn’t this plan or that plan of Bernie Sanders. The problem is Bernie Sanders, and the way he and too many of his followers conduct themselves. And a moment later, Ms. Goldberg said some awesome things about that:
I don’t think the Sanders movement understands how alienating it is to people who aren’t already on board with it, or maybe to people who are on board with maybe 85 percent or 90 percent of what they believe.
There’s a sort of paranoid style in that movement…
I’ve been around the left long enough to know that the left has always attracted a certain number of people who, um… you know, who are sort of just in it for the reeducation camps, right?…
Left-wing movements kind of succeed or fail to the degree that they can, you know, marginalize or quarantine those figures…
Yes! Absolutely! You get it! Paranoid style!
When she made that crack about the re-education camps, I laughed out loud, right there in the middle of the household goods department in Belk. (On rainy days, I tend to go do my afternoon walk in the nearly empty Richland Mall, rather than walking across the USC campus and around the Statehouse.)
And one of the guys on the show — I think it was Leonhardt — laughed, too. It was so perfect, so dead-on.
You go, Michelle!
But then, later in the show, she said she was going to vote for Bernie instead of Joe.
And suddenly the member of the trio I love to boo was back. I’m just briskly walking into Barnes and Noble shaking my head. I can’t believe it…
It’s alright, I guess. Most of the world came around and backed Joe this past week. Some people just take a little longer. No way to speed it up without, you know, re-education camps…
Related Posts
I’m sorry this didn’t engage y’all’s interest. It’s probably a tough topic to get into unless you’ve spent months listening to these podcasts the way I have (something I do recommend, by the way).
I should have broadened it, to make it clearer that I consider Michelle Goldberg’s disdain for Joe to be representative to a LOT of the coverage he’s gotten over the past year. Media — and not just opinion writers — have been falling all over each other trying to outdo each other in writing Joe off. And in no way trying to hide it.
It’s been pretty obnoxious. And it’s been satisfying to see them have to eat their words the last 10 days or so…