Only an idiot (Jonah Goldberg) would compare volunteerism to slavery

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Tue Jul-08-08 03:05 PM
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Only an idiot (Jonah Goldberg) would compare volunteerism to slavery

July 08, 2008

Slavery!

by hilzoy

Jonah Goldberg strikes again:

"There's a weird irony at work when Sen. Barack Obama, the black presidential candidate who will allegedly scrub the stain of racism from the nation, vows to run afoul of the constitutional amendment that abolished slavery.

For those who don't remember, the 13th Amendment says: "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime ... shall exist within the United States."

I guess in Obama's mind it must be a crime to be born or to go to college.

In his speech on national service Wednesday at the University of Colorado, Obama promised that as president he would "set a goal for all American middle and high school students to perform 50 hours of service a year, and for all college students to perform 100 hours of service a year."

He would see that these goals are met by, among other things, attaching strings to federal education dollars. If you don't make the kids report for duty, he's essentially telling schools and college kids, you'll lose money you can't afford to lose. In short, he'll make service compulsory by merely compelling schools to make it compulsory."

Maybe in the schools Jonah Goldberg attended, they didn't require things like homework, or attendance, or reading, or math. It would explain a lot. (The idea that he wasn't asked to work his way through all those analogies in preparation for the SATs alone would probably explain most of the "arguments" in Liberal Fascism.)

For the rest of us, though, there have always been lots of compulsory things in schools. If this counts as slavery, children have been enslaved since compulsory schooling began.

I can't wait for Jonah Goldberg's sudden discovery that some children are told -- told!! -- to clean their rooms.

Tuesday, July 08, 2008

LA Times writer calls Obama "the black presidential candidate," says he want to bring back "slavery"

John Aravosis (DC) · 7/08/2008 11:00:00 AM ET
This is what passes for legitimate journalism in the corporate media nowadays. The Los Angeles Times, like the New York Times, decided to hire a far-right activist writer in the hopes that this might stop conservatives from being mean to them. How's that working for you? The LA Times' conservative just called Obama "the black presidential candidate" and accused him of trying to bring back "slavery." Funny, but I'm guessing that an African-American doesn't need a lecture on slavery from some guy named Jonah Goldberg. How many times does the Los Angeles Times and New York Times need to cringe at something these conservatives have written before they realize that these guys don't practice journalism, they practice Limbaughism. They're literary shock jocks. Their "columns" are nothing more than political performance art. It's all about being vulgar and getting attention, all at the expense of their victim, their newspaper, and their own credibility.