Doughy D.O.A.

It's taking longer than expected for Jonah Goldberg's ghostwriter to finish his long awaited worstseller, I Heart Hitler: Without You, Adolf, I'm Nothing. Back in 2003, the Pantload's publisher was promising a 2005 release date. As 2005 passed, Goldberg promised a March 2007 release date, and then a September 11, 2007 (!) release date.

The dupes at Doubleday are now announcing a December 26, 2007 release date which, no doubt, will roll over to a 2008 date by the end of Spring.

Or maybe not. I searched the Doubleday website and could find nothing on Lucianne Jnr.'s manfesto. A page at the website of Doubleday's parent, Random House, refers to Goldberg and has a picture of the book's cover, but has no information about the Pantload's volume. And the Pantload's not one of the ten Goldbergs on the publisher's author roster.

At a promised 272 pages, this means that Goldberg hasn't managed to complete even a fifth of a page per day. Factoring in the huge margins, large type, bogus endnotes and eight to sixteen pages of red and black Crayola illustrations, it's probably closer to less than a tenth of a page. Of course, Goldberg's churned out much more than 272 pages worth of Corner Crap over the past four years (and that's not including his syndicated column and BSG slash fiction). So he's got no excuse for delivering his book 2 and 1/2 years late.

Either the publisher is refusing to publish Goldberg's steaming pile as written or Goldberg couldn't come up with enough examples of liberal fascism to fill a large pamphlet. Or both.

Meanwhile, it's appropriate that the current release date is the date known for returning unwanted crap in exchange for cash or store credit. And the start of Kwanzaa.

What we have to learn from others is how to flee greed, and how to flee greed in a way that does not sabotage the expansiveness of peoples' lives. Imagine a family of four living on $20,000 a year. The United States could do with a new immersion in egalitarianism. This is still said to be an animating idea of contemporary liberalism. But it's not at all clear to me how much this idea really does animate liberalism's high priests and priestesses, especially those from Hollywood.

And:

Secondly, if Fitzgerald was persuaded that Libby had in fact leaked Plame's identity, why didn't he, in fact, take Libby to the grand jury and charge him with violating the secrecy provisions of the law? There are several reasons. One is that the applicability of those provisions are dubious. The second is that Plame seems to have led a rather public "secret" life, flashy, suggestive and also silly. Anyone one who outed Plame was outing a known character. And, then, there is the probity of Plame pushing her own husband--a low-level diplomat with no significant past and, even then, no promising future--for an intelligence and security task for which he had no qualifications. Yes, the ex-ambassador may have been quite known in Niger. And that is only one reason why he was so very wrong for the job at hand. Do you send a show-boater to dig for the movement of nuclear material? Is this not shameful? Is this not what we call nepotism, high-stakes nepotism?