Demagogue

All sorts of liberal blogs have apparently been linking to this post (I found it via the link at Atrios). Ordinarily, I wouldn't see much point in adding one more link.

But I did want to point out that the (very entertaining) smack-down administered to Jonah Goldberg here reinforces the point made by Juan Cole in my favorite post to link to: pundits tend not to know what they're talking about, and when they take on experts in a particular field, they simply aren't armed for intellectual combat. Cole also--and, it appears, correctly--claims that Goldberg is worse than most pundits in asserting the superiority of his own judgment irrespective of the fact that he (like most of us) is ignorant about the topics on which he opines.

I remember having an informal lunch with a group of people including Nina Totenberg. She was proud of having attained a level of expertise in the law and in the workings of the Supreme Court that enabled her to be an excellent Supreme Court reporter without any formal training. But regarding her punditry post (I think she was then on ABC's Sunday morning show), she had a different stance. She didn't see why her thoughts about, e.g., tax policy should be any more worth listening to than anyone else's, but as long as ABC wanted to pay her for those thoughts, she was having fun along the way.

Goldberg, Totenberg--so similar in sound, so far apart in humility.