Jonah Goldberg Decides Next Wingnut Target Is ... Teddy Roosevelt

Not even teabaggers and wingnuts pay any attention to Jonah Goldberg, but he still wants in on this whole GOP purge & self-destruct thing he saw on the Internet, so he has bravely submitted the dead Republican president Teddy "Theodore" Roosevelt as the next victim. Why must the beloved GOP icon be destroyed? Because Jonah actually looked up this Roosevelt guy on Yahoo and whoops, communist much, Teddy? No wonder they called him "The Bull Moose Pulpit" or whatever.

Seems old Teddy said or wrote something that implied people should be decent to one another, which is exactly what Stalin used to say. Worse yet, "T.R." apparently thought GOVERNMENT should play some role in society.

But T.R. saw the State (hopefully with himself at the helm) as the arbiter of what did and did not represent a "benefit" to the community. That this is a deeply statist mindset seems pretty obvious to me, not least because T.R. admits that he thinks this standard should usher in a new era of greater state power and "governmental interference with social and economic conditions." .... T.R. worship is nonetheless fraught with peril for conservatives.

And Jonah's mom emailed with a new Word of the Day, "statist," and Jonah thinks it is just the coolest word to use, on a blog. If he could just work in a reference to a cartoon episode from two decades ago, he would really have something going on, with his writing. He might even rework this for theLos Angeles Times. (Did you know he is the "conservative pundit" for that paper? It's true!)

One day soon, Jonah's going to hear about this "Nationalized Parks" thing, and he is NOT going to be happy about it. [ The Corner ]