Google Bombs Jon Swift; Goldberg runs for the bunker

Brad, at Sadly, No! forwards this report.

Welp, Jonah’s fanboy army of Cheeto-stained wretches have successfully managed to pressure Google into removing Jon Swift’s ingenious post on Liberal Fascism from Google search results. Weak sauce, peeps. Go over to Jon’s blog and give him your support. Google’s Webmaster Blog can be found here. If you wish, you may go there and tell them what you think about the removal of Mr. Swift’s post. Solidarity, bee-yotchez.

Now, the thing with pages which Jonah Goldberg assembled, and retitled an amazing number of times, has undergone a complete necropsy so there is very little point in adding further to the evisceration already carried out by others in such a neat and complete fashion.

The problem is that our good friend Jon Swift did nothing if not to attempt to assist Goldberg. The post which Google has removed from its index was written back in June... before Goldberg even started assembling the words completed his novel piece of revisionist history. Jon has taken an unjustifiable and odious hit from Google. They have, without consideration for the fact that his post has 97 links to it, totally removed his post from the index... without so much as an explanation. Inversely, Google has given The National Review's The Corner, a ranking it has not earned since it has no links.

It all looks like Google is in Jonah Goldberg's corner and they are promoting his revisionist piece of garbage while trying to hide any criticism, or, in the case of Jon Swift, literary assistance. Jon explains:

I believe it may have something to do with this post: "What If a Googlebomb Is a Googledud?" which referred to the attempt to Googlebomb "Liberal Fascism" by linking to my piece but did not mention the Urban Dictionary Googlebomb. Both Jonah Goldberg and Instapundit linked to that post, which no doubt resulted in a number of complaints sent to Google. The only explanation I can come up with is that Google responded to complaints by manually editing the results, something they claim they try never to do.

A point made by Google itself. (Themselves?)

We don't condone the practice of googlebombing, or any other action that seeks to affect the integrity of our search results, but we're also reluctant to alter our results by hand in order to prevent such items from showing up.

Apparently, Google is not as reluctant as they claim. Jon's post is gone from the Google index and the blathering fuckwad still has a Google page ranking for searches of Liberal Fascism which far exceeds its worth.

Back to the thing produced by Goldberg known by his fans as a book. As Goldberg's interview with Alex Koppelman was concluding, this exchange took place. (Koppelman in bold.)

And you say you're not calling liberals Nazis, but...

I must say it 25 times in the book.

No shit?! How about that.

Yeah. But the cover has the smiley face with the Hitler mustache. Does that undermine that message and lead to some of these reactions?

You're going to love this answer.

Well, I'm perfectly glad to concede that people who do judge books by their covers or think it's more important to read a title rather than read a book will be confused and jump to conclusions. But these are people that I don't generally respect.

Waitaminute, waitaminute, waitaminute! For three years, three fucking years, all we've had is the cover with that picture and the linkage of Hitler, Mussolini, Liberal and Fascism in one location. There was no book. What Goldberg did was take a cover that's been hanging about in book sales sites for three years and fill it with paper.

And as for not respecting people who "judge the book by it's cover", Goldberg has managed to prove that he only holds two positions. Lack of respect for those who don't get past the wearisome cover and read his book, or fear, as he crawls into the bunker to try and avoid those who have read it and find that the cover is actually very representative of the contents.

What's almost pathetically amusing about this is that we're talking about a book whose stated purpose is to make conservatives look less like fascists. And of course, its end result is very much the opposite.

Which is a serious person's assessment of Goldberg... I mean his "book". Because Goldberg is all about serious readers and serious persons.

And if you can't get past the cover and the title, then you're not a serious book reader and you're not really a serious person.

Yeah well, I reiterate, there was nothing past the cover and the title. For three years all we had was a smiley face with a Hitler mustache, a title that changed on the same schedule as Goldberg's fast food orders and empty space. Now he expects people to take him seriously?

Right. And when things get a little hot and his "book" gets torn to shreds, Jonah calls in the cheeto-dust army.

Interestingly, I found someone who seems to have some knowledge of Goldberg. Back in the day, Goldberg attended college. In fact, Goucher college, which had, up to the time just before his acceptance there, been an all female institution. Goldberg was a "quota-boy" who only got in as a result of Affirmative Action - something he is all too ready to diss whenever the opportunity arises.

Goucher alumnae have a Livejournal page has an interesting comment.

Goucher bloggers
Within two years, Goucher produced two bloggers on two wildly different webistes: Cristina Page '93 on Huffington Post Jonah Goldberg '91 on National Review Online Neither of their bios mentions Goucher, though Jonah's Wikipedia entry does. That's right, folks, Jonah Goldberg has a Wikipedia entry. Creepy.

Heh! Seems Goldberg leaves that kind of impression wherever he goes.

Update: I had meant to add this to the original post. One of the commenters over at Balloon Juice has neatly labeled Goldberg. It's called the Goldberg principle and it explains everything:

You can prove any thesis to be true if you make up your own definitions of words.

BUSTED!! : I had always suspected Goldberg wrote this from information he gathered out of his ass between super bacon double cheeseburgers.

Here he provides comment on the request that he should have included in his tome of fascist history the Blue Shirts of China or Mosley's Silver Shirts.

Any serious historian who had done any amount of research would have addressed that quickly by pointing out that Mosely's "Silver Shirts" were a work of fiction in an alternative history written by Harry Turtledove. In short, Turtledove was writing what could have been had the Germans actually won and occupied Britain.

Does Goldberg dispatch the idea for it's lack of historical accuracy? Nooo. Instead he treats it as a fact which he chose not to include.

There is also the fact that when confronted with quotations from Mussolini, (Hey! He's mentioned in the title of the book!), Goldberg quickly excused his lack of knowledge by attempting to steer away from an answer, not the least of which was an admission that he hadn't read one of Mussolini's more important works in over three years.

Great research Goldberg. Just great.