I have given up reading Paul Krugman or Charles Blow in the Times op-ed pages since the Julie Principle applies: they are reliable dishonest left-wing hacks, and it’s silly to waste time criticizing them for doing what they will always do. I have almost reached that point with Michelle Goldberg, last vivisected here, but her column this week was interesting. She actually criticized her fellow travelers for siding with Hamas after the horrific sneak terror attack on Israel. Not only that, Goldberg, a knee-jerk wokester if there ever was one, was moved to question progressives generally, writing in The Massacre in Israel and the Need for a Decent Left,

“…the way keyboard radicals have condoned war crimes against Israelis has left many progressive Jews alienated from political communities they thought were their own.”

“Progressive Jews” like Goldberg. Funny, I just think of her as an integrity-challenged, progressive liar and fool. Anyway, she goes on in part,

Conservatives reading this might take a jaundiced satisfaction in what some surely view as naïve progressives getting their comeuppance. But part of what makes the depravity of the edgelord anti-imperialists so tragic is that a decent and functional left has rarely been more necessary… It is not just disgusting but self-defeating for vocal segments of the left to disavow those universal ideas about human rights, declaring instead that to those who are oppressed, even the most extreme violence is permitted….Perhaps such hideous dogmatism shouldn’t be surprising. The left has always attracted certain people who relish the struggle against oppression primarily for the way it licenses their own cruelty; they are one reason movements on the left so reliably produce embittered apostates. Plenty of leftists have long fetishized revolutionary violence in poor countries, perhaps as a way of coping with their own ineffectuality….

The most sympathetic reading of the online leftists playacting as the Baader-Meinhof Gang is that their nihilism is a function of despair. As Leifer pointed out, even before the killings in Israel, it was a grim time for the American left, as the elation of the Sanders campaign and the revolutionary hopes of the Black Lives Matter movement gave way to backlash and retrenchment. “When the left loses, it enters into a cycle of self-marginalization,” he said….On social media, some scholars and activists are repeating the line “Decolonization is not a metaphor,” suggesting that the homicidal spree we just saw in Israel is not a departure from their ideology but the embodiment of it. I suspect they will come to regret it if people take them at their word.

By valorizing terrorism, these voices on the left are effectively choosing to stop contending for power in a serious way — a slow and grinding process rife with setbacks — and indulge instead in messianic projection.

Well bless her heart. (“The revolutionary hopes of the Black Lives Matter movement”? You mean like discriminating against whites, replacing merit with racial spoils, using violence as a political tool, destroying urban law enforcement and, of course, making lots of money? Those hopes?)

It’s fascinating: the tendencies and reflexes Goldberg now criticizes are exactly those that she routinely channels in her punditry. In her last appearance in the Spotlight of Shame on Ethics Alarms, Goldberg was making excuses for racist huckster Ibram X. Kendri, which is less bloodthirsty than excusing Hamas but in the same broad category: Leftists believing that the ends justify the means. Shortly before that one, another column regurgitated multiple Democratic Party Big Lies and talking points to claim that Fox News and Donald Trump were existential threats to democracy (so, presumably, shut one down and lock the other up).

The most telling of Michelle’s uniformly revolting and unethical columns, however, was a topic here 12 years ago, before she started polluting the Times. In a column for The Daily Beast, Goldberg had defended journalist Nir Rosen after he ridiculed the horrendous attack on ABC reporter Lara Logan by an Egyptian mob and implied that as a ‘war-monger” she deserved the beating. Goldberg embraced multiple rationalizations to excuse this—this, don’t forget, is a progressive journalist arguing that a female reporter deserved to be attacked and savaged by a mob—writing,

“…it indicated that Rosen has deep, unexamined problems with women, particularly women who are his more-celebrated competitors. But it was also appalling to realize that this brief, ugly outburst was going to eclipse an often-heroic career. The media’s modern panopticon has an awful way of reducing us all to the worst thing we’ve ever done…Again and again, we see people who make one mistake either forced out of their jobs or held up for brutal public excoriation. But the more we live in public, the more we need to develop some sort of mercy for those who briefly let the dark parts of themselves slip out, particularly when they’re truly sorry afterward.”

Yes, it’s the King’s Pass and “one mistake” rationalizations, teamed with “Everybody Does It.” Yet what she excused on Rosen part in 2011 is exactly what she now refuses to excuse for the Hamas apologists, except on a smaller scale. Is rationality taking over from rationalizations in Goldberg’s psyche?

Of course not. With Rosen, she was siding with another progressive Jewish journalist against a conservative shiksa reporter. Now, Goldberg is taking Israel’s side against non-Jewish progressives. The Times pundit is a slave to the cognitive dissonance scale. She was enough of an Obama lackey, for example, to never criticize that awful, awful President who, as the Federalist accurately notes today, “used his presidency to destabilize the Middle East in the service of a left-wing ideology that excuses antisemitism and justifies terrorist violence.” Goldberg is incapable of being objective or overriding her own biases, so she can’t see that the conduct of both her pal Rosen and Israel-hating leftists like “The Squad” are symptomatic of the ethics rot that infects her ideology—signature significance for people who cannot and must not be trusted. It is mordantly amusing to see Michelle Goldberg calling for “decency” on the Left, when, for example, she writes columns like this one, spinning on behalf of transactivist school districts. Her sentence in the latest column is particularly desperate: “Conservatives reading this might take a jaundiced satisfaction in what some surely view as naïve progressives getting their comeuppance.”

Not just conservatives, Michelle, but anyone who can objectively recognize when extremists are hoisted by their own petards. And not just on this topic of late, but so much more: defunding the police, attacking the Second Amendment, the Obama and Biden gifts to Iran, open borders, etc. Maybe, just maybe, the stench of what has become liberalism in the 21st century in finally permeating nasal cavities of ideologues and ignoramuses holding their noses