{"id":31515,"date":"2015-05-31T04:00:49","date_gmt":"2015-05-31T08:00:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=31515"},"modified":"2015-05-30T12:10:06","modified_gmt":"2015-05-30T16:10:06","slug":"jonah-goldberg-the-real-republican-primary-contest","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2015\/05\/31\/jonah-goldberg-the-real-republican-primary-contest\/","title":{"rendered":"Jonah Goldberg – The real<\/em> Republican primary contest"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jonah was taken aback by something Kevin Williamson wrote — not so much at the article itself, but at the casual assertion that his favourite presidential candidate was “the mighty Cthulhu (‘Why Vote for a Lesser Evil?’)”. Jonah explains why<\/a>:<\/p>\n

I found this curious. Kevin\u2019s preferred candidate is Cthulhu? Don\u2019t get me wrong, I get the appeal. Cthulhu gets things done. He doesn\u2019t pander. He certainly seems to believe in a kind of sound-money policy (by the way, I\u2019m using the masculine pronoun for convenience, not descriptive accuracy; Cthulhu is beyond sex and gender). But Cthulhu poses some problems as a presidential candidate. The first that comes to mind is that he is evil. <\/p>\n

I should note that the claim that Cthulhu is evil has actually sparked some controversy on Twitter. Some of his devotees tell me that he\u2019s beyond mortal conceptions of evil which, of course, is what evil people always say. Moreover, his campaign slogan is \u201cWhy vote for the lesser evil?\u201d Is he lying? Will he be a flip-flopper, refusing to follow through on his platform of full-spectrum evil? The last thing this country needs is an EDINO \u2014 Evil Deity In Name Only. No, I take him at his word. <\/p>\n

Call me old-fashioned, but even though I take a back seat to no one in appreciating the appeal of a cleansing fire that shall sanitize this corrupt husk of a planet, choosing evil still strikes me as morally problematic.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Jonah’s preferred choice? SMOD:<\/p>\n

I suggest that for the principled conservative looking to chuck it all in and give up, there\u2019s only one candidate with the credentials and philosophy the times require. I\u2019m referring, of course, to the Sweet Meteor of Death<\/a>, Smod to his friends. <\/p>\n

Smod describes himself as a \u201cpre-cambrian conservative.\u201d He has no cultists looking to rule in his name. He doesn\u2019t endorse evil, merely the sweet release of planetary destruction. While Cthulhu can be a bit of windbag, Smod makes no speeches, he makes no sounds at all as he glides through the cosmic ether. Calvin Coolidge looks loquacious by comparison. Meanwhile, Cthulhu\u2019s will is unpredictable, he vows chaos and anarchy here on earth. Smod provides what the market demands: certainty, predictability, and simple rules for a complex society. Who knows what Cthulhu will do tomorrow? With Smod there is no tomorrow. He has the single-minded focus only a cold and soulless inanimate object can provide. <\/p>\n

Last, Smod is real. We don\u2019t know when he\u2019ll get here, but odds are he eventually will. Sure, \u201cWhy Choose the Lesser Evil?\u201d is a great bumper sticker, but aren\u2019t we tired of fakes who fail to deliver? To borrow a phrase from Seinfeld<\/em>, Smod is real and he\u2019ll be spectacular (for a fraction of a second. And then silence. Sweet, sweet silence).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Kevin<\/a> responds:<\/p>\n

Jonah, I thank you for the kind words. But, hesitant as I am to disagree, I think you might need to think through this a little bit. I am second to none in my admiration for Sweet Meteor O\u2019Death, and I pray devoutly that he arrives in one piece every time I turn on MSNBC, but there is a strong case to be made for Cthulhu in 2016. <\/p>\n

Smod is a little bit like Rick Santorum: You may sympathize with what he stands for, but that doesn\u2019t mean you necessarily want him to be president. Imagine the fear, the absolute terror, the despairing wails of the entire human race at the moment of his arrival: You could get all that by nominating Santorum for secretary of education and saving the presidency for surer hands. <\/p>\n

Jonah, I think this is another case of the tension between more libertarian-leaning conservatives such as myself and the more traditional Burkeans such as you. I am perfectly comfortable with a reign of eldritch chaos on Earth, while you, in spite of your own warnings against the totalitarian temptation<\/a>, present us with the ultimate one-size-fits-all solution. Yes, solving all of our problems in a blinding flash of planet-ending mass extinction is, given the current political environment, a genuine feel-good solution \u2014 but what are we, hippies? <\/p>\n

Sure, Smod is bound to have some clever campaign ads, e.g. a big picture of the Earth over the slogan \u201cI\u2019d Hit That!\u201d (Another possible Smod motto: \u201cThe End Is Near and It\u2019s Going to Be Awesome<\/a>.\u201d You\u2019d think he\u2019d have thought of that.) But we cannot allow ourselves to be distracted by that kind of shallow demagoguery.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jonah was taken aback by something Kevin Williamson wrote — not so much at the article itself, but at the casual assertion that his favourite presidential candidate was “the mighty Cthulhu (‘Why Vote for a Lesser Evil?’)”. Jonah explains why: I found this curious. Kevin\u2019s preferred candidate is Cthulhu? Don\u2019t get me wrong, I get […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[57,53,13],"tags":[885,822,517],"class_list":["post-31515","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-humour","category-politics","category-usa","tag-meteors","tag-mythology","tag-republican"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-8cj","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31515","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=31515"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31515\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31518,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31515\/revisions\/31518"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=31515"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=31515"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=31515"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}