Sulli v. Goldberg on Ponnuru’s The Party of Death

While the folks over at the National Review have nothing but praise for a book written by Ramesh Ponnuru, Andrew Sullivan (to his credit) has been criticizing what appears to be a partisan cheap shot. Jonah Goldberg is upset with Sulli and offers this advice:

maybe Andrew Sullivan could simply take a few extra minutes and actually read Ramesh’s book.

I know, I know – Goldberg is not exactly known to read books he has been asked to review, but just consider the Sulli post that Goldberg referred to. As of April 26, Sulli had admitted that he had not read the book entitled The Party of Death: The Democrats, the Media, the Courts, and the Disregard for Human Life. Sulli had read KLo claiming this book was not a partisan attack and decided to read at least a portion of the book where we read:

Is the Democratic Party the “Party of Death”? If you look at their agenda they are.

So Sulli has at least started to read this pathetic smear on my party. But if Mr. Goldberg and KLo don’t realize that is an attack on the Democratic Party, I have to wonder if they have even read the title.

By the way, I have not bothered to read even one page of any of Ann Coulter’s books.

Update: Does Jonah Goldberg read anything?

It seems to me that conservatives are going to have to respond to Jonathan Rauch’s argument in the new Atlantic … Me: One point which seems worth raising is that the key to this argument is that saying tax cuts don’t pay for themselves is different than saying tax cuts don’t result in increased revenue. This, it seems to me, is central to most conservative arguments for cutting taxes. The growth in spending Niskanen (an objectively credible voice, I should add) identifies is probably attributable to several factors – some of them noted by Mallaby – but one of them may be an increase in revenues. Anyway, I need to read the Rauch piece and there are others better qualified to deal with the economic issues. But if tax increases can be demonstrated to shrink government in some significant way, I’m certainly open to them. But there are way to many ifs and buts built into that hypothetical to deal with here and now.

First of all, I wish he’d drop that childish habit of starting his uninformed opinion with “ME”. Secondly, Rauch’s piece was not particularly long so he might have been able to read it in approximately the same amount of time that it would take Andrew Sullivan to read an entire book.

But let me make this really simple for the very slow Jonah Goldberg. Government spending as a share of GDP did not decline during the Reagan years and went up during the Bush43 years, which was Niskanen’s point. Of course, this historical data has been clear to anyone who has bothered to follow anything in this debate.

As far as some supply-side effect, the reduction in national savings and investment from the Reagan and Bush43 tax cuts LOWERED economic growth so as Mr. Goldberg starts his babble trying to hold out hope for a Laffer curve increase in revenues from tax rate reductions, he shows he knows not a single thing about this issue.
But when did incredible ignorance ever prevent Mr. Goldberg for opining on things he has no time to research?