Two Facts

1. Someone is still paying Jonah Goldberg to write a garbage column.

2. Jonah Goldberg uses this week's garbage column to write some shambling deposit of tommyrot in which he mendaciously deconstructs an NPR piece about the ubiquity of the phrase, "That's racist!" which the younger set uses as an absurdery to mock racial sensitivity, in order to assert that conservatives are like kids, man: They don't get all sensitive about racial stuff.

Goldberg's right that (many) conservatives are like (many) kids, in the sense that neither one has a particular sensitivity toward covert racism. Thing is, kids have the excuse of youth and inexperience: White kids also have privilege making them insensitive to race; and some kids of color experience something similar to what I did growing up as a girl in a feminist age—the promise of equality that makes social justice seem quaint and antiquated until you run headlong into evidence of the promise unfulfilled.

Conservatives like Goldberg, however, who fancy themselves beyond the tedium of racial sensitivity, do not have the excuse of youth and inexperience. They're just assholes.