WHY NOBODY LIKES THE GOLDBERG FRAUD SQUAD.

Jonah Goldberg has been leading a charge of his fellow creeps against the large numbers of disability beneficiaries in the United States. He's already had some answers, but I think this response of his deserves another:

The most intriguing complaints come from people who are in effect saying that, since they have serious disabilities, it’s outrageous for me to question anyone’s disability claim. I think most people can see the flaw in this thinking. In fact, I’m flummoxed as to why people with real disabilities wouldn’t be the ones clamoring the loudest to stamp out fraud. Maybe disability checks would be more generous if voters thought they were subsidizing fewer cheats?

It would be difficult for Goldberg to see it, considering who he hangs out with, but not everyone is like him. And, in rare good news for the Republic, there are even fewer people like him than there used to be.

Back in sunnier times, when there seemed to be some relationship between the good fortune of Wall Street and the average American's purchasing power, we had an easier time believing that there was something morally superior about making money, and therefore something wicked about being poor. Those old Reagan-era stories about welfare queens and strapping young bucks with T-bone steaks, idiotic as they were, got a lot of people who should have known better to think, yes, maybe we should reform welfare, because even though snatching back some of the scraps we've been throwing the paupers won't enrich us much, it would be better for America and our souls if we at least tried to be mean sons of bitches. For look at the Masters of the Universe! It's not charitable instincts powering their economic miracle, but enlightened self-interest.

Came the collapse, that hooey became harder to swallow. Since it's turned out that the worse we do the more Wall Street rallies, we can't even stand the smell of it.

Conservatives are still telling us about the queens and bucks, though, trying to get us back into pauper-bashing shape. Fox News reports the so-called poor have refrigerators so why are they complaining; well-fed rightbloggers are outraged that welfare recipients spend some of their money on fast food and movie rentals; Jonah Goldberg wants to know which of these cripples are faking it, and his asshole buddy is talking about this guy he knows who pulled himself up by his bootstraps so why can't they, etc.

It isn't going over like it used to because there's this funny thing about Americans: We tend to be nicer to each other when times are rough than when they're easy. We get more sympathetic to other people who are having it hard in life because we know we're only a few paychecks away from it ourselves and, being human, we react with sympathy, rather than like George Costanza to a fire at a children's party.

And this applies in ambiguous circumstances, too -- what Goldberg in his pretense of magnanimity calls the "grayer area." If someone's a bum who spends the change you give him on drugs, he's still a bum; if someone's living off the dole, it's still not much of a living, and it certainly affords far fewer options and rewards than a viable working life. And if some disability pensioners are less disabled than the law might allow, what a sad pass they've come to, that they would go through all that to claim some miserly stipend. That poverty is not pure -- "the poor," Jimmy Breslin has said more than once, "are a pain in the ass" -- doesn't mean it's not poverty.

But maybe you need to have some minimal capacity for empathy to see that. Someone who wonders why the disabled aren't as eager as he is to turn in frauds, and offers them fatter checks in hopes of motivating them, probably doesn't qualify.

UPDATE. Comments are more eloquent than I was; here's a prime cut from D. Johnston:

That, my lazy little friend, is why people with "real" disabilities hate what you're doing - they understand your true intent. There is no part of me that believes you are honestly interested in rooting out fraud. There are sectors of the government far more vulnerable to fraud - the military, for instance - that you don't seem to care about. They believe - as do I - that your objective is to make people think that people on disability are liars so you can spend the next twenty years using them as scapegoats.