This is hilarious. Apparently Matt Yglesias called me stupid yesterday. He tweeted:

My goal is accuracy — Jonah Goldberg is, in fact, a stupid person — not persuasion.

An aside: How do we know he favors accuracy when he has admitted he sees no problem with lying when it suits his political agenda?

But that’s not the hilarious part. Indeed, it will take me years to recover from this barb. Because, after all, if Yglesias is even 1/100th as smart as he thinks he is, then he is the smartest guy, like, ever.

What’s hilarious is this bit of contrarian blather he posted, which could win a Tom Friedman prize for asshattery. In its entirety (though the comments are amusing too):

With Richard Daley apparently ready to relinquish his long-held post of Mayor of Chicago, it’s worth reflecting on the slight oddness of the American idea that the next Mayor of Chicago should be some other politician who happens to be from Chicago rather than some other mayor who’s done a good job. They’re going to get some Alderman or maybe a member of the US House of Representatives or maybe Rahm Emanuel. My understanding of how they do this in China is that they’d promote the mayor of some other city.

Consider Boston, for example. The metro area is about half the size of Chicago’s, but the city proper has only 645,169 people to Chicago’s 2,851,268. And incumbent mayor Tom Menino has shown a Daley-esque ability to get endlessly re-elected. What’s more, in terms of crime and school system performance, Boston is clearly among the best-governed cities in America. Why not give him a chance?

And of course promotion needn’t go strictly in terms of upward size. Michael Bloomberg has been a good mayor of New York, but NYC has strong fundamentals and it was clear from the last election that the voters there are getting a bit sick of him. So since he’s effective, why not have him bite off a more challenging city like Baltimore or Detroit? Obviously, “that’s not how we do things” but the logic of relentlessly promoting from within seems pretty weak to me.

Man, if only we had a Politburo that could assign really effective commissars to trouble spots around the country, everything would be so much better!

Now, that might be a winning idea for a book.

Update: My apologies. Not being an actual reader of Yglesias’ I had no idea that this mayor idea doesn’t even rate in the top 1 percent of Yglesian asshattery. For a running compendium, see Ydiot.net.