Conservative Columnist Jonah Goldberg is Caught Lying About Pulitzer Prize Nominations

Nothing Wrong Here – It’s Only a Lie if You are Caught At It

This Forum has often said that one of the problems with Conservatives is that they are so utterly convinced that their philosophy is absolutely correct and that every one else is wrong.  As a result they do not believe they are bound by the limits of truth, accuracy, facts or logic because the rightness of their positions means they can use any falsehood to advance their ideas.

Now it comes out that on the cover his new book, Conservative columnist Jonah Goldberg has the claim that he was “nominated for two Pulitzer Prizes”.

 

On the dust jacket of his new book, "The Tyranny of Clichés: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas," best-selling conservative author and commentator Jonah Goldberg is described as having "twice been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize."

Ok, actually getting a Pulitzer would be even better, but being nominated is certainly something to extol.  That is it would be if it were true.

In fact, as Goldberg acknowledged on Tuesday, he has never been a Pulitzer nominee, but merely one of thousands of entrants.

But, heh, heh, Mr. Goldberg was only joking, he didn’t mean to imply that he was nominated for a Pulitzer just because he said he was nominated for a Pulitzer.

When this bit of résumé inflation was pointed out by a reporter for msnbc.com, Goldberg said he hadn't meant to mislead anyone and removed the Pulitzer claim from his bio at National Review Online. (Here's the page before and now.) And he added, "I never put it in the bio in the first place."

And as for the book, well it was just an inadvertent error.

His publisher, Penguin Group (USA), said the error was unintentional and it would remove the Pulitzer word from his book jacket when it's time for the first reprint, "just like any other innocent mistake brought to our attention."

Yep, there’s that Microsoft Word software with the bug that inserts a claim of being nominated for a Pulitzer into just about every document it writes.  The Dismal Political Economist has been nominated for a Nobel Prize in Economics.  For example this Post has been written in MS Word and there’s no telling what it will insert.

But doesn’t being an “Entrant” mean something.  Yeah, it mean someone filled out a form and sent in $50.00.

It's not uncommon for Pulitzer entrants to claim to be nominees. Here's how it works: Though there are only three nominees, known as nominated finalists, in each Pulitzer category each year, there are more than 2,000 entrants. One could say that all of them were "nominated" by someone. If all Pulitzer entrants could be called nominees, any publisher could give all its authors that honorific by submitting an entry form and a check for $50.

So this is a formal request for 100 readers of this Forum to send The Dismal Political Economist 50 cents each so he can be “nominated” for a Pulitzer.  Why the request for donation?  You don’t think The Dismal Political Economist would waste $50.00 of his own money do you?