As someone who volunteers about 400 hours of his life per year to a cause he holds dearly, allow me to say that Jonah Goldberg is a complete and utter idiot. It’s one thing to be a pundit, even to be a pundit for the sake of punditry, but quite another to be willfully ignorant for the sake of sounding superior.

Actually, that kind of behavior is what my grandmother would’ve referred to as “being contrary.”

There’s a weird irony at work when Sen. Barack Obama, the black presidential candidate who will allegedly scrub the stain of racism from the nation, vows to run afoul of the constitutional amendment that abolished slavery … In his speech on national service Wednesday at the University of Colorado, Obama promised that as president he would “set a goal for all American middle and high school students to perform 50 hours of service a year, and for all college students to perform 100 hours of service a year.”*

No, Jonah. A national call to volunteerism, especially one with a carrot and a stick involved, would give complacent young Americans — you know, the ones whose eyes glaze over while watching MTV — the opportunity and incentive to seek a cause beyond their own. Conversely, slavery — at the very least — involves the wholesale dehumanization of a particular segment of humanity (through the deprivation of freedom) to the socio-economical benefit of another segment.

Asshat.