On the back of my review copy of “The Tyranny of Clichés,” Goldberg’s latest, it still claims that the author “has twice been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.” That, of course, was revealed yesterday to be utter bullshit. He is a two-time entrant for Pulitzer consideration — to enter requires solely an application and a $50 fee — and while Goldberg claims not to have added that line to his bio, it appears everywhere he writes, and it’s hard to believe he hadn’t noticed it until this week. That said, I can’t imagine a person dumb enough to actually believe that Jonah Goldberg had been seriously considered for a Pulitzer. (Well, OK, I can imagine one person dumb enough.)

If Pulitzers were handed out, like editorships at conservative publications, based on nepotism, Goldberg might’ve had better luck.

His mother Lucianne Goldberg’s history is sordid enough. In 1972, she was paid by a friend of Richard Nixon to spy on the McGovern campaign and the reporters covering it, posing as a member of the press. She became an anti-women’s liberation activist and campaigned against the Equal Rights Amendment. Eventually she became a literary agent (and ghostwriter) specializing in gutter-scraping attack jobs, starting with unauthorized celebrity biographies and branching out, when Bill Clinton was elected, into conspiratorial books accusing him and Hillary of various crimes. The “Vince Foster was murdered by the Clintons” story? That’s one of hers. (As was the best-selling book on the O.J. Simpson case by racist ex-LAPD detective and convicted perjurer Mark Furhman, who became a right-wing folk hero despite the fact that he was responsible more than anyone for the case against Simpson falling apart.)

She lucked out when she fell upon Linda Tripp, a White House secretary with a deep disdain for the Clintons and a penchant for gabbing with the press. Goldberg was introduced to Tripp in 1993, and Goldberg pushed Tripp to help out with a tell-all expose of the Clinton White House (focusing on conspiracy theories surrounding the death of Vince Foster) for years. The problem was, Tripp’s problems with the Clinton White House were largely based on matters of style — George Stephanopoulos’ dirty hair and Bill Clinton’s flirting — that is, until Tripp befriended Monica Lewinsky after both had been sent to work at the Pentagon. Goldberg convinced Tripp to secretly record her conversations with Lewinsky, promising her a major publishing payday. She then convinced Tripp to go to Newsweek’s Michael Isikoff, who’d eventually break the Lewinsky story.

Jonah was there for much of this. His apartment was the scene of meetings between Lucianne and Linda Tripp that would define the rest of the Clinton era. He was privy to the contents of the (illegally recorded) Lewinsky tapes. In 1998, he published a Talk of the Town piece in (Tina Brown’s) New Yorker, in which he played the wry observer of the chaos his mother has wrought. By the end of 1998, young Jonah Goldberg had an enviable contributing editor gig at the National Review, the most prominent conservative magazine in the country. Before Lewinsky, Jonah Goldberg had been writing and producing public television documentaries on gargoyles.

As reprehensible as his mother’s career was, at least Lucianne was fun — I’ll take a chain-smoking, bomb-throwing provocateur over a po-faced pseudo-intellectual any day. Not that Jonah Goldberg was always a would-be scholar. The founding editor of National Review Online, his original job was to be the fusty magazine’s cool young person (though he was already nearly 30 when he was hired) who was conversant with the popular culture. His attempts to be breezy came off (and still come off) as glib and self-amused. His columns were essentially banal conservative dogma with a generous heaping of Simpsons references. Roy Edroso collected some choice early Goldbergisms in his 2008 review of the right-wing blogosphere’s leading lights:

Themes and style were evident from his earliest NRO “Goldberg File” contributions. Prefaced a post on Bill Clinton’s Kosovo intervention with a quote from The Princess Bride (which remains one of his cultural touchstones, along with Animal House, Star Trek, and Battlestar Galactica) and took a breezy attitude toward matters of life and death (“We should kill Milosevic . . . Stalin moved populations like I play Risk on my computer”). Later, welcomed “the opportunity to wax Swiftian and offer my modest proposal for saving the rainforest,” resulting in a wan P.J. O’Rourke rip-off proposing to “sell the rainforest to Disney” (which “is becoming an incredibly liberal company anyway”).

Goldberg soon created the National Review’s multi-contributor blog The Corner, which will be his greatest legacy: Now an entire generation knows the National Review not as the leading intellectual light of the conservative movement, but as the place where random right-wing hacks alternate arguments about the grossness of Mexicans and gays with brief thoughts on Star Wars and personal tales of harrowing run-ins with liberal stereotypes.

Goldberg is always careful never to actually stake out a controversial position on anything. He’ll never buck the movement, but he sees himself as above the right-wing populists. His position on any number of issues is impossible to discern. On gay marriage: “I have always felt that gay marriage was an inevitability, for good or ill (most likely both).” Jonah defended waterboarding while also claiming to find it a “tough question” and complaining that supporters of waterboarding were unfairly tarred as “pro-torture.” Everything he writes for publication is littered with “to be sure” ass-covering and declarations that he’s not actually seriously arguing what it seems very much like he’s arguing. (The Supreme Court’s Fred Phelps ruling was deplorable but also probably correct but maybe not. Julian Assange should be assassinated not that I’m saying for real that he should be assassinated.) He’s too cowardly and insecure to allow himself to be pinned down on most divisive political issues, much preferring to devote pixels and ink to making fun of mythical sandal-wearing Prius-driving (formerly Volvo-driving) liberals who supposedly think things he finds silly. Or Barbra Streisand, a recurring figure in his oeuvre.

Goldberg’s also a master at avoiding serious challenges to his half-formed opinions. In 2009, TBogg documented more than 40 instances of Goldberg evading arguments or declining to elaborate on points he’d made by invoking some rapidly approaching deadline. (Sample: “This has been discussed endlessly in the Corner and elsewhere. I’m on a deadline so I’m not going to wade too deeply into it.”) Other popular excuses in the Goldberg list of reasons he’s unable to respond to criticism have included working on his books, taking his children to and/or from school and/or the doctor, and being late for something.