January 12, 2008

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Ah...the Doughy Pantload strikes again. Speaking in front of the Heritage Foundation (because, honestly, who else could sit through this tripe?) to pimp his latest book, Liberal Fascism, Jonah Goldberg tries again to prove Moynihan wrong, not only by coming up with his own facts, but his own definitions as well.

The primary definition that Goldberg ignores for his own version is "Fascism." In Doughy Pantload World, "fascism" means "something bad". This is something I've suspected for many years about conservatives: They don't actually know the definitions of the epithets they like to throw out to dismiss and demean the left. They just think it means "something bad." For example:

To sort of start the story, the reason why we see fascism as a thing of the right is because fascism was originally a form of right-wing socialism. Mussolini was born a socialist, he died a socialist, he never abandoned his love of socialism, he was one of the most important socialist intellectuals in Europe and was one of the most important socialist activists in Italy, and the only reason he got dubbed a fascist and therefore a right-winger is because he supported World War I.

Um, actually, not so much. Mussolini was dubbed a fascist because he founded the Fascist Party, you big, fact-ignoring dope.

Jonah's hatred of Hillary Clinton knows no rational bounds (the original sub-title was "The Totalitarian Temptation From Mussolini to Hillary Clinton"--Mussolini as an American politician--who knew?) and he steals liberally from Naomi Klein to dive head first into the Godwin abyss with fantastical allusions to 1984 and some Big Brother bleak bureaucratic scenario of DMVs with Jumbotrons with nanny-state advisories on breastfeeding, based on Hillary Clinton's It Takes A Village.

The dizzying logic of it all just shows you why if Jonah Goldberg is one of the great thinkers on the right (and certainly, he's has prominent enough platforms from which to spew this tripe to argue that point), the right is bankrupt of intellectual honesty and comprehension.

(Update: BG thanks her fellow liberal bloggers for this.)

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