alternative hippopotamus

progressive cyberdadaism from our nation’s capital

January 17, 2008

Your Moment of Pantload

by AltHippo @ 12:43 pm. Filed under Liberal Fascism

I was poking around for a clip of last night’s Jonah Goldberg interview, and here I see eRobin already has it up.

I was surprised to see that he used the line about progressivism leading to Clintonism, which as we know is an official department in the Trilateral Service Commission (see New World Order conspiracy if this is confusing). It’s just a particularly stupid arrow in his singularly vapid quiver. It occurred to me as I was getting ready for bed that maybe the whole exercise is a dog whistle for the Birch Society types. Recalling that, as a rule of thumb, deconstructing tiny minds is a sure-fire path to insanity, I decided to knock it off for the evening.

I see David Neiwert has more up on the Pantload, including this howler:

…Moreover, if the Klan was less racist than we’ve been led to believe, academia was staggeringly more so. …

Michael Ledeen, who appears to be taking his meds, joins the party:

So much for the view—the fact—that Hitler was driven, from an early age, by an antisemitism so virulent that he would not rest until he had set in motion the Holocaust. Indeed, in one of “Liberal Fascism“‘s most unfortunate phrases, Jonah trivializes Nazi racism, equating it with some American political rhetoric:

“What distinguished Nazism from other brands of socialism and communism was not so much that it included more aspects from the political right (though there were some). What distinguished Nazism was that it forthrightly included a worldview we now associate almost completely with the political left: identity politics.” And in case you thought he was kidding, he repeats it a few pages later: “What mattered to (Hitler) was German identity politics.”

Except for the white washing of the Klan and Hitler, Mrs. Lincoln enjoyed the play.

Here’s the funny thing. Jonah could have received his right-wing bonafides not by writing a hack fest, which is what he ended up doing, but by following conventional lines. For instance, he could have started with The Road to Serfdom, updated its warnings for the 2008 election, and even have slung some mud at the Clintons- which undoubtedly is part of his purpose.

Alternatively, he could have started with Star Trek, as I understand one of his favorite shows, and shown what the Prime Directive would have implied for the US in the Middle East.

In either case I probably wouldn’t have read his “treatise”, but at least the book would have been kind of interesting, and not the kind of thing that would expose him to universal ridicule, which is the predictable outcome of his little endeavor.

Be careful what you ask for, I guess.

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hip·po·pot·a·mus n. A notion, perhaps distinct from conventional wisdom, that needs to be verified by reality-based scrutiny.

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