anti-Pantload quotables

From Sadly, No -- a post that makes me sad. First, their link to a comment by John Emerson at Crooked Timber, who first nails DP as a lazy undergrad, but then shakes his head:

[T]he U.S. is doomed. Goldberg is going to successfully pull this off. The big Movement Conservatives will support him, or at least not blow his cover. The big media people will continue to pay him lots of money. And with his help, the American people will become just a smidgen stupider.

And Sadly's HTML Menken observes:

On the one pudgy hand, Pantload’s book — dishonestly and preposterously, natch — inoculates the Right from any association with or responsibility for historically extremist ideologies, pushing the historical blame, as it were, entirely on the Left. On the other, and in the more general sense, it simultaneously broadens wingnuts’ pejorative lexicon while narrowing liberals’.

It’s not about arguing over history at all; it’s about putting ammo — dishonest, historically illiterate ammo, to be sure, but then these people don’t care — into the hands of legions of True Believers. And no amount of incisive, historically informed criticism will stop it; if anything, the more we lefties prove that Jonah’s book is a pile of dogshit, the more we confirm wingnuts’ belief that it’s pure gold. Twenty years from now trolls will cite that renowned, famously persecuted scholar Jonah Goldberg in calling our kind Hitler’s descendants.

Sadly, sad. For America.