more pantload takedowns

Professional duty to collect the best of them.

Review by Austin Bramwell in the American Conservative. One of the many good parts:

He makes much of his discovery, for example, that the Nazis supported organic farming and animal rights and even goes so far as to admonish us to “grapple with the fact that we’ve seen this sort of thing before.” Readers can spare themselves the energy. That Nazism and contemporary liberalism both promote healthy living is as meaningless a finding as that bloody marys and martinis may both be made with gin. Repeatedly, Goldberg fails to recognize a reductio ad absurdum. He tells us that Himmler bemoaned the Christian persecution of witches, just like Wiccan feminists do today, that Hitler once described his doctrine as “reality-based,” just like today’s progressives describe theirs, and that Mussolini was quite smart “by the standards of liberal intellectuals today.” In no case does Goldberg uncover anything more ominous than a coincidence.

Also some interesting observations about how DP admits the poverty of his thesis and disowns his own arguments, to the point where they become meaningless.

He qualifies his conclusions to the point of taking them all back, insisting that he does not actually mean to say that liberals are dangerous totalitarians. He grants that some of his points are trivial and others may appear outrageous, so that nothing he says should be taken as both true and interesting at the same time. He claims that movement conservatives also suffer from the totalitarian temptation, so that we are “all” fascists now. Why then link liberalism in particular with fascism? Here Goldberg is surprisingly candid: because, he argues, liberals do it to conservatives all the time.

He’s right, of course. Many liberals do impute nefarious designs to conservatives. With just a modicum of restraint, Goldberg could have written a very good book. “Look,” he could have said, “‘Fascism’ has no meaning today, but, in any case, not only does conservatism owe nothing to fascism, but, historically, conservatives in America generally opposed fascism while liberals and leftists often were sympathetic.” Instead, lacking even the excuse of ignorance, he chose to sling the term “fascism” around as casually as the most vulgar leftist. It does not speak well of Goldberg that, by his own admission, he wrote his first book not to enlighten but to exact revenge.

The Pantload dismisses the review here. He wishes someone else got assigned to it --- I BET he does.

Meanwhile, The Poor Man continues its in-first-person mockery of the Pantload. This post includes a pretty good hyperlinked summary of why this pot is so misguided in its attacks on certain kettles:

DEar Moron,

You are a joke. How someone who thinks the government should be allowed to imprison and torture people without any accountability, who supports a President who makes people pledge loyalty oaths to him, parades his militarism around in phony military outfits, subverts the free press, and believes that he has essentially supreme and unchecked power to do anything he wants and answer to no one - and, oh, yeah, started a war under false pretenses - how someone like this gets off calling the people who are against all this “fascists” is completely beyond me. If you want to talk about ‘totalitarian tendencies’, why don’t you try looking in the mirror?

Some Hippy

Funny because it's true!!!