Oh, My Bad! Obama IS a Nazi!

Maybe I didn't notice this because I don’t pay attention to writing that is “out there." But the reason the conservatorati like town hall folk who refer to President Obama as Hitler is because that's a thought pattern that comes straight from the playbook of Jonah Goldberg, the editor of the National Review.

His book, Liberal Facism from Mussolini to the Politics of Change has the following Amazon description, which I had to reread four times because it was so preposterous by implication:

Fascists, brownshirts, jackbooted stormtroopers - such are the insults typically hurled at conservatives by their liberal opponents. Calling someone a fascist is the fastest way to shut them up, defining their views as beyond the political pale. But who are the real fascists in our midst? Liberal Fascism offers a startling new perspective on the theories and practices that define fascist politics. Replacing conveniently manufactured myths with surprising and enlightening research, Jonah Goldberg reminds us that the original fascists were really on the left, and that liberals from Woodrow Wilson to FDR to Hillary Clinton have advocated policies and principles remarkably similar to those of Hitler's National Socialism and Mussolini's Fascism. Contrary to what most people think, the Nazis were ardent socialists (hence the term National socialism). They believed in free health care and guaranteed jobs. They confiscated inherited wealth and spent vast sums on public education. They purged the church from public policy, promoted a new form of pagan spirituality, and inserted the authority of the state into every nook and cranny of daily life. The Nazis declared war on smoking, supported abortion, euthanasia, and gun control. They loathed the free market, provided generous pensions for the elderly, and maintained a strict racial quota system in their universities where campus speech codes were all the rage. The Nazis led the world in organic farming and alternative medicine. Hitler was a strict vegetarian, and Himmler was an animal rights activist.

Thank God Mr. Goldberg came along in time to put a stop to this! Had I known my vote in favor of a bond initiative to get air conditioners into IPS schools was going to lead to the future extermination of six million American Jews, I probably would have voted against it.

This is the worst kind of disingenuous hack/hucksterism and the notion that a publication as renowned as the National Review would actually have an editor who wrote this is astonishing. How can an educated man not recognize that correlation does not mean causation? Yet there it is by implication…if A existed before B, B must come from A, and, accordingly, everything despised by Goldberg and his ilk is a secret Nazi stratagem being orchestrated by Democrats. Isn't that the REAL message of this book? Watch out!

You know another thing the Nazis favored? Air. Oh my God! Everyone stop breathing before we all become Nazis!

I won’t assume this gentleman is Jewish because his name is Goldberg, but if he is, he ought to be ashamed.

A Republican colleague of mine suggested that Goldberg never meant to actually equate any Democrat to a Nazi, but rather, was just saying “fascist” as a political insult should not stick because some on the left are more closely aligned with historical fascist than those on the right.
I’m supposed to believe Goldberg devoted four hundred ninety-six pages for what could be distilled in the phrase, “I know you are, but what am I?”

Bovine feces. This man intended to whip up the conservatorati, a task at which he has succeeded spectacularly well, given that a Google search of “Nancy Pelosi” and “fascist” gets you 310,000 hits (had to stop after the first 240, but all of them accuse Pelosi of being a fascist). Clinton only had 288,000 hits, but almost all of them were more acidic references to her fascism, if that is possible.

In short, I couldn’t find a single reference to any leftwing figure calling somebody a fascist since Woodstock. Nonetheless, Goldberg created a straw man book, refuting an insult seldom if ever made, so that that he could get a good portion of America to equate their president to Hitler while acting like he was being just a detached historian. This book is blatant political propaganda masked poorly as intellectualism.

While I didn’t agree with him often, William Buckley at least had integrity. Mr. Goldberg, I assure you Mr. Buckley is pivoting in his grave and cursing you polysyllabically.

You are now precisely who I speak of when I talk about the decline in civility in political discourse.

Oh, My Bad! Obama IS a Nazi!