Sadly, No!

Shorter Phyllis Schlafly: Only commies and traitors could disagree with some guy’s research vindicating Joe McCarthy.

Shorter Doug Wilson: The fact of the matter is, freedom will die if President Bush’s tax cuts are allowed to expire.

Shorter Star Parker: Upon closer analysis, Fred Thompson’s campaign failed because he just wasn’t conservative enough.

Shorter Matthew Ladner: We’d have better graduates and fewer dropouts if we made students pay their own damn tuition.

Shorter Amy Ridenour: Class-action lawsuit websites are destroying patients’ confidence in their prescription drugs; also, a lot may depend on what the definition of “safe” is.

Shorter Kathryn Jean Lopez: Sure, Barack Obama is charming, but he’s still a baby killer.

Shorter Frank Gaffney: Right-wing Democrats are becoming scarce, with the result being the impoverishment of our politics.

Shorter Dinesh D’Souza: Bush so did not lie, you liars!

Shorter Bert Prelutsky: Back in my day, movies didn’t show homo buttfucking.

Shorter Carol Platt Liebau: All things being equal, I’d rather the Republican nominee be a total asshole.

Shorter Rich Galen: I don’t approve of racial politics, but as a Republican, I’m happy about the South Carolina Democratic Primary.

Shorter Suzanne Fields: Clintons aren’t human beings; they are animals.

Because there’s nothing we like more than kicking a dead lion, we bring you David Frum:

For example, one of the great concerns that America felt in the late 1970s … it wasn’t just that government was failing in the late 1970s. All of the institutions in American life were failing. The car companies were failing. […] Today, 2008, almost all the institutions of American life work brilliantly. […] You take delivery of your new car — it works.

Let’s see: GM is on its way to become the second largest carmaker in the world, Ford doesn’t even want to predict its market share for 2008, and Chrysler is on its third (?) “turnaround” in the last 10 years.

Ford’s share of domestic sales of its U.S. brands slid 1.6 percentage points to 14.8 percent as Toyota rose to second in the U.S., and GM dropped 0.8 point to 23.5 percent, according to Autodata. […] The combined monthly U.S. market share for Chrysler, Ford and General Motors (GM) domestic nameplates is estimated to be 50.7 percent in January 2008, down from 51.8 percent in January 2007 and down from 51.9 percent in December 2007. […] Cerberus Capital Management, Chrysler’s new owner, doesn’t publish financial data, but Daimler did and the company losses may have exceeded $1.6 billion in 2007. (1, 2, 3)

Or is Toyota considered one of American life’s institutions?

Holy cow. Larry Kudlow’s latest attempt to sledgehammer reality’s bollocks is shocking even by his standards. Look at the advice he’s giving to Bush for the State of the Union addy:

You have offered important ideas on free-market solutions for health, education, and Social Security. And you have made it clear that faith is a key part of our national life and our daily personal lives.

While all is never perfect, you have delivered on the most fundamental hopes for the nation: peace and prosperity.

In Kudlow’s world, “peace” = “two endless wars” and “prosperity” = “subprime mortgage collapse,” “the highest level of wholesale inflation in a quarter of a century” and “stagnating real wages.” Whatever drugs Kudlow’s downing every morning, I want some of ’em.

John Emerson is Sadly, Right:

Jonah’s book is most successful among people who had no concept of fascism at all before they read the book by their friend Jonah, who told them all they needed to know: fascism is transfer payments and government interference in the economy.

And Jonah is a hyper-inflated version of the bright, glib, lazy frat boy college student who successfully bullshits his way through most of his undergrad years and then hits a wall during his senior year when a teacher actually requires him to perform, and who for the rest of his life whines about the biased teacher who ruined his career.

He’s the avatar of lazy undergrads, and he has has hundreds of thousands of disciples.

Also, the 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.

Supposedly, Pantload wrote the book because he was tired of hearing lefties use the word ‘fascist’ inappropriately (meaning, using it as a slightly hysterical description of quasi-fascist authoritarians like… Jonah Goldberg). So far as explaining Doughbob’s personal motives, this is probably correct. But it’s not quite the real reason why the book was published and has garnered the wingnut movement’s endorsement. Emerson hits on the larger motive; Daniel Pipes confirms it. 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.

Above: Kristol Blooper Suasion

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Subject folds the aluminum foil into a trap, or fashions it into, as the slang has a it, a ‘chrome taco’; the point being to construct something that can safely hold the drug (pinkish-yellow, translucent, looks like a piece of aquarium gravel) while it is vaporized. Subject places the drug inside the foil.

A flame is placed under the foil. Through an ink-pen’s casing, a straw, or preferably a glass pipette, subject’s inhalation of resultant vapors is facilitated. Process yields:

Sympathy toward McCarthyism:

To approach the issue of communism as merely a constitutional matter, [Irving Kristol] said, was wrong. It was wrong because that response failed to take account of “the nature of the communist movement.” Communism, he urged, was not simply an opinion that one held regarding history or politics, such that that opinion contributed to meaningful intellectual discourse. “It is obvious to almost everyone by now,” Kristol wrote, “that Communism…is a fanatical conspiracy, whose basic ideas are a set of paranoid illusions, and whose ‘opinions’ are strategems.” Kristol said that he did not wish to encourage a wave of public hysteria about, nor a vindictive reaction against, those who might at one time have been members of or sympathizers with the movement. But Kristol did make one statement of which people in his circle took notice and which has been a scourge against him since its utterance. Kristol was speaking about Joseph McCarthy and about the liberals who denounced him: “There is one thing that the American people know about Senator McCarthy,” Kristol said. “He, like them, is unequivocally anti-Communist. About the spokesmen for American liberalism, they feel they know no such thing.”

Read the rest of this entry »

The Editors and Sifu have returned. Go over and say “hey” when you get a chance.

Holy crap. Bill Quick is still holding out hope for a Fred Thompson preznincy:

[The Republicans] have to learn that if they want conservative votes, they have to nominate candidates conservatives would want to vote for.

This strategy is the only one that offers any hope of changing the leftward move of the GOP in the future. Sitting out won’t do it — they can spin the reasons why you sat out. Voting Democrat won’t do it, they can spin it that the GOP candidates weren’t liberal enough. Even voting “None of the Above” won’t do it, because that doesn’t specify what you want instead of none of the above.

Very true, since no rational person would assume you’d want Fred Thompson.

Look, doofus, conservatives had a chance to vote for Fred Thompson in many states. Fred won 14% of the vote in Iowa, 1.2% in New Hampshire, 3.7% in Michigan, 8% in Nevada and 16% in South Carolina. If those numbers look sucky, then it’s because, well, they’re sucky. Fred’s campaign stunk because the only constituency it polled well with was Internet nerd boys — and as fans of Firefly will tell you (sniff!), getting lots of love from web dorks doesn’t bring home the bacon.

I’m pretty sure that if this notion starts to get traction, Fred Thompson will publicly oppose it. Don’t worry, and don’t listen to him. This isn’t really about Fred Thompson. It’s about the future of the Republican party. Fred ran because he hoped to influence that, but he failed. Now it’s time for the rest of us to take a crack at it.

In other words, Bill’s asking his readers to go out of their way to nominate an admitted failure as the Republican nominee. I think historians will look back upon this passage as the quintessential warblogger statement.

So remember: Just write in Fred Thompson’s name when it comes time to cast your vote. (There’s nothing stopping you from writing it in for other offices, either).

Fred for Licking County Sanitation Commissioner! Fred for Toledo Animal Control Officer! Just nominate him, you assholes!! NOMINATE HIM!!!!

ABOVE: Erick the Redstóttir

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Poor Erick Erickson is clearly miffed that the Pantload is getting all the attention for saying all liberals are fascists. So Erick has entered the left-is-right-and-turds-are-truffles sweepstakes with a post at Red State titled “Democrats: The Party of the Klan?” Not surprisingly, Erick festoons this post with the obligatory photo of the dessicated corpse of Robert Byrd. And that, sadly, is the best argument that Macon, Georgia’s most second-most*-famous buffoon can come up with to prove his thesis that the Democrats plan on wearing white sheets and burning a few crosses at their convention this summer.

Let’s look at Erick’s other arguments, starting with this:

[I]t is looking more and more like the Democratic Party, to its core foundation, is racist. In New Hampshire, white Democrats turned out overwhelming [sic] to reject the uppity black man who dared to challenge the Democratic establishment.

Coming in a close second is not normally evidence that an overwhelming number of Democrats showed up to reject an ‘uppity’ black man. Of course, I have a simple question for Erick: Which party has a credible African-American candidate running for President and which party has a bunch of white men running for President?

[Gavin adds: Now, that’s totally unfair — Alan Keyes is getting…uh, some percentage of the GOP primary vote.]

Now you’re probably thinking that having stepped in one pile of poop, Erick the Redstóttir wouldn’t immediately dive head first into an adjacent manure pit. But you would be grossly underestimating Erick’s fuck-uptitude:

In South Carolina tonight, Democratic voters would rather vote for the rich, Southern, white man than either the black man or the female yankee [sic].

I guess Erick’s cable and Internet service must still be disconnected.

Not content simply to dive into the manure pit, Erick figures that he might as well swim a few laps around the pit before pulling himself out:

John Edwards, by staying in the race, is taking votes that would otherwise typically go to Barack Obama. Is this a racist ploy? Is John Edwards in league with the Clintons to make sure white voters, who don’t want to vote for Clinton, have a white alternative to go to, lest Barack Obama get more traction?

And both the Edwards and Clinton camps are in league with giant dinosaurs that are living on the planet Alpha Draconis and that will take over and rule the Earth when their flying saucers arrive in 2008. Bow down, Earthlings, before your dinosaur masters!

*cf.

Argh. The WaPo’s editorial page has published yet another “contrarian” editorial about how eventually Americans will look back upon Bush’s presidency as a golden era of love and sparkledust. All the tired clichés are here: “Bush is like Harry Truman!” “The Iraq war will turn out awesome!” “Uh… Truman was unpopular too!!” If you have the stomach to read on, let’s check ‘er out:

Reaching for a Place in History

By Lou Cannon and Carl M. Cannon

As President Bush prepares to deliver his last State of the Union address tomorrow night, a legion of pundits, politicians and, yes, historians is already assigning the 43rd president his final place in history. These commentators, and especially those who confidently assert that Bush is the “worst president in history,” would do well to remember the British historian C.V. Wedgwood’s observation: “History is written backward but lived forward. Those who know the end of the story can never know what it was like at the time.” We all know — or think we do — what things are like in our union now, with an economy hitting a rough patch and a foreign war grinding on with no end in sight. But we don’t know how the story will turn out.

Actually, we do. History is going to take a steaming dump all over George W. Bush’s face. He has been the single worst president in history, and not just because of the Iraq war or the impending recession. Here are some other factors that will inevitably plop Bush straight into the Richard Nixon-James Buchanan scrap heap:

• Zero leadership on energy issues. America is just as addicted to oil on the day when Bush arrived in office. Even as gas prices and heating prices have continued to soar, Bush’s basic response has been to shrug shit off.

• The deficit. America faces some major goddamn challenges over the next 20 years. Our government is going to have to provide some kind of national health insurance solution and improve its social safety net to help people harmed by globalization. That will cost money. During Bush’s tenure, the deficit and the national debt have ballooned. All those bonds that the Chinese government has purchased will have to be paid. That’s gonna leave a lot less money and flexibility.

• Torture. Never in my life have I been so ashamed of my country’s human rights record. Seeing a goddamn president of the United States so willfully disregard the rule of law and international treaties is sickening.

Bush is terrible. Everyone hates him. Historians will also hate him. Stop trying to pretend that all the stupid shit he’s done over the past seven years was secretly awesome.

Anyway, here’s the thrilling conclusion:

Nonetheless, politics is ultimately about keeping score. Bush’s approval rating is now in Carter territory, less than 30 percent of Americans hold a positive view of the Republican Party, and Democratic presidential candidates have overtaken the Republicans in campaign money, votes and crowds. The Republicans’ chances of taking Congress back from the Democrats are slim. So we can indeed reach a short-term political judgment of George W. Bush: He is a disaster — if not the worst president of all time, then at least the worst since Carter, Hoover or any other recent failure. But who knows how the story will end?

Indeed. Someday we’ll look back on this and laugh:

And maybe those magic beans I bought will really grow into a giant bean stock that will bring me untold riches. Because hey, who knows how the story will end?

Megan McArdle & Liberal Fascism

She hasn’t read it and admits she probably won’t, so accusing me of bad faith based on a conversation with Will Wilkinson isn’t all that powerful an indictment. Still, I’m a big fan of what I’ve seen of McCardle’s work generally and I think she’s trying to be fair. So let me respond to this passage which seems to be the heart of her objections — and those of many others. The rest of her post largely amounts to her reacting to hypotheticals and straw men of her own design. In the…

Liberal!=Fascism

Jonah Goldberg protests my take on the title of Liberal Fascism. Some of his argument is a misreading of my post, perhaps because I was unclear–when I said that…

[Hanx! DiffBrad]
* Cf.