Sadly, No!

New photographic evidence uncovered by Sadly, No! Research Labs forces us to admit that the Doughy One has been correct all along. Fascism is indeed a product and a project of the left, not the right. It seems that even a pair of loaded pants gets it correct once in awhile:

Hybrid cars accompanied Panzers to ensure that the Blitzkrieg left a minimal carbon footprint while inflicting maximum casualties.

Pacifists, schmacifists. Nuremberg lawyers threw the book at one of the primary actors in the Nazi War on Cold Cereals.

Despite a famous aversion to smoking, Hitler tolerated Mussolini’s frequent bong rips. For his part, Il Duce looked the other way when Der Führer placed daisies in the barrels of soldiers’ rifles.

ABOVE: Sher Zieve

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We interrupt our regularly scheduled Doughy Pantload coverage, to bring you the latest from Sher Zieve, a wingnut who is not just a nut but is, arguably, actually crazy, as in shouting-at-strangers-in-the-park crazy. Sher is a contributing editor of “The Sand People Are Coming! The Sand People Are Coming!” aka Family Security Matters where her latest column is devoted to explaining how Hollywood is conspiring with Al-Qaeda to murder Christians. No, seriously:

As Christians throughout the world continue to be oppressed and even murdered by Islamofacists, demi-celeb Joy Behar seems to have decided to join the oppressors. After all, Christian-bashing is not only accepted by Islamists and the Hollywood elite, it’s expected – if not required. … Of course, these actions by the active, vocal, ever-present and (hopefully unaware) Leftist terrorist-collaborators in our midst may actually encourage the slaughter of Christians by said terrorists on a global basis.

Now what exactly did Joy Behar say to encourage Al Qaeda to kill Christians? Er, this:

I have a theory that you can’t find any saints anymore because of psychotropic medication. I think that [in] the old days, the saints were hearing voices and they didn’t have any Thorazine to calm them down. Now that we have all of this medication available to us, you can’t find a saint anymore.

You may wonder how this might encourage terrorist plots to kill Christians, but that’s only because you haven’t seen this double secret transcript that Sher must have seen before writing her column:

Scene: a villa on the outskirts of Lahore. Osama Bin Laden and Ayman Al-Zawahiri are sitting in Barcaloungers, drinking tea and watching “The View” on satellite TV

Osama Bin Laden: Hey, Ayman, did you hear that? Christians who heard voices were schizophrenic.

Ayman Al-Zawahiri: That’s disgusting. Let’s go kill some Christians.

Osama Bin Laden: Okay, but let’s watch “Days of our Lives” first.

Actually, Behar’s statement about crazy people hearing voices has Sher all in a twist because she also hears voices herself. No, seriously:

As a child, Sherrie Zieve received personal information regarding her life. This information came in the form of knowing many things (including the death of her husband) which would occur when she was an adult. Although some of the received data could be regarded as “negative”, it also allowed her to save the lives of one of her brothers and a sister. While in seventh grade science class, she saw a map of the Pacific Ocean and told her teacher that the included volcanoes were called the Ring of Fire and that there would be massive and simultaneous eruptions in that area. That same year, Ms. Zieve was “led” to the library book Many Mansions by Dr. Gina Cerminara. After reading the first chapter (which discussed reincarnation), she told her then disbelieving mother that now “it makes sense!” Throughout the years, Ms. Zieve has in business and thought it best to keep her experiences quiet. But, after the Northridge quake in California, she was led to write her novel Journey which regards the changes to come. …

Now back to our regularly scheduled coverage of Liberal Fascism: From Mussolini to Trans-Fat-Free Funyuns.

Gavin adds: Also click here to review Family Security Matters’ board of directors!

Shorter Isaiah Z. Sterrett:

“Brokeback Mountain” meets immaturity

Above: No longer writes for RenewAmerica, for some reason

• As a libertarian, I support gay marriage because I support fairness — and by the way, I’ve had it with you freakin’ social conservatives who can’t appreciate a beautiful goddamn movie just because there are gay people in it.

‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard.

Shorter Rudy Takala:

Part I of II: How college made me more conservative

Above: Rudy can, as it were, fail

• I used to be a libertarian until I encountered the gay homosexuals and their demands for liberty.

‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard.

Welp, Jonah’s fanboy army of Cheeto-stained wretches has successfully managed to pressure Google into removing Jon Swift’s ingenious post on Liberal Fascism from Google search results. Weak sauce, peeps. Go over to Jon’s blog and give him your support. Google’s Webmaster Blog can be found here. If you wish, you may go there and tell them what you think about the removal of Mr. Swift’s post. Solidarity, bee-yotchez.

And hey, speaking of Jonah, he’s got an op-ed published in today’s WaPo. As you’d expect, it’s chock-full of hilarity:

Conservatism, quite simply, is a mess these days. Conservative attitudes are changing. Or, more accurately, the attitudes of people who call themselves conservatives are changing.

The most cited data to prove this point come from the Pew Political Typology survey. By 2005, it had found that so many self-described conservatives were in favor of government activism that they had to come up with a name for them. “Running-dog liberals” apparently seemed too pejorative, so the survey went with “pro-government conservatives,” a term that might have caused Ronald Reagan to spontaneously combust. This group makes up just under 10 percent of registered voters and something like a third of the Republican coalition. Ninety-four percent of pro-government conservatives favored raising the minimum wage, as did 79 percent of self-described social conservatives. Eight out of 10 pro-government conservatives believe that the government should do more to help the poor and slightly more than that distrust big corporations.

Ye gods! Who could distrust our corporate masters? They seem like such honest folk!

Above: Some things are not as labeled

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There’s more evidence elsewhere. As former Bush speechwriter David Frum documents in his new book, “Comeback,” income taxes are no longer a terribly serious concern among conservative voters. Young Christian conservatives and others are increasingly eager to bring a faith-based activism to government. As the conservative commentator Ramesh Ponnuru recently noted in Time, younger evangelicals are more likely to oppose abortion than their parents were, but they are also more likely to look kindly on government-run anti-poverty programs and environmental protection.

Y’know what? Good. Those beliefs are at least consistent with what I’d describe as a Christianist worldview. What’s made the Christian Right in this country so appalling over the past 30 years has been their inconsistency: a lot of them would rail against teh ghey and abortions, all the while ignoring Jesus’ essential message of compassion. It now seems as though the Christian Right has come to the refreshingly sane conclusion that a lot of the GOP’s positions simply aren’t very Christian. After all, there’s nothing in the Bible that says “Thou shalt waterboard the darkies, butt-rape the environment and eliminate the capital gains tax.”

Today the American public seems deeply schizophrenic: It hates the government — Washington, Congress and public institutions are more unpopular than at any time since Watergate — but it wants more of it.

No, Jonah, it wants a better government. It doesn’t want a government run by incompetent boobs who get us into needless wars and who screw off with guitars during national disasters. In short, people are sick of having their government run by stupid assholes. You know, the same stupid assholes that you’ve enthusiastically supported all these years.

Conservative arguments about limited government have little purchase among independents and swing voters. This is a keen problem for a candidate like Romney, because it forces him to vacillate between his credible competence message — “I can make government work” — and his strategic need to fill the “Reaganite” space left vacant by former senator George Allen’s failure to seize it and Thompson’s inability to get anyone to notice that he occupies it. Worse, the conservatives who want activist government want it to have a populist-Christian tinge, and that’s a pitch that neither McCain nor Giuliani nor Thompson nor Romney can sell.

In other words: “Oh shit! None of the guys I support can convincingly snooker the Christian Right like Bush did!”

You really are a right stinker, Jonah. As I said a couple of weeks ago about Stephen Green, I cannot wait to see your taxes hiked in 2009.

The Liberal Fascism blog, now that it actually has content beyond “This is the first post”, gives us an insightful glimpse into the creative process behind the writing of a great book. We learn what one does — and what one doesn’t do — when crafting such an epic work of scholarship.

For example, one does rely heavily upon historical research that does not actually appear in one’s book:

One of the richest resources for my argument is Oswald Mosley and his British Union of Fascists.

One does not give one’s readers any credits, though, nor does one include any history in one’s history book. And one certainly does not use an example just because it might lend credence to one’s argument:

But I made the conscious effort not to go fishing for convenient fascist movements most readers had never heard of.

One does avoid discussing any historical discussion, however relevant, that might include the mention of an article of clothing:

As I’ve told people who wanted me to deal with the Blue Shirts of China or Mosley’s Silver Shirts, “I don’t do shirts.”

Even if one obviously couldn’t be bothered to think of something when one was ‘researching’ the book, one does not forget to mention the thing after they have been brought to one’s attention:

Still, I think it might be interesting to revisit Mosley and his crowd here in the days to come.

One does behave like a true gentleman and mention that one’s peers are much more qualified than one’s self to write a book about the subject:

Several of NR’s best contributors know a great deal about this stuff, starting with David Pryce-Jones (who wrote a book about Unity Mitford, the Hitler-worshipping sister of Oswald Mosley’s wife, Diana) and Mark Steyn who could write a book about the Mitfords.

One does not respond to more than 1% of idiocy:

I look forward to some interesting debates down the line, and I think I probably should be less intemperate. But I’m a big believer in reviewing reviewers. Lord knows I’m not responding to 99% of the idiocy being thrown at me. I plan on doing more of this because I think it’s important. If it makes me look thin-skinned, that’s unfortunate because I think the opposite is pretty obviously the case given all the stuff thrown at me. But if it make me look that way, so be it. It’s easier to enjoy life when you feel you didn’t let people get away with b.s. when you had the chance.

One does share with Hitler a contempt for the process of law and the notion that the will of the people should determine the treatment of ethnic minorities:

But it’s true liberalism’s faith in a “living constitution” is profoundly illiberal. The liberal fondness for a supreme court that consults foreign laws is inherently undemocratic and illiberal. It’s investment in the UN, Davos and other transnational elite institutions smacks of an (HG) Wellsian contempt for localism, sovereignty and democracy.* Racial quotas are wildly unpopular according to public opinion surveys and yet they are imposed from above everywhere in contravention of the spirit of egalitarianism and in accordance with liberal racial essentialism.

That gives me a great idea for a book!

* Gavin adds: Indeed, it was the same thoroughgoing contempt for German sovereignty and ‘blood and soil’ that led Hitler to suggest the party name, Internationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (ISDAP), or International Socialist German Workers’ Party — which is why, today, we call these German fascists ‘the Izzies.’

Jillian adds from I Like Trike in the comments:

This guy is killing me:

Oswald Mosley’s British fascist group were actually called the Black Shirts.

The Silver Shirts were the name of an American fascist group run by one William Dudley Pelley.

The source of Jonah’s confusion? Why, Harry Turtledove alternate history series, which called Mosley’s group the Silver Shirts.

So here we have documented evidence his research isn’t coming from actual history, but alternate history. Sigh.

Interestingly enough, our own Silver Shirt fascists were rabidly anti-Communist, anti-FDR, and anti-New Deal, which makes it difficult to see how they could ever have been “liberal” – but this is central to my point.

Jonah’s back, and this time he’s mad.

My Response To Neiwert

It’s too long to blog. So it’s a whole article. You can find it here.

Here’s the beginning:

On Thursday, I said that David Neiwert’s review of my book, Liberal Fascism, in The American Prospect was the sort of “shallow, cliché ridden, attack-the-messenger stuff that I would expect Ezra to find so persuasive.” But it turned out I’d misquoted Neiwart, for which I apologized. I also said I was bleary from the slog of promoting the book and maybe I was too harsh. Well, now — as they used to say of Nixon — I’m tanned, rested and ready (minus the tan). So with fresh eyes let me say that Neiwert’s review is the sort of shallow, cliché ridden, attack-the-messenger stuff that I would expect Ezra to find so persuasive.

GOLDBERG: My argument, in brief, is that the zeek, frongle, oink, with the ee-yudda woo-woo, ergo Aquaman could totally beat up the X-Men.

[Derisive laughter from crowds of humans, woodland creatures, animate furniture and housewares, pods of dolphins and schools of fishes, the very stones themselves. The heavens open to rain poo on Goldberg, the Earth cracks a sulfurous fissure and laughter peals from Hell. A tree drops a mushy apple on his head. Gravity, disgusted, quits, and all objects in motion remain so, and vice versa. The universe thinks better of itself and begins glumly to recede. Someone hums tunelessly into a kazoo.]

GOLDBERG: Yeah, well, I believe this only underscores my point.¹

First, there’s the opening where he tries ever so slightly to tag me as a member of the David Irving Holocaust-denier camp. Then, he whines that I don’t have any credentials and I have no qualifications other than “right-wing nepotism” (You can expect this bleat to get ever louder, by the way, if the book becomes a bestseller). I like that, because it seems it’s only right-wing nepotism that bothers the party poised to nominate the wife of the last Democratic president, a party which remains a cargo cult to the Kennedys — every member of whom (save for pro-Nazi papa Joe) got where they are from nepotism (as for the charge I’m the product of nepotism: Yawn).

Above: Goldberg’s book editor, son of Saul Bellow

Okay, on to the substance.

Okay, on to the substance.

The intellectual dishonesty of Neiwart’s first grown-up paragraph is glorious in its majesty….

01/11 03:27 PM

When, oh when, will these childish liberals cease their silly personal attacks and grapple with the issues?

Leonard adds: Gavin, if I might…?

Then there’s the omnipresent canard that I must be wrong because of fascism’s “overwhelming anti-liberalism.” Neiwert is again displaying either his ignorance or his dishonesty. It is absolutely true that a great many academic definitions — Ernst Nolte’s “fascist negations” for example — cite fascism’s anti-liberalism. And it is true that Mussolini and Hitler spoke of their disdain for liberalism many times, and there are many quotes to that effect. But guess what? These two European statesmen were speaking in — wait for it! — a European context where liberalism generally means limited government: classical or “Manchester” liberalism. They were most emphatically not talking about progressivism or socialism, which are the correct label for American liberalism and/or the American left (as I demonstrate at length in my book).

This is the point at which we reach the tipping point: is Jonah an idiot, or a liar? Paragraphs like this say:

Honestly, it’s not even a good lie. If Jonah has read even one book about Nazism or Fascism — and let’s give him maximum credit and say that he has, in fact, read exactly one book about each topic — he knows good and well that Hitler and Mussolini damn sure did mean progressivism and socialism when they spoke of their hatred of liberalism. Any high-school student knows what Hitler did to the communists; anyone who’s read Boswell’s books — which Jonah cites as a source — knows that socialists were the primary targets of the fascisti. If you want a picture of the future, picture bullshit dripping from a Goldberg’s face — forever.

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‘Prez Takes Left-Wing Tack: Bush Likes Dead Jews More Than Live Ones’

‘NY Protest: Jew Hatred at Annapolis’

‘Bush Is No Longer Worthy of The Title “President”’

‘Contiguous? UPDATE: The Final Solution’

Above: ‘”Peace” is just another word for killing all teh Jews!’

• Anyone who would try to engender peace between the Chosen People of Israel and the subhuman vermin known as ‘Palestinians’ is objectively anti-Semitic and an enabler of another Holocaust — and that includes you, Mr. President.

‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard.

* q.v., cf.

Ezra writes about Jonah’s weepy breakdowns over the endless ridicule Liberal Fascism has endured:

I don’t really understand why Jonah’s so touchy about his book. I mean, I do, on one level. I don’t like having mean things said about my work, and I presume Jonah doesn’t either. It must hurt to have your book relentlessly mocked for months before the publishing date, then relentlessly mocked some more once it comes out in stores.

Quite so. And not to pile on, but I’m about to pile on.

The folks at AlterNet were kind enough to publish my review of Jonah’s book. Here’s an excerpt:

In a lot of ways, this kind of nonsense shouldn’t be surprising coming from Goldberg, since it’s the same lazy brand of inherited thinking that defines today’s conservative movement. For like his contemporaries William Kristol and John Podheretz, Goldberg was raised by prominent figures within the right-wing movement and was trained from the start to be an influential public “intellectual.” And just as Kristol and Podheretz’s writings closely mirror the neoconservative views espoused by their parents, Goldberg’s penchant for attacking liberals in the most shameless and slimy ways imaginable is unsurprisingly similar to the style of his mother Lucianne, a right-wing literary agent who first came to national prominence when she helped Linda Tripp break the Monica Lewinsky scandal to the press. Indeed, I imagine Lucianne training young Jonah to hate Democrats by repeatedly bopping him over the head with a frozen bratwurst meant to represent Bill Clinton’s penis.

“Woof! Clenis bad! Clenis bring pain!” I picture the beleaguered pundit-in-training yelping as his mother’s stern hand reared back and prepared to deliver another hit.

Now, to address a few sure-to-be-common concern-troll objections to my review:

• Objection #1: You didn’t thoughtfully try to refute this very serious argument!

Me: I sure didn’t. But I can assure you that no one has ever made a frozen bratwurst joke about Clinton’s penis with such detail or such care.

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Some people seem to think we hate Jonah Goldberg.

Nothing could be farther from the truth. First of all, the Doughy Pantload has given us hundreds of hours of entertainment; in his official role as Village Idiot of the Internet, he never ceases to amuse us with his falling off of walls, tumbling into ditches, and trying to come up with smart things to say when he’d really rather be at home watching Deep Space Nine DVDs. He’s so clearly ill-suited for the role in which he was thrust, he’s almost like a Terry Southern character: General Ripper with a bottle of GameFuel instead of grain alcohol and rainwater, the gun-wielding redneck at the end of Easy Rider gone to Goucher College, Mark Noonan with a rich mom.

But beyond that…we kinda feel for ol’ Jonah. There are even times, when he’s all wound up from talking about Battlestar Galactica with his soul-mate John Podhoretz and just needs to go run around in the yard for a couple of hours, that we almost like him. After all, aren’t his troubles our own? Haven’t all of us been forced into a position we can’t possibly live up to, possibly by our dagger-wielding harridan of a mother? Haven’t all of us at some point felt like a bit of an intellectual fraud? Haven’t all of us, once or twice in our lives, stood before the world, feeling doughy and bearing in our metaphorical trousers a reeking, sticky pantload of our own making?

The difference between us and Jonah, though, is that we know our limitations. We don’t keep up the pretense that we are something that we’re not. Having produced the occasional pantload, we do not strip off our trousers, turn our boxers inside out, and present it to the world as if it were a basket of flowers. Jonah Goldberg is a clown, but he’s a clown who thinks he’s a lion — or, worse yet, a lion tamer. When people like you and I make fools of ourselves, we quietly own up to it, make what amends can be made, and go on with our lives, determined to either better ourselves or at least avoid such humiliating circumstances in the future. When Jonah Goldberg makes a mistake — even a 496-page mistake that retails for $27.95 — he goes around the country on a media blitz telling everyone how awesome it is, and that if they think it’s a mistake, that’s not his problem because they’re clearly not smart enough to understand it. His job, in short, is to sell people shit and tell them it’s sugar.

His latest sales pitch comes on the electronic pages of Salon magazine, where the inhumanly patient Alex Koppelman does what very few of us would have the wherewithal to do: sit there nodding politely while Jonah Goldberg makes a gigantic ass out of himself.

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Attn: Boston-area sadlynauts:

I will be playing the role of Orgon in an adaptation of Moliere’s Tartuffe next week at the Footlight Club in Jamaica Plain. If ya wanna see me act (and I promise you do- seriously), then come along. Tickets are only $5 (free fr children and s3ni0rz!!1!) and are available at teh door. Hope to see some of y’all thrrrr 🙂 Ask for directions if you need ’em.

UPDATE: Just so y’all know, this isn’t a professional production- don’t expect fancy sets or nothin’. We’re all volunteers and we do this out of love 🙂

THAT SAID: it’s gonna be a lotta fun. We have some very good actors in the show who are vets in the Boston fringe theatre scene- the d00d who plays Tartuffe is particularly fun to watch. The Footlight Club is one of the better all-volunteer theatres in the city, and JP has a fun’n’lively community of artsy folks who love to perform.

ANYWAY, it’ll be super-fun, I promise. I swear to you here and now that I will give a performance that has never been done in such detail or such care 😉