Jonah Goldberg to Base! Under Attack by Commie-Nazis!

The reviews for Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism are awful, of course, and the new line from its author is that the critics just haven't read it hard enough. It's like the mis en scene in Hostel II. You'd get it, if you just watched a few more times.

Which made me feel bad, because I hadn't planned on reading it at all. I still have all these Michael Savage books on the nightstand.

(With the Savage books I just like staring the author photos on the covers. He looks like Al Goldstein without the panache. Odd that he has all this trouble with women.)

So I went to Borders and read Liberal Fascism.

I can't imagine what terms we're supposed to be judging it on. It's tragic.

It's not just that Goldberg's understanding of history would get him laughed out of a game of Axis & Allies; the index doesn't work.

Is it for young adults?

Here's the Goldberg Thesis:

Liberals are like Fascists because Fascists told people to do things and so do Liberals. The End.

Yeah, it's not exactly Umberto Eco.

I guess Jonah Goldberg is supposed to be a fun guy -- you don't grow up in a whorehouse without learning to play at least a little piano -- so it's okay that he's not very bright. And he's still just a kid, in Young Republican terms; he's not even forty. At his age George Bush was still driving drunk. But is that really an excuse?

When you buy it, you don't get to pay with play money.

Goldberg also notices that "Nazi" is short for "national socialist," which is scholarship on a level with discovering that there were mid-winter holidays that predated Christmas. (Religion's like a myth, dude!) It's the kind of thing stupid people think sounds smart. A grown man might sit there and listen to a boy say it, but only to humor him. "Well, that's an interesting thought, son, but Jesus was a historical figure. Now run upstairs. I've paid my $10, and I need to fuck your mom."

If you get to the end, you do, however, find the "rosebud" of the whole thing: Liberal Fascism is Jonah Goldberg's revenge on Gore Vidal for making William F. Buckley lose his temper.

Here:

"In 1968, in a televised debate on ABC news during the Chicago Democratic convention, Gore Vidal continually goaded William F. Buckley, eventually calling him a crypto Nazi. Vidal himself is an open homosexual, a pagan, a statist, and a conspiracy theorist. Buckley, a patriotic, free-market, anti-totalitarian gentlemen of impeccably good manners, could take it no more and responded: 'Now listen, you queer, stop calling me a crypto Nazi or I'll sock you in the goddam face and you'll stay plastered.'"

This is a pretty well-known incident. (I'm not sure why "open homosexual" is the first thing Goldberg lists in Vidal's bio, except as a synonym for "asking for it," but it's his book. I might have gone with, "author, playwright, screenwriter, veteran," but that's just me.) Most viewers remember the other guy, the impeccably well-mannered patriotic gentleman speed freak dilettante footnote, getting the worst of it, as he was the one screaming slurs and threatening to hit people.

I think Vidal compared it to watching a cuckoo clock bird pop out of Buckley's head.

But that's not how Goldberg sees it.

"It was one of the of the few times in Buckley's long public life that he has abandoned civility, and he instantly regretted it. Nevertheless, being on the receiving end of many similar insults and diatribes, I have deep sympathy for Buckley's frustration. For at some point it is necessary to throw down the gauntlet, to draw a line in the sand, to set a boundary, to cry at long last, 'enough is enough,' to stand athwart 'progress' and yell 'stop.'"

(Or I'll hit you with my purse.)

"My hope is that this book has served much the same purpose as Buckley's intemperate outburst while striving for his more typical civility."

Liberal Fascism isn't about politics or history or even making a fast buck. It's about sucking up to the boss.

"Remember that night you totally lost your shit on national TV? (Probably not, you were taking a lot of speed at the time.) Well, I thought you were swell. That mean man was totally asking for it."

I'm glad you called him a queer.

--

By the way, don't look for this incident with the dozen other references to homosexuality in the index. It's not there.

--

William Buckley, when remembered at all, will be remembered for eating it that night in 1968. The way, up until now, Jonah Goldberg's claim to fame was lifting a line from The Simpsons, "cheese eating surrender monkeys," and applying it to anyone who didn't want to fight Iraq. (And by "fight" Goldberg meant, "send somebody else.")

Goldberg doesn't get many ideas. So where'd he come up with pure gold like "liberal fascism?" Wait, look:

I'm pretty sure that's The Simpsons. The line is: "McBain to base. Under attack from Commie Nazis."

I know no one gets paid for the Internet, but someone owes someone some money.

Comments

[DasBoot]

Right on, Chris. No mercy.

But dare any Democrat compare Bush to Hitler...

Goldberg, D'Souza et al are so cute because they honestly consider themselves intellectuals. I am sure Cheney has no such pretentions.

[schmuckwithearlaps]

If we want to be a little accurate in calling people Nazis and Commies, we might want to be guided by the recent book "Lenin Stalin and Hitler" in which Robert Gellately makes a strong point that the 20th century's two main bad guys were poles apart on dealing with public opinion. He points out that Hitler was very sensitive to public opinion and wanted to keep everyone happy. Everyone, of course, excluded the minorities he persecuted. Gellately presents Hitler as kind of the Lyndon Johnson of the 1930's wanting everyone (who counted) to be pleased.
Stalin, on the other hand, could not care less about public opinion or how unpopular he was in Russia as long has he had the power to rule with an iron hand. To Stalin, he knew his ideology was right, and he had the power to enforce it, and the public be damned.
So liberals are very misguided when in the heat of the moment they call someone in Washington a Nazi. However, if they called him a Stalinist,
well, that may cause some needed head scratching.

[wldnswmmr]

I'm not sure you're quoting exactly, but wasn't Buckley's line "you god-dahm queer."? That's what made it so funny (I saw it live, actually). Buckley, who's clearly a crypto-Nazi, was so beside himself with rage, Vidal had done such a great job of pushing his buttons, that Buckley was flushed out of his Mandarin role and resorted to name calling, with that inimitable Yankee drawl, of course. But since Buckley was a crypto-Nazi, I guess he was actually a crypto-soc­ialist-lib­eral, probably proved by his penchant for telling people what to do, like making Jonah pick up his laundry. How weird. I never would have guessed that. Maybe it's because of the speed, which I'm sure he used to counteract the booze.

[SamanthaJaneSalem]

The low point of my life still is when I looked at the back of my Starbucks coffee cup and saw a "The Way I See it" quote by Jonah Goldberg.

[metrodorus]

Please explain: What are these references to being born in a whorhouse? And to Buckley's speed usage?

I'm such a naïf.

[realpolitic]

Goldberg can link himself to William F. Buckley because they both have been rhetorically attacked. Using this criterion, I can link myself with exceptional historical figures as well. I cross a street each day and I am sure Dr. Martin Luther King and Albert Schweitzer crossed streets in their comings and goings, so I perhaps can equate myself with these great men. The point is at least William F. Buckley can make some pretense toward intellectualism and respectablity and Goldberg surely can not.

As Mr. Kelly states, Goldberg sees the word Socialist in the Nazi Party's plank and he fills in the blanks from there. This scribbling is what passes for intellectualism and historical analysis on the right. Well, at least it is historical revisionism, which is what these debasers are really interested in. It must be nice to be on the wrong side of issues such as supporting states's rights in the old south to disenfrancise blacks and then just alter the historical record later. Such revisionism is an exercise in mind control worthy of Orwell and better left to fiction.

Goldberg is a hack, only worthy of a guest appearance on Fox News to wake their slumbering audience of angry white men.

[SteveK]

Dinesh D'Souza proved, a short while back, that facts don't matter, just find a catchy title, and the drooling moron 23%ers will buy the books.

I'm sure that if I tried to publish a book called "Liberals are Secretly Trying To Kill Your Children", I could get a book deal instantly.

Fascism is the opposite of Liberalism. The person who created the Fascist Party said so himself. Look it up, it's FACT. Not debateable, FACT.

[IncredulousGeezer]

Nah, Lucianne is (or was) a literary agent and I'm sure she's very proud of her boychik.
At $10 you'd be grossly overpaying for her services, in either profession :)
Bill Buckley's still a sad case. His present kick is calling Obama ugly, in A Lincolnesque way of course. Wonder what the crypto's ploy is here?

[desmirl]

The most bizarre part of the whole story is that some editor liked the book enough to submit it to his/her publisher who paid Goldberg good money for the book. Amazing how such a trivial, infantile piece of writing gets run through a printing press.

[adzeman]

Wonderful. My appetite for Doughy Pantload bshing is limitless.
What pisses me off most about him I think is his delusion of A) being a "serious" guy and B) that he is anything but a GED grade intellect.

[waiguoren]

Human beings cannot fully grasp the concept of the infinite ( it's way too endless, for one thing).

But as far as can be grasped, I'll opine that the words written by Jonah Goldberg ( and I mean every single line and every single time ) approach the infinitely fallacious.

[southernlib]

I don't care what they say. You are exceedingly more talented and intelligent that Ann Coulter.
Hilarious, as usual.

[TheWesternBreed]

Nice review, but it's like kicking a dwarf.