January 13, 2008


IMPEACH BUSH


IMPEACH CHENEY


THEIR ATTACKS GET MORE INANE


Their own ideology is so toxic conservatives twist themselves into knots to criticize the left. Ann Coulter has made lots of money writing trashy books attacking liberals. There has been a history of conservative "intellectuals" defending the indefensible, such as William F. Buckley praising Spanish dictator Francisco Franco. Now we have Jonah Goldberg saying that we on the left are "fascists." He needs to make up his mind. The right usually calls us Communists and, as I recall, Hitler attacked the Soviet Union. This article by Brad Reed looks at Goldberg's tome Liberal Fascism. The article is at www.alternet.org:

While a lot of this stuff is easy to laugh off, some of Goldberg's historical revisionism is downright sickening. In one particularly grotesque passage, he tries to obfuscate the Nazis' treatment of homosexuals by calling their attitudes toward homosexuality "a source of confusion." Oh sure, he writes, "some homosexuals were sent to concentration camps," but it's also true that the early Nazi party was "rife with homosexuals." I'm sure the 100,000 men who were arrested for being homosexuals in Nazi Germany, as well as the thousands more who died in concentration camps, were proud to see their brethren so well-represented in the SS.

Most stunningly, Goldberg completely glosses over the American Right's support for any fascist governments, stating that "no leading conservative intellectual or scholar celebrated fascist themes or ideas" and that "to the contrary, Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, William F. Buckley Jr. and the conservatives around the National Review dedicated themselves to restoring the classically liberal vision of the Founders." He must not have read Buckley's "Letter from Spain" dated Oct. 26, 1957, where he praised Gen. Francisco Franco as "an authentic national hero" who was "not an oppressive dictator" but rather "only as oppressive as it is necessary to be to maintain total power, and that, it happens, is not very oppressive, for the people, by and large, are content."