There are only a couple of people on my automatic ‘punch in the face’ list. One is Jonah Goldberg. (The other’s Dinesh D’Souza.) It’s not anger. I’m not a violent person. I’d rather go verbal than mano a mano. But when someone has made the choice to argue the opposite of what everyone else knows to be so in a perverse attempt to rewrite history — truth be damned! — really, you can’t have a normal discussion with that person. It would just give them an opportunity to spew crap. Spewing crap is what they’re good at, and it’ll only make it worse. But a punch in the face transcends discourse. And it may provide that person with the reality check that reality never gave them.
The crap I’m talking about is, of course, Goldberg’s book, ‘Liberal Fascism’. Sadly, No! has done a great job taking down the Doughy Pantload’s premise, which is basically the associative fallacy spread over 400 pages: Nazis and Fascists liked organic foods, liberals like organic foods, ergo liberals are fascists. Fascist states are totalitarian, and totalitarians tell people how to live their lives. Liberals would like to tell people what to do (e.g. the environment, good parenting); ergo, liberals are totalitarians. Utterly fallacious, and remind me again whose vision of the state involves legislating people’s bedroom behaviour?
You might enjoy Jon Stewart’s interview with Das Lodenhosen, if your eyes don’t hurt from all the rolling.
21 January 2008 at 5:43 am
You’re on a flippin’ roll! I watched the DS when Goldberg was on. Is it me or has Stewart given up the ‘I’ll play along with the Conservatives’ game in his interviews ever since the writers walked out? He gets knee-deep in it these days, his interview with John Bolton was almost disrespectful. The crowd doesn’t even get into it like they used to. He loses a great dynamic to the show if it ends up scaring away the Con’s from the show.