Interesting Read. Notice the date, then notice that even Jonah Goldberg couldn't have predicted this level of HOSTILE TAKOVER, SO QUICKLY! Al Gore is an opportunist, plain and simple....which is fine with me, as a capitalist, granting that he'd have left the FASCIST FEAR MONGERING at the door....eh? He will go down in the footnotes of History as a LIAR, a disingenuous intellectual(I know....couldn't think of another way of phrasing it. Let's just say that "intellectual" is being VERY generous), and the ONLY reason that Woody didn't go down in the books with even more disdain?.....Well, for one, AL GORE HADN'T INVENTED THE INTERNET, QUITE YET, for one! Secondly, while Woody was QUITE the propagandist.....it's nothing compared to the skills therein of the Left, today. As a great article read, the other day, "FROM RED TO GREEN- The transformation of the Socialist-One World Government- Movement"
Hope you enjoy the read;
Friday, December 28, 2007According to Goldberg, fascism in America predated the regimes of Mussolini and Hitler. He believes that Woodrow Wilson turned the United States into a “fascist country, albeit temporarily” during World War I. Americans in 1917 were reluctant to join the slaughter in Europe. Their nation hadn’t been attacked; there was no defining event — a Fort Sumter or Pearl Harbor — to rally public support. So Wilson formed the country’s first propaganda ministry, the Committee on Public Information, to teach people what they were up against. The devil became German militarism — the merciless Hun — and Americans were encouraged to lash out at those of German ancestry inside the United States. Vigilante groups arose to mete out justice and spy on fellow citizens. Congress passed draconian laws banning “abusive” and “disloyal” language against the government and its officials. The Post Office revoked the mailing privileges of hundreds of antiwar publications, effectively shutting them down. Rarely if ever in American history has dissent been so effectively stifled.
At the same time, Wilson formed numerous boards to regulate everything from the production of artillery pieces to the price of a lamb chop. The result, Goldberg argues, was the birth of a socialist dictatorship that “whipped, cajoled and seduced American industry into the loving embrace of the state.” Though partly dismantled after the war, this model, we are told, became the blueprint for Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal.
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The final chapters of “Liberal Fascism” are a rant, often deliciously amusing, against America’s numerous liberal-fascist elites. In unexciting times, when there are no calamities to be addressed, liberals push a more robust social agenda, Goldberg claims, using the state and the friendly news media to tar opponents of, say, affirmative action or same-sex marriage as bigots, fanatics and fools. The task facing conservatives, he adds, is to hold liberals accountable for these jackboot tactics. “For at some point,” Goldberg writes, “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.’”
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I think Jonah Goldberg is a terrific writer and I look forward to reading his new book. While I tend to call liberals control freaks, Goldberg makes a compelling case for also calling them fascist. I think both labels may fit. Global warming is particularly ripe with control freaks who want to take away your freedom. This review, is in the Sunday NY Times.
Fairly accurate prediction, the second to last sentence was, wouldn't you agree?
