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Sadly, Jonah Goldberg has another book to promote, which means he'll surely be popping up for more interviews like the ones that Blue Texan already wrote about here and here. For anyone who would like a reminder of the dishonesty in the last book he wrote, check out Dave Neiwert's post from back when Glenn Beck was still on the air and promoting Goldberg's fraudulent Liberal Fascism: Historians stand up to 'Liberal Fascism' and its abuse of history, while Beck blithely promotes it.

This Friday, Goldberg appeared at Ralph Reed's Faith and Freedom Coalition conference and although he claimed that he was not there to plug his new book, that's clearly what he was doing during the end of his speech there. I'm assuming a lot of what he said is straight out of his new book, The Tyranny of Cliches: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas, but someone else who has actually read it will have to let me know, since I'm not in the mood to beat myself upside the head with a hammer attempting to read it or to send him any money. Hearing him talk about it in the interviews or speeches I've seen is bad enough.

I'm no expert on so-called "liberal philosophers" like the ones Goldberg was quoting here, but to this non-expert, his arguments seem completely ridiculous. Feel free to correct me in the comments section because what he said here is so convoluted, I'm having trouble making sense of it, but his basic premise seems to be, here are some things some liberal philosophers said. I'm going to interpret what they said to mean they want man to take the place of God. Man shouldn't have anything to do with government getting involved with policies that protect the least among us, because that's God's place. The lowest person in a society is an unborn fetus, so you can't care about those who are actually born unless you put that unborn fetus first. And President Obama has repeated some things these liberal philosophers have said, therefore he must be a Socialist. And his Life of Julia campaign is very creepy.

For a more honest assessment of President Obama's Life of Julia, here's Steve Benen's take from last month: 'The Life of Julia':

Continue reading »

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From the man who brought us 'Liberal Fascism" and who doesn't seem to have much of a grasp on logic or facts, here's Jonah Goldberg on Fox's Special Report with Bret Baier: Fox's Jonah Goldberg: The Idea That GOP Obstructionism Is Hurting The Economy "Doesn't Track Logically Or Factually".

Goldberg has a pretty short memory if he doesn't recall the record number of filibusters we've had in the Senate, the fact that Mitch McConnell said their main goal was to make sure Barack Obama was a one term president, or that they forced him to water down a good portion of the stimulus with tax cuts they claim create jobs. Or the fact that since taking the House, Republicans have done nothing but pass one anti-abortion bill after another and refused to work with him on anything.

Goldberg also apparently doesn't think that cops and firefighters and teachers spend any money if he thinks that putting some of them back to work isn't going to help the economy. But that's not the way things work in Republican upside down world.

BAIER: Jonah, Brit Hume argued earlier in the program in his commentary that this is really how the President thinks and that another stimulus, another big influx of money for government workers is really what he'd want to do.

GOLDBERG: I think Brit's absolutely right. The second where you cut it, he cleaned up his statement, he didn't clean it up. Nowhere in that statement did he actually sort of rebut the logic or reasoning from his press conference statement. David Axelrod on another network was asked by Candy Crowley, three times, yes or no, is the private sector doing fine. David Axelrod could not answer the question.

Obama's theory is that what we need is this new government controlled stimulus and he has to have that theory about government jobs, because if he concedes that the private sector is doing terribly, then he's basically ceding the fundamental argument to the Romney campaign, that Barack Obama has failed to fix the economy.

So he has to say, hey look, the Republicans stopped me from hiring more cops and firefighters, keeping us from having a robust economy. And it just doesn't track logically or factually.

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On this Tuesday's The Daily Show, host Jon Stewart took some time to delve into the right wing's cognitive dissonance and their inability to give President Obama credit for anything, whether it be the killing of Osama bin Laden or Mitt Romney's recent ridiculous statement that he'll "take a lot of credit" for the auto industry coming back in America.

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Comedy Central's Jon Stewart took Republicans to task for their feigned outrage over the new ad from the Obama campaign, which heaven forbid, subtly questioned his opponent Mitt Romney's judgment on whether he would have been willing to go after Osama bin Laden in Pakistan.

Cue Sean Hannity, John McCain, Michael Turner and Jonah Goldberg all complaining about President Obama politicizing or “gloating about” the killing of bin Laden. Stewart proceeded to lay into them for their hypocrisy.

STEWART: So let me get this straight. Republicans, you're annoyed by the arrogance and braggadocio of a wartime president’s political ad? You think he's divisively and unfairly belittling his opponents. I see. Have a question. Are you on crack!? Were you alive lo these past ten years? It seems unseemly for the president to spike the football. Bush landed on a f**king aircraft carrier with a football stuffed cod piece. He spiked the football before the game had even started!

Yes, your Republican caterwauling in outrage... your caterwauling in outrage is the subject of our new segment:

You are aware that the frontal lobe of the cerebral cortex gives us the ability to store and recall past events as they occurred, right?

After taking the likes of Ed Gillespie, George Pataki and Brit Hume to task for their rank hypocrisy as well and for pretending they had no memory of what they said ten years ago, Stewart followed with this:

STEWART: Look, Republicans, yeah, the Obama ad, kinda shitty, a little bit of a cheap shot, but the only reason you're pissed is that you didn’t get to run it, because let's face it, if bin Laden had been killed on Bush's watch, this would have been the ad you're running with.

Cue the over the top fake ad celebrating W's greatness over killing bin Laden. And kudos to The Daily Show's research team for digging up the old clips of Gillespie and Pataki. They need to have their own words thrown back in their face as Stewart did here as often as possible. Lord knows most of the talking heads in our corporate media's excuse for "news" aren't going to do it.

Rachel Maddow points out that even the GOP's latest darling Paul Ryan who is the only member of Congress who's written a budget proposal is out there with the wingnuts and buying into Jonah Goldberg's revisionist history book Liberal Fascism. She forgot to mention that he's also a big fan of Ayn Rand.

Maddow: Congressman Paul Ryan is the Republican Party’s budget guy. He has proposed a GOP budget this year that would essentially get rid of Social Security and Medicare in the long run, slashes both programs dramatically and then privatizes them, so goodbye Medicare safety net, goodbye Social Security safety net. The Republicans are proposing to get rid of them.

Republicans like Michele Bachmann, Marsha Blackburn, Jack Kingston, Jim DeMint, these folks have been, recently been very happily arguing to kill Social Security and Medicare, but they are thought of as being on the far right of even their own party.

Paul Ryan proposing to kill Social Security and Medicare is another thing. He’s the only; his is the only budget that the Republicans have proposed for 2010. He’s supposed to be the Republican Party’s big brain on policy. He’s supposed to be a serious guy.

Well in an interview with The Daily Beast yesterday Paul Ryan was asked why if he’s so fiscally conservative he voted for the bank bailouts. In response the Republican Party’s serious, big brain policy guy explained that he voted for the bank bailout because of this.

Get it. See it’s a smiley face but it has a Hitler moustache! Because liberals seem nice but they’re really Nazis—Nazis were liberals and liberals are Nazis! Paul Ryan, the budget guy for the Republican Party tells The Daily Beast that a conservative book of revisionist history about how the Nazis were secretly liberals and liberals today are secretly Nazis, convinced him to vote for the bank bailout, because otherwise we’d have a great depression and then Obama could use that great depression as an excuse to impose his secret Nazi agenda. Obama’s liberal fascism.

And that is both an admission that even the Republicans admit that the bailout staved off the next great depression and a revelation that even the supposedly sane Republicans in Congress right now believe this stuff. Keep that in mind the next time someone proposes a bipartisan compromise with guys like Paul Ryan who proposed to kill Medicare and Social Security and who justify it by their votes on worries that Obama might secretly be Hitler.

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August 24, 2009 News Corp

From TPM:

Jonah Goldberg, editor-at-large of National Review Online, went on Fox News today to fan the flames of the latest fabricated "death panel" controversy.

Goldberg equated a Veterans Affairs pamphlet -- one that's reportedly no longer being used -- with Nazi eugenics, saying "death panels may not be too far off the horizon."

The pamphlet in question is one that, Fox reported this weekend, encourages disabled veterans to decide whether their lives are worth living. Tammy Duckworth, an assistant secretary of the VA, told Fox on Sunday that the department instructed VA doctors to stop using the pamphlet in 2007.

But Fox has ignored that insistence, saying soldiers returning from Iraq are given the pamphlet.

Dave N.: This really points out just how profoundly dishonest Jonah Goldberg is, just as he was with trying to deny that James Von Brunn was a right-wing extremist. These remarks are an outgrowth of his specious "Liberal Fascism" thesis, which since President Obama's election he has framed as the apotheosis of Obama's own fascist tendencies.

But as noted above, Tammy Duckworth has pointed out that the pamphlet in question was commissioned by the Bush administration, and discontinued in 2007. The Obama administration has had nothing to do with this.

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Bill Maher goes after Michelle Malkin for already writing a book trashing Obama's Presidency only six months in, and has a bit of fun with Jonah Goldberg, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter and Glenn Beck in the process.

BTW, Malkin is going to be a guest on This Week with George Stephanopoulos. Bravo George. At least the Maher's of the world are making a fool of you for giving the likes of Malkin another format to spew her venom.