End of Issue #47


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Editorial and Rants

Jonah Goldberg is the author of the New York Times bestseller Liberal Fascism.

The Facts Your Liberal Friends Need to Hear

By Jonah Goldberg

Liberals, perhaps more than anyone, believe that we should be vigilant against the threat of fascism.  Now, they also believe that fascism can only come from the Right--I think they're wrong.  But, what liberals - and everyone else - very much need to understand is that whatever direction fascism comes from, it's popular.  Fascism succeeds in democratic countries because it convinces people that it's the wave of the future, it's progressive, it's young, it's vital, it's exciting.  Fascist promise to fix what's broken in our democracy, to heal our wounds, to deliver us to promised lands.  So if you think fascism comes from the Right, fine.  But at least keep in mind that it won't sell itself as dull, or uptight, or old-fashioned.

Let me take a moment to give you a concrete sense of what I mean.

Fascism appealed to youth activists.  Indeed, the Nazis and Fascists were in major respects youth movements.  In 1931, 60 percent of all German undergraduates supported the Nazi Student Organization.  "Their goal," the historian John Toland wrote of the young idealists who fed the Nazi rise to power, "was to establish a youth culture for fighting the bourgeois trinity of school, home and church."

Meanwhile, middle and lower class Germans were attracted to the economic and cultural populism of Nazism.  The Nazi party began as the German Worker's Party.  The Nazis economic rhetoric was eerily similar to John Edwards "Two Americas" talk.  The Nazis promised to clamp down on Big Business - particularly department stores, the Wal-Marts of their day - and end the class struggle.  Theodore Abel, an impressively clever American sociologist, gives us insight into why working class Germans were attracted to Nazism.  In 1934 Abel took out an ad in the Nazi Party journal asking "old fighters" to submit essays explaining why they had joined.  He restricted his request to "old fighters" because so many opportunists had joined the party after Hitler's rise.  The essays were combined in the fascinating book Why Hitler Came Into Power.  One essayist, a coal miner, explained "Though I was interested in the betterment of the workingman's plight, I rejected [Marxism] unconditionally.  I often asked myself why socialism had to be tied up with internationalism-why it could not work as well or better in conjunction with nationalism."  A railroad worker concurred, "I shuddered at the thought of Germany in the grip of Bolshevism.  The slogan 'Workers of the World Unite!' made no sense to me.  At the same time, however, National Socialism, with its promise of a community ... barring all class struggle, attracted me profoundly."  A third worker wrote that he embraced the Nazis because of their "uncompromising will to stamp out the class struggle, snobberies of caste and party hatreds.  The movement bore the true message of socialism to the German workingman."

Nazism's appeal to the professional classes was just as strong.  Raymond Dominick, a historian specializing in the history of German environmentalism, found that by 1939, 59 percent of conservationist leaders had joined the Nazi party, while only 10 percent of adult males had.  Forty five percent of medical doctors had joined and roughly one quarter of teachers and lawyers had.  The two groups of professionals with the highest rates of participation in the Nazi Party?  Veterinarians were first and foresters were a close second.  Dominick found a "unique nexus between National Socialism and nature conservation."

The Nazis and Italian Fascists won-over big business, cultural elites, the youth and the lower-classes because they portrayed themselves as heroically on the side of progress, protecting the environment and the poor.  Fascists preached unity, togetherness and an end to division.

Liberals need to ask themselves where do they hear this rhetoric the most?

I'm not saying that merely being for the environment, the poor or national unity makes you a fascist.  But what I am saying is that if you're concerned about spotting fascism on the horizon you can't just look at people you don't like.  That's like only looking for your lost car keys where the light is good.  Huey Long reportedly said that if Fascism comes to America it will be called "anti-Fascism."  Liberals can still make their arguments that fascism comes from the right.  But until they understand that wherever fascism may come from, it never arrives save in a form that the best and the brightest are willing to accept with open arms.

And if liberals don't know their history, they won't be equipped to spot it when it comes knocking.


What Hillary and Barack Have in Store

By Jonah Goldberg

The most common left wing definition of fascism is "when business runs the government."  Historically, this is basically nonsense.  But that hasn't stopped liberals like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. from saying it over and over again.

But if we are going to go by that definition, conservatives in the U.S. are hardly the fascists.  The principled conservative position is that the free market should rule the day.  Businesses are never "too big to fail" and corporate welfare is folly.  In all honesty, we must admit that many Republicans fail to live up to these conservative principles.  But what are liberal principles?  They are simply this: corporations should be "progressive."  Government should regulate corporations heavily as a means of using big business as another branch of the state.  Hillary Clinton wants "public-private partnerships."  She believes that businesses must collude with government in providing universal healthcare to the point where it's impossible to tell where the government begins and business ends.  She has contempt for entrepreneurs and small business.  When it was pointed out to her that "Hillarycare" would hit small businesses while enriching big corporations, she replied that she couldn't worry about every under-capitalized business in America.  Barack Obama, meanwhile, talks incessantly about how government must police the "patriotism" of corporations.  His definition of "patriotism" in this regard seems extremely elastic.

We've seen something like this before.  Woodrow Wilson implemented a form of "war socialism" during WWI.  Big Business and government worked seamlessly together under the auspices of the War Industry Board.  Industry rigged the system for its own benefit, with the approval of government.  When the war ended, the American people rejected Wilson's war socialism, but Progressive intellectuals didn't.  They proclaimed "we planned in war" and, hence, felt they should be allowed to plan the economy during peacetime as well.  They looked enviously at Fascist Italy and, even more so, the Soviet Union.  These were the sort of grand "experiments" they wanted to conduct here at home.  "Why," Stuart Chase asked in his 1932 book, A New Deal (which many credit with originating the phrase) "should the Russians have all the fun of remaking a world?"

They finally had their chance under the New Deal, where FDR - a veteran of the Wilson Administration - tried to recreate what the Progressives had wrought during the war.  When Hugh Johnson -- the head of the National Recovery Administration, the centerpiece of FDR's New Deal - took office in 1932, one of the first things he did was hang a portrait of Mussolini on his wall and started handing out pro-fascist literature to FDR's cabinet.

The left has told us that the New Deal rescued the little guy, the "forgotten man."  But in reality it prolonged the Great Depression and served as a boon to Big Business.

For example, Clarence Darrow was charged with studying the effects of the NRA.  In "virtually all the codes we have examined," he reported, "one condition has been persistent ... In Industry after Industry, the larger units, sometimes through the agency of ... [a trade association], sometimes by other means, have for their own advantage written the codes, and then, in effect and for their own advantage, assumed the administration of the code they have framed."  We may believe that FDR fashioned the New Deal out of concern for the "forgotten man."  But as one historian put it, "The principle seemed to be: to him that hath it shall be given."

The fundamental mistake Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, John Edwards and company make is that they assume "clamping down" on corporations will lessen the role of big business in politics.  The reality is exactly the opposite.  Microsoft had nearly no lobbyists in Washington DC until Washington DC decided to go after Microsoft.  Now, Microsoft has an enormous lobbying operation.  Walmart is the same story.  Once big business discovers that it's profit margins are determined in Washington, big business focuses on Washington.

Perhaps more importantly, really big corporations like regulations.  Coca-Cola can pass its costs onto the consumer.  But smaller business are not only hurt by regulations, they are also prevented from competing with the big boys because those regulations serve as a "barrier to entry."

The great "fascist bargain" with big business goes something like this: The government promises corporations market share, a lack of competition and reliable profits in exchange for compliance with its political and ideological agenda.  Today big corporations hold up their end of the deal.  They buy into global warming (often at a profit) they agree to all the tenets of diversity-mongering and affirmative action.  They cast themselves as "Progressive" corporate citizens and in exchange we get economic policies that punish entrepreneurs and inhibit free markets.

This is as it should be according to the Progressives, the New Dealers and today's Democratic Party.  And whether you want to call it fascism is up to you, but it fits what liberals have been saying about fascism to a T.


Government Knows Best

By Jonah Goldberg

Type "New York City Council" and "ban" and "2007" into Google. Here's some of what you find:

A New York Times story: New York City Council Approves Ban on Metal Bats

A BBC News story: "Racial slur banned in New York."

A CNN story on how New York is considering banning "ultrathin" models.

A New York Sun article on how New York City is contemplating banning feeding pigeons.

A link to the Humane Society's effort to ban horse drawn carriages.

And that's on the first page alone.

These sorts of stories trickle-in almost hourly.  Sometimes we hear them and are briefly distracted by them, other times we tune them out as background noise.  And, most often, we simply forget them, these little human interest stories that amused us for a moment on talk radio or in back pages of a newspaper.

Sometimes we giggle about what's happening in other countries, without long pondering that places like Canada and Britain often blaze the trail we are on.  For example:

In Britain, in a perfectly typical event quickly forgotten, police tracked down and nearly arrested an 11-year-old boy for calling a 10-year-old boy "gay" in an e-mail.  This was considered a "very serious homophobic crime" requiring the full attention of police.  In 2006, the coppers fingerprinted and threw a 14-year-old girl into jail for the crime of racism.  Her underlying offense stemmed from the fact that she refused to join a class discussion with some fellow students because they were Asian and didn't speak English.

In England, traffic cameras are now trained on drivers to arrest them for eating in their cars.  And in both Britain and Canada, the old Hitler Youth slogan, "Nutrition is not a private matter!" has taken on a new life.  One expert this week argued that obesity must now be treated like Global Warming (http://www.metro.co.uk/news/article.html?in_article_id=99600&in_page_id=34), requiring stern government intervention.

Health experts in Britain and Canada insist that the government has every right to meddle in the private life of its citizens since the state is picking up the tab for their healthcare (never mind that it's not the "state" but the taxpayers themselves).  As Tony Harrison, a British health-care expert, explained to the Toronto Sun, "Rationing is a reality when funding is limited."  So fat people and others can't get surgeries if bureaucrats or doctors don't think they're worthy of surgery.  Now, of course, there's a certain logic here since the taxpayers are picking up the tab and someone has to make the hard choices about priorities.  But it never occurs to these people that maybe the fact that the government is slowly being put in charge of many of the most important and personal issues in peoples' lives is in fact an argument against socialized medicine.  It doesn't occur to them that refusing to unload seriously ill patients (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/news/news.html?in_article_id=515332&in_page_id=1770) from ambulances, sometimes for hours at a time, just so emergency rooms can meet government quotas, is a sign that something is seriously wrong with the way statists handle medicine.

Woodrow Wilson proclaimed that the goal of Progressivism was to have the individual "marry his interests to the State."  "Government" he wrote in book, "The State," "does now whatever experience permits or the times demand."  "No doubt," he wrote elsewhere, taking dead aim at the Declaration of Independence, "a lot of nonsense has been talked about the inalienable rights of the individual, and a great deal that was mere vague sentiment and pleasing speculation has been put forward as fundamental principle."

He was hardly alone.  "[W]e must demand that the individual shall be willing to lose the sense of personal achievement, and shall be content to realize his activity only in connection to the activity of the many," declared the pioneering progressive social activist Jane Addams.

The old story of the frog who doesn't jump out of the pot because the heat is turned up so slowly comes to mind.

On countless fronts, the natural pastures of daily liberty are being paved over by bureaucrats, politicians and other do-gooders.  They aren't merely fixing problems as they come up.  They are laying-down a path to a world where people like them are in charge of our lives, in large ways and small.  And when you realize it, the funny stories we so often hear, aren't so funny anymore.




Agenda for the 2008 Democratic National Convention

 7:00 PM     Opening flag burning
 7:15 PM     Pledge of Allegiance to the U.N. in Spanish
 7:20 PM     Ted Kennedy proposes a toast
 7:25 PM     Nonreligious prayer and worship with Jessie Jackson and Al Sharpton
 7:45 PM     Ceremonial tree hugging
 7:55 PM     Ted Kennedy proposes a toast
 8:00 PM     How I Invented the Internet - Al Gore
 8:15 PM     Gay Wedding - Barney Frank presiding
 8:35 PM     Ted Kennedy proposes a toast
 8:40 PM     Our Troops are War Criminals - John Kerry
 9.00 PM     Saddam Memorial Rally - Cindy Sheehan and Susan Sarandon
11.00 PM     Ted Kennedy proposes a toast
11:05 PM     Collection for the Osama Bin Laden kidney transplant  fund - Barbara Streisand
11:15 PM     Free the Freedom Fighters from Guantanamo Bay - Sean Penn
11:30 PM     Oval Office Affairs - William Jefferson Clinton
11:45 PM     Ted Kennedy proposes a toast
11:50 PM     How George Bush Brought Down the World Trade Towers - Howard Dean & Rosie O'Donnell
12:15 AM     "Truth in Broadcasting Award" - Presented to Dan Rather by Michael Moore
12:25 AM     Ted Kennedy proposes a toast
12:30 AM     Satellite address by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
12:45 AM     Nomination of Hillary Rodham Clinton by Nancy Pelosi
12:50 AM     Speech and toast by Hugo Chavez to the departure of "the great satan", 'W' Bush
12:55 AM     Hillary proposes a toast to our 89 million new Democratic Mexican voters
 1:00 AM     Ted Kennedy proposes a toast to the extinction of the Republican party.
 1:05 AM     Coronation of Hillary Rodham Clinton
 1:30 AM     Ted Kennedy proposes a toast
 1:35 AM     Bill Clinton asks Ted Kennedy to drive Hillary home







"Mr. Obama recalled the opening lines of the Arabic call to prayer, reciting them with a first-rate accent.  In a remark that seemed delightfully uncalculated (it'll give Alabama voters heart attacks), Mr. Obama described the call to prayer as one of the prettiest sounds on Earth at sunset."

--- March 3, 2007 quote from Barak Obama in the New York Times.
(http://select.nytimes.com/2007/03/06/opinion/06kristof.html)

    

Barak Obama's little fascist following also worship a known Communist terrorist and child murderer.

Now there's a real shocker!

Barak Obama's little fascist following are also going around marking YouTube and Liveleak videos they don't agree with as "mature."  This is so people will have a harder time viewing them, especially if you're at work or school.
























Straight from NOAA's website.  You won't hear this on CNN!

Increased Hurricane Losses Due to More People, Wealth Along Coastlines, Not Stronger Storms, New Study Says

February 22, 2008 - From: www.noaanews.noaa.gov

A team of scientists have found that the economic damages from hurricanes have increased in the U.S. over time due to greater population, infrastructure, and wealth on the U.S. coastlines, and not to any spike in the number or intensity of hurricanes.

"We found that although some decades were quieter and less damaging in the U.S. and others had more land-falling hurricanes and more damage, the economic costs of land-falling hurricanes have steadily increased over time," said Chris Landsea, one of the researchers as well as the science and operations officer at NOAA's National Hurricane Center in Miami.  "There is nothing in the U.S. hurricane damage record that indicates global warming has caused a significant increase in destruction along our coasts."

In a newly published paper in Natural Hazards Review, the researchers also found that economic hurricane damage in the U.S. has been doubling every 10 to 15 years.  If more people continue to move to the hurricane-prone coastline, future economic hurricane losses may be far greater than previously thought.

"Unless action is taken to address the growing concentration of people and property in coastal hurricane areas, the damage will increase by a great deal as more people and infrastructure inhabit these coastal locations," said Landsea.

The Natural Hazards Review paper, "Normalized Hurricane Damage in the United States: 1900-2005," was written by Roger A. Pielke Jr. (University of Colorado), Joel Gratz (ICAT Managers, Inc.), Chris Landsea, Douglas Collins (Tillinghast-Towers Perrin), Mark A. Saunders (University College London), and Rade Musulin (Aon Re Australia).

The team used two different approaches, which gave similar results, to estimate the economic damages of historical hurricanes if they were to strike today, building upon the work published originally by Landsea and Pielke in 1998, and by Collins and Lowe in 2001.  Both methods used changes in inflation and wealth at the national level.  The first method utilized population increases at the county coastal level, while the second used changes in housing units at the county coastal level.

The results illustrate the effects of the tremendous pace of growth in vulnerable hurricane areas.  If the 1926 Great Miami Hurricane were to hit today, the study estimated it would cause the largest losses at $140 billion to $157 billion, with Hurricane Katrina second on the list at $81 billion.

The team concludes that potential damage from storms - currently about $10 billion yearly - is growing at a rate that may place severe burdens on exposed communities, and that avoiding huge losses will require a change in the rate of population growth in coastal areas, major improvements in construction standards, or other mitigation actions.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, an agency of the U.S. Commerce Department, is dedicated to enhancing economic security and national safety through the prediction and research of weather and climate-related events and information service delivery for transportation, and by providing environmental stewardship of our nation's coastal and marine resources.  Through the emerging Global Earth Observation System of Systems (GEOSS), NOAA is working with its federal partners, more than 70 countries and the European Commission to develop a global monitoring network that is as integrated as the planet it observes, predicts and protects.



From: http://news.yahoo.com/nphotos/slideshow/photo//080312/481/640c0bf2e4c74c418691b61d419bfc96

Note the "photo" actually shows this Danish cartoonist's decapitation and a dog peeing on him.

The Associated (with terrorists) Press never mentions this.