Back in 2007, Noemie Emery of the Weekly Standard rounded-up a collection of items from the left dubbing then-President Bush’s administration as “fascist;” it was a continuation of the Bush=Hitler rhetoric that we heard throughout the naughts. The culmination of which was arguably former Al Gore advisor Naomi Wolf’s mind-blowing screed at the HuffPost in September of 2008 (link safe; goes to Newsbusters) in which she dreaded the coming “Palin-Rove police state” with its inevitable “mafia tactics” and of course, its riot police decked out in “the black S&M gear of the Rovian fantasy life.”
But along the way, Andrew Sullivan of the Atlantic, before becoming the world’s most dogged uterus investigator took a slightly different tack, and dubbed Bush “The Weimar President” in 2007. As I wrote back then:
My current favorite is Andrew Sullivan’s newest riff, on “The Weimar President“. I can only guess that Andrew believes that President Bush is an elderly figurehead leading a weakened but relatively benign quasi-socialist administration suffering the ravages of hyper-inflation and that Hillary, Obama or whoever his successor is, is the next Hitler, about to install a terribly malevolent war machine and concurrent massive welfare state?
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Doug Ross explores the logical extension of Sullivan’s meme here; the Anchoress writes that somewhere offstage, the late Michael Kelly must be wondering what happened to the magazine he so successfully edited.
And Jonah Goldberg spotlights his own role in aiding conservatives’ pushback against a week of hateful memes and journalistic wilding from the left:
Finally, about the relevance of Liberal Fascism. I don’t think any of what I have to say about Nazism or Communism has any bearing on any of this, for the simple reason that I don’t think either Mein Kampf or the Communist Manifesto played any significant role in Loughner’s actions (and some of those who do might explain why they want to stifle political speech but not books). But here is the relevance. The chief point of the book is to question the locked-in left’s locked-in narrative about America, conservatism and of course fascism. From the casting of Father Coughlin as a right-winger to the claims that Barry Goldwater was a fascist and the denial that Lee Harvey Oswald was a leftist, there is a fraudulent story of America told by the Left and the liberal establishment every day (don’t believe me? Watch Chris Matthews for five minutes). What we saw for the first 72 hours after this shooting, was a desperate, malicious and ignorant attempt to cram this horrible tragedy into that deceitful narrative. But conservatives opposed that effort. If my book helped even slightly in the resistance, I’m delighted.
And as the Disrupt the Narrative blog notes:
After listening to the incessant libel being hurled at Rush, Levin, Fox News and conservatives in general by the reckless liberal media buffoons, I was wondering why people like Rush weren’t threatening to take people like Chrissie Matthews to court.
Last night, Mark Levin promised to do just that:
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Naomi Wolf
Love you though I do, I cringe everytime you write “naught” instead of “ought” or “aught” to refer to the zero in cardinal number, including year, abbreviations. Where did you get the “naught”? In colloquial American English, it is “ought” (or “aught”) first last and always! Would you refer to it as a “thirty-naught-six”?
Boyd,
Really? It seems to be pretty commonly used phrase.
“Weimar Presidency”???? Well, I guess a professional journolist (sic) can’t let a little thing like history get in the way of a completely silly contrived narrative.
Boyd: Watch some English soccer. Zero, nil, naught, they all mean the same thing. Naught is not short for naughty, although by bringing it up you’ve been naughty…