You’d think someone would write a book.

Not that there’s a word of truth in Jonah Goldberg’s tragically best-selling compendium of scurrilous rumors and accounts of idiosyncratic, marginal cranks like Woodrow Wilson, George Creel, Mitchell Palmer, Herbert Croly, Fr. Coughlin, Huey Long, H.G. Wells, FDR, Eleanor Roosevelt, Walter Lippmann, Hugh Johnson, Harry Hopkins, John Dewey, and a bunch of other people you’ve never heard of.

Well, those crazy ’wingers are at it again, trying to gin up significance out of total coincidences like that, while “the American “Progressive” “left wing” has recently attempted to socialize the medical system, opined that it’d like its opponents to “shut up,” and effectively corporatized most of the auto industry.”:

• Thomas Friedman of the NYT loves him some Chinese fascism (link et seq.).
• A fellow at the Center for American Progress (out of which a lot of positions in the Administration have been staffed) calls Chinese fascism a “shining example.” (Dude, don’t you mean a Shining Path?)
• Sen. Jim Webb (D-Va.) has been sucking up to the Burmese fascists.

Grab the reins, Democrats. Drop this pas d’énnemi à gauche nonsense that’s making you defend Van Jones to the point that you make yourselves look like idiots (TNR pointed out in his defense that 35% of Democrats believed some 9/11 conspiracy bullshit. You’d rather tar your party with that that say, “Yeah, Commies are bad.” Attention sane people: Do you want to be in a party where a third of the people are evil or stupid?). We know you mean well, but your refusal to learn history or examine your premises and actions in its light are leading you in the direction of a particularly nasty cliff. We’ll stipulate you’re not bad people at heart. But you know what the road to Hell is paved with.

Remember, as a wise man once said:

…fascism is a hypertrophied version of some very deep human desires. Its endpoint is not swastikas and concentration camps, but that hardly makes irrelevant the fact that it‘s always—deliberately—taken away freedom and economic opportunity in the name of letting the Smart People, the Great & the Good, run things in a beneficent Third Way, unopposed by the messy multitude of interests that compete in an free, open, democratic system.

Confucius, Œc. Vol.

Don’t ask impertinent questions like that jackass Adept Lu.