Comments on: I Heart Bill Cope

By: fun stuff to do in idaho

fun stuff to do in idaho — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 13:12:44 +0000

fun stuff to do in idaho…

You must put a lot of work into blogging this much!…

By: Jon

Jon — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 04:52:11 +0000

And I’m confident — relatively — that if Junior works hard, learns to write without depending on links to supply 80-percent of his material, practices thinking with his own brain rather than Wayne LaPierre’s, and comes up with a more sophisticated brand of snottiness than “lobotomized tree frog,” he may yet write well enough to move out of the blog barrios and find a little paper in his own neighborhood that would publish him.

Interesting point coming from a guy who wrote a review based on OTHER writers’ reviews.

By: ThomThumb

ThomThumb — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 23:14:04 +0000

Thom, buddy
you’re obviously another angry liberal who hasn’t bothered to read the book, then tries to insult the intelligence of people who have. You end up only insulting your own intelligence, and with friends like you, your intelligence doesn’t need any more enemies. What, precisely, did you mean when you said blubblubblubblubblub? I found that a devastating riposte indeed.

“Bone-crushingly dumb,” indeed.

By: megapotamus

megapotamus — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 19:44:41 +0000

No need to read Cope, of course. Beside being a perfectly predictable Leftwing pants-peer (ANYone cans see THAT) inhabiting a media space about as relevant as the MahiMahi Gazette he begins his pedantic yet proudly ignorant opus with a gutbusting anecdote of self-importance; just Googled up yerself on a sunny afternoon, didye? Hilarious! Do that much, do we? Why does it seem so likely that this is the first hit you ever got outside your own domain? But this empty garment bag presumes that his retrograde and historically demolished moronicisms carry more weight than Edwards or Goldberg obviously from the mere granduer of his contempt for his fellow citizens that have the temerity to sit to the Right of Geraldine Ferarro. Cope, learn to cope.

By: Andrew

Andrew — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 15:34:15 +0000

“CB said:

blubblubblubblubblub

and concludes that I embarrassed myself when I pointed out that Jonah Goldberg did in fact assign guilt by trivial coincidence.

CB.”

Again with the refusal to actually read. Do I see a pattern developing?

CB’s point, which is Goldberg’s, which you would know if you read the book, is that modern liberalism and fascism both share (some) goals and ideals, which is unsurprising, as each descend from late 19th-century progressive socialism. There is nothing particularly controversial about this claim, unless you’re a liberal who wants to keep his favorite rhetorical hand-grenade of calling right-wingers fascists.

Is a great big Certified Super-Genius like Tom incapable of grasping such a point? Or does he simply not have the intellectual honesty to address it?

The jury is out.

Incidentally, I like this place.

By: JB

JB — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 20:37:04 +0000

When the day comes, don’t even bother wasting ammo on people like Bill Cope. That is what the rifle butt is for.

By: Ben N

Ben N — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 03:39:16 +0000

It used be, when a paper had to be written that any direct quote or paraphrase included in the paper would be cited with the page number and from what book the quote was from. This was a courtesy to both the author of the material being cited and to the paper’s audience, so that they would not have to waste time in order to find the context from which the paper’s author took a particular quote. This practice could be very useful here in this particular situation in order to clarify what Mr. Goldberg was trying to convey in his book.

There are plenty of text in the book that can be used out of context to lure the reader into beliving that the argument Mr. Goldberg is for how evil liberals are. However, Liberal Fascism, not being a great work of classical fiction to be interpreted many different ways in order to find meaning and enjoyment, is rather a single argument thesis, in which Mr. Goldberg supplies ample evidence to back the book’s premise. With that, we don’t have to guess what he has concluded; he’s telling us.

“It’s cruel to call someone a Nazi because it unfairly suggests sympathy with the Holocaust. But it is no less inaccurate to assume that fascism was simply the ideology of Jewish genocide. If you need a label for that, call it Hitlerism, for Hitler would not be Hitler without genocidal racism. And while Hitler was a Fascist, fascism need not be synonymous with Hitlerism” (bottom of p. 16 to top of p. 17).

Essentially, Mr. Goldberg is concluding that liberalism and Fascism share a few common ideals such as the ideal of a state-run health care system. Mr. Goldberg also concludes that wanting such a thing as a proposed solution to health-care issues does not make a person evil or related to genocidal Hitlerism, but be aware that state-run things are rooted in a Fascist philosophy. In any case, it’s difficult to prove Mr. Goldberg’s argument in this post, seeing as it took him 405 pages to prove it himself. Leaving us with the original point by Cam Edwards: that you have to read the book to review it!

By: Tom G

Tom G — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 23:15:45 +0000

Where, precisely, in his book does Goldberg make reference to “the pro-gay stance of the Nazis”? I don’t recall that he made any such statement. I believe he did point out (correctly) that in the early years of the movement, Hitler was quite tolerant of the homosexuality of his followers, e.g. the SA leader Ernst Röhm. I find nothing particularly “bone-crushingly dumb” in citing a well-known historical fact. Perhaps Thom could cite the page on which Goldberg supposedly makes the statement that the Nazis were “pro-gay.”

As a general observation on Liberal Fascism, I would say that Goldberg makes a good case that contemporary progressivism and historical totalitarianism shares some ideological DNA. Whether this justifies the phrase “liberal fascism” is certainly debatable. But it does’t appear to me that progressives are much interested in debate. Ad hominem rants, infantile name-calling—that seems to be their preference. And Mr. Cope is the perfect poster boy for the arrested adolescents of the Left.

By: Bryan Frymire

Bryan Frymire — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 23:14:29 +0000

Pretty danged close, I’d say.

By: inmypajamas

inmypajamas — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 23:07:08 +0000

Thom - did you actually read the book or are you just quoting lefty blogs? The book is a serious treatment of the history of modern progressivism and its fascist/socialist roots. Engage others in the actual arguments of the book and your take on them. That’s much more interesting than parroting the left’s received wisdom about the book.

Just why is the left so terrified of reading this book? They act like it’s some sort of scary rightwing kryptonite.