My heart’s all a-flutter today with the news that Bill Cope has paid a visit to our dusty corner of the Internet. Here’s what he has to say (I’d hate for Bill Cope to accuse me of burying his comments when they should be prominently displayed!):

This afternoon, with nothing else to do, I Googled myself, just to see what’s cooking on the Bill Cope burner. And how could I not enter a site labeled “I Heart Bill Cope?”

My jubilation was short-lived, of course, as anyone who’s read the article can imagine. It seems Cam Edwards doesn’t heart me anywhere near as much as he let on in the title. In fact, Mr. Edwards has used his blog to dismiss not one but two of my recent columns. Normally, I don’t respond to detractors — especially the on-line sort. If I cared that much what other people think, it’s unlikely I would be writing opinions in the first place. Secondly, of all the people I don’t take seriously, bloggers come very near the top of the list.

Still, Mr. Edwards said some things for which I need to thank him: notably, that I should “stay classy.” You can’t imagine how pleased I am to have my classiness acknowledged, especially coming from a radio talk show host. Yes, Cam, I explored your blog “manifesto,” in which you publicly admit to being a talk show host. Why, I know people who would put talk show hosts just below guys who sell night crawlers out of their kitchens, but I’m not one of them. No sir, I rank radio talk show hosts at least as high as telemarketers and bloggers. And if anyone ever doubted your personal sense of “classy,” I recommend they read the Manifesto feature of your blog — particularly that line about how you and your drinking buddies don’t want to talk about Lindsey Lohan anymore “until she eats something and gets her chest back.” Ah, now that’s class.

And how appropriate that Cam and his buds fashioned their blog after their Friday night boozing sessions. I have always felt that conservatives were at their wittiest when they had a few drinks under their belts — in their own minds if nowhere else.

But on to Cam’s opinions of my opinions. At present, I will address only his comments on the Jonah Goldberg column, as I have plans for a sequel to the “ loony bastard gun nuts” column in the near future, and I want to save my best stuff for that. Surely, as a fellow writer, Cam can understand . . . uh . . . but I forgot. Cam’s only a blogger. My mistake.

(Before we leave the gun nuts matter entirely, though, I should point out that the talk show Cam is host of runs on something called NRA News. Yes, that’s right — it’s a propaganda organ of the National Rifle Association. I thought this might help us with his perspective on the concealed weapons matter, since he neglected to include the word “stooge” in his job description.)

Now, about that Jonah Goldberg book, Liberal Fascism . No I didn’t read it. Nor am I embarrassed to admit that I criticized the dull ideas that were widely disseminated from a book I didn’t read. For Christ’s Sake, it’s not like I was doing a book report on a Dickens’ novel and slipped by on CliffsNotes. If Cam feels he has to read every mediocre word of a mediocre writer to understand the mediocre message therein, let him. It’s not his fault some of us get the picture much quicker than he seems to.

Still, I have to wonder what nuances I missed, as Cam insists. Was it Goldberg’s ridiculous “guilt by trivial coincidence” which implies that, since many Nazis were vegetarians, and many liberals are vegetarians, therefore Liberals must be Nazis?

Or did it have to do with Goldberg’s twist of both logic and history that would have us believe, since some American populist movements were liberal, and since fascism started as a populist movement (as did the KKK, Posse Comitatus and those knot-head militias that were flopping about in the woods not so long ago, pretending to be soldiers), ergo Liberals must be fascists?

Truth be told, if Cam is going to accuse someone of showing little regard for facts or truth, maybe he ought to be a bit more specific as to which facts and truths he has in mind. I mean, if he truly read the book like he says he did, and if I didn’t read it like I said I didn’t, why (both in the original column and here) have I provided more example of what’s actually in the book than Mr. “Reading Comprehension” Edwards? Surely, he remembers more than how “fascinating” he found Goldberg’s opus to be. (Incidentally, in answer to Cam’s claim that “anyone who’s read Liberal Fascism will tell you . . . ,“ go to David Neiwert’s review at www.prospect.org and get yourself a finely-detailed accounting of exactly how absurd Goldberg’s crap is. As I said in the column, the only audience for right-wing bullshit anymore is right-wingers.)

In closing, I must also thank Cam for mentioning my beloved publisher, Boise Weekly , to which I have supplied a column a week for over 13 years. (Over 200 Bill Cope columns in the archives, so if you don’t like what I’m saying here, stay away.) Yes, it’s a small paper. Yet it is a paper. People own it, people read it, people get paid to write for it, and it amounts to a great deal more solid substance than inert Internet gas. Three owners, five publishers and more editors than I can remember have deemed my “semi-literate arguments” worthy of print. 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.

Where to start? Honestly, I’ll let most of the personal stuff (and even the professional attacks) go. It’s obvious Bill Cope has no more listened to the show than he’s read “Liberal Fascism”. Otherwise he would have heard our interviews with Peter Hamm of the Brady Campaign, Russ Ford from Ammunition Coding Systems, Ray Schoenke from AHSA, and the countless gun control supporters that populate our “man on the street” interviews. If propoganda consists of hearing what gun control supporters have to say and then picking their argument apart, I guess I’m guilty. It should be noted though that our nightly polls would indicate we have a small but dedicated following among some gun control supporters.

Also, if I don’t respond to every single criticism from Bill Cope, please don’t assume that I’m conceding the point. Frankly, I’m not bored enough right now to Google my own name, and I’m writing this in bits and pieces while I’m working on other things. I’d like to post this sometime this afternoon though, so I may cut short a few arguments for the sake of brevity.

As for picking on the fact that I posted this on a blog… Bill Cope has cut me to the quick. It’s true we don’t deliver 35,000 free copies of this blog on a weekly basis to the neighborhood bars and restaurants in the greater Boise area. We exist only on the Internet, a place where amateurs like a public relations exectutive, an award winning journalist and author, and a nationally broadcast talk show host can sit in their jammies and spew their venom between hours of “World of Warcraft”.

And yes, we do have a bar theme for the blog. It comes from those halcyon Friday nights in 2004 when the three of us would gather around a table to share food and drink and talk for hours. It’s called friendship, Bill. It’s not just a conservative thing. You might want to try it sometime.

A quick note about Bill’s defense of his review of Liberal Fascism, which he neglected to read. Bill says:

If Cam feels he has to read every mediocre word of a mediocre writer to understand the mediocre message therein, let him. It’s not his fault some of us get the picture much quicker than he seems to.

Well, I read every word of not one, but two of your columns. What does that say about me? As for you getting the picture much quicker… you got the picture without reading a word. You’re trying to tell me you the Literary Kreskin? Quick tell me the plot of the next J.K. Rowling novel… we’ll make a fortune!

Bill also says:

Truth be told, if Cam is going to accuse someone of showing little regard for facts or truth, maybe he ought to be a bit more specific as to which facts and truths he has in mind. I mean, if he truly read the book like he says he did, and if I didn’t read it like I said I didn’t, why (both in the original column and here) have I provided more example of what’s actually in the book than Mr. “Reading Comprehension” Edwards? Surely, he remembers more than how “fascinating” he found Goldberg’s opus to be. (Incidentally, in answer to Cam’s claim that “anyone who’s read Liberal Fascism will tell you . . . ,“ go to David Neiwert’s review at www.prospect.org and get yourself a finely-detailed accounting of exactly how absurd Goldberg’s crap is. As I said in the column, the only audience for right-wing bullshit anymore is right-wingers.)

I finally stopped walking around with my copy a couple of weeks ago (it’s currently in the back seat of my car) and didn’t feel like walking down to get it, to be honest. It’s a serious book. I don’t know that there a a great many little anecdotes that stick out, because it’s distinctly not saying that vegetarianism=fascism. It’s the sum of the whole. And I say that because I’ve read the book.

But I think the real issue here is that Bill is reacting this way because he simply can’t believe he could be a fascist, liberal or otherwise. Fascists are mean, and Bill isn’t mean (unless it’s to people who deserve it, like people who stand in the way of “progress”). But no one’s saying you’re mean, Bill Cope. We’re saying you’re a nice fascist.

Take Bill’s issue with allowing bars and restaurant owners to decide for themselves whether or not to let Right to Carry holders come into their establishments. Most of us would agree the State has a compelling public interest to prohibit drinking while carrying a firearm. But does the State’s interest really extend to prohibiting people with a Right to Carry license from even entering the establishment? There are now 40 states with shall-issue RTC, and how often do we hear of drunken RTC holders shooting up a bar or restaurant? Why? Because RTC are responsible citizens, and they obey the law (there have been plenty of studies showing RTC holders are arrested and convicted at far lower rates than the general population).

If the state’s interest extends to banning a practice that causes an infintismal amount of people harm, then what’s to stop the State from simply prohibiting driving after consuming one drink? A blood alcohol level of .01 or .02 would certainly be okay. Heck, you can’t tell me that drunk drivers kill more people each year than drunken RTC holders. Why not simply ban drinking in public? Or require that bars get rid of their parking lots?

Why not ban dancing? New York City has. Dancing makes you hot and thirsty, which makes you consume more alcohol, which results in higher drinking and driving rates.

Where does the ever loving arms of the State ever end? Where is there a place for personal responsibility in the world that Bill wants? What individual freedom do we have? Where is right to exercise our own judgement?

Fascism is militaristic, and operates in a heightened sense of emergency. For every “War on Terror” we’ve got a “gun crisis” or a “global warming emergency” or a “war on poverty”. Bill, look at what the “war on obesity” has brought us? We’ve got people suing restaurants because they ate too much fatty food for too long and got fat. What’s the answer? To ban all bad food? And just as the progessives say the “War on Terror” can never truly be over, the same is true for the liberal fascist wars.

You’re a liberal fascist Bill. It doesn’t make you a bad person. But it does mean you should read the book.