Sunday February 15, 2009
F-BOMB (UPDATED). I see Victor Davis Hanson Michael Ledeen* has, in short and long forms, called the Obama Administration fascist. He takes off from Newsweek's declaration that Obama is the latest in a line of enablers bringing the country toward French-style socialism, which is just a mildly provocative observation based on apparent facts. Hanson's Ledeen's stuff, on the other hand, is based on Jonah Goldberg's hysterical revisionism, in which any government activism beyond mustering troops and delivering the mail (maybe) can be evidence of fascism, if the author finds it politically expedient to say so.
(*Update: In first writing this post I confused Ledeen with Victor Davis Hanson, an understandable mistake, as they both employ the same woe-unto-you-scribes-and-pharisees schtick that adds pomp, or at least pomposity, to Pajamas Media and National Review. I followed on with comparisons to Hanson's previous writings on the Wall Street bailouts, which don't apply to Ledeen, so I've removed them and will save them for a rainy day. Ledeen, a War on Terror obsessive, doesn't write much about the economy, so we assume his fascist comparison comes fresh from the crazy lab.)
The usual suspects are praising Hanson's Ledeen's courage. Ed Driscoll offers an interesting twist, claiming that Newsweek was afraid to admit that Obama is a fascist, and praising Hanson Ledeen for seeing through their cowardice.
It'll be interesting to see how many of them will take the bait. Obama's been President for less than a month. If they're already calling him a fascist, what's left for them? Maybe by spring they'll be comparing him to Satan, and after that they'll be making up fables about unimaginable evils in alternate universes to accommodate the ever-escalating scale of their accusations: e.g., Once upon a time in the Deruvian galaxy, there was an evil tyrant named Obamanous... Maybe this will lead to the conservative aesthetic renaissance that we have been promised for so many years. It's an ill wind that blows no one some good!