Wow. Now I understand why people use the N-word and the F-word so often – they get results. That one little blogpost got me more e-mails than any “Collateral Damage” I’ve ever toiled over. So much for subtlety and fine distinctions.
Most of the responses were positive, but among the negatives were many liberals wondering why I picked on them. To be fair, I should have written “some really annoying liberals” instead of just “liberals.” One libertarian reader reminded me that “Nazi” and “fascist” are increasingly the epithets of choice for neocons and minicons (e.g., Sean Hannity). True, but I think those guys do it with a joy engendered by the impression that they’re giving liberals a taste of their own medicine.
And some liberals frankly deserve it. Among those who wrote me, several were hellbent on proving my point. To wit:
- NO, all right wingers are Nazi and fascists. The fact is imutable, as in libertarians are little shits that think all welfare is wrong, except the welfare they get, or that government is bad, except when it works for them, and who differ from their Repuglikan counterparts in that they are “stay-at-home” Nazis, rather then “lets-spread our ugly -mean-nasty-souless-thinking all over the world” Nazis.
No, buddy, such libertarians may be hypocrites, but they aren’t Nazis. I’ll say it real slow for you: you may loooove the welfare state and think anyone who opposes it (as I do) is an abomination, but that doesn’t make those people Nazis any more than torturing kittens makes one a cannibal. And if you’re ever inclined to move your eyeballs side to side, you might want to read up on the Nazis of reality as opposed to those of lefty fantasy. Here’s a start from none other than Barbara Ehrenreich:
- Hitler built up a welfare state, too, including support for single women willing to produce fresh cannon fodder for his state of permanent war.
Finally, a reader asks if maybe I misinterpreted Glenn Reynolds’ response to my follow-up post:
- The way I read his statement [“Jesus Christ that’s pathetic, especially from someone who invokes McCarthyism.”] is he’s accusing you of McCarthyism — which, come to think of it, is a pretty lame-ass stereotypical liberal thing to do.
That’s also how I initially interpreted it, until I asked Reynolds what he meant and he sent me a link to this Justin Raimondo column. In it, the only reference to McCarthy or McCarthyism is the following quotation from Glenn Reynolds:
- Going to a march organized by Communists doesn’t make you a Communist, any more than going to a march organized by Nazis makes you a Nazi. But knowingly going to either one makes you icky. And calling it McCarthyism when people point that out, or point out that the Communists really are Communists, makes you either dishonest, or stupid.
In other words, Reynolds referred me to an instance in which he bashed people for invoking the specter of McCarthyism in self-defense. Thus, I understood that he was accusing me of crying “McCarthyism!” (which I wasn’t), not practicing it (whatever the hell that entails). I had to decide whether Reynolds was being “dishonest, or stupid,” and I chose the latter. He has yet to correct me.