Life isn’t much fun when you have 200+ unread articles to get through every day in your RSS reader. In light of this rather burdensome (albeit self-imposed) condition, I’ve decided to re-evaluate my news-gathering activities. I’ve dropped some RSS feeds that were not really that informative and have added some others (most notably the American Spectator Blog). Additionally, I’ve moved off of eventbox (which I did like) back to NetNewsWire (which now has google reader integration AND an iphone app!).
During this transition, I went back and read through some old posts from Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism blog (which he is no longer maintaining, to my chagrin), one of which I particularly enjoyed. If I were this kid’s father, I would be pretty proud!
From a reader:
Hi—
A couple months ago I took my teenager, a freshman in high school, to hear your lecture to the Leadership Program of the Rockies at the Broadmoor Hotel. I thought at the time your talk made a great impression on him, and now I know it did. He came home from school the other day chortling about his “take-down” of what he described as “the liberal at the lunch table.”
Seems someone alleged Obama has socialist tendencies…The liberal student retorted, “At least he’s not a fascist, like Bush!”
My son James, who has been taught always to ask for examples when arguing with someone’s opinion, asked what, exactly were Bush’s fascist policies? Liberal student couldn’t come up with any, but sputtered that Fox News was full of lies (isn’t it amazing that even teenagers resort to this non sequitur when challenged?), so James asked for examples of Fox’s dishonesty. Here I gather the sputtering and stammering became more pronounced.
But the best part was when my son said, “And then I had to go into the whole thing since they didn’t understand socialism and fascism.”
What whole thing, I asked.
“You know, the whole thing we heard in that guy’s [that’s you] speech. About Mussolini, and how he was trying to nationalize things, and that nationalizing something means socializing it, and the Nazis were actually the National Socialist party and that Obama is taking over the banks and car industry and healthcare and that is anti-capitalist and more like fascism than anything they could tell me Bush did.”
Not your most eloquent fan, perhaps, but a pretty serious application of your arguments for a 15-year-old!