The hormonal chewing gum was a Firesign Theater thing… clip. It was in Nick Danger in The Case of The Missing Yolk.

The hormonal chewing gum was in BNW. One of the mentions of it is near the end of the book, when the crowds of people show up at The Savage’s country hiding place and start pelting him with things such as “pea-nuts, packets of sex-hormone chewing-gum, pan-glandular petits beurres.” Yes, of course I had to look up the exact words, though I remembered, god knows why, that that was one of the objects thrown in that scene. (Just as an aside, Huxley was a bit hyphen-happy there, wasn’t he?)

So, how ’bout that? A nugget of corn, er, truth in this particular Doughy BM. Chalk it up to the law of averages…or a smidgen of fiber (though certainly not of the moral kind) in his diet…or something.

And nothing happens. In fact, anyone daring to say anything similar to that is instantly written off as a cynical, pretentious elitist fuck. Basically for not believing in that Bush is an honest guy who wants the best for his country and the world. Or for not believing that Hillary, since she’s worked for a charity and has compassion, somewhere, isn’t a competent leader who will solve all of America’s problems (whatever they may be perceived to be).

Or try to say you don’t doubt Bush, you just doubt his competence in translating his messiah- complex into anything but disaster – and people go “oh yeah, we’ll see about that in fifty years time, won’t we!. And you can’t prejudge the future, so therefore you have to admit a miracle can happen! HAHA, take that, you intellectual bastard!”. Or they go, “well, we actually can’t /prove/ that Bush can’t make water flow uphill just once”. And then some years later. “Well, we can’t prove that water didn’t, in a matter of speaking, eventually flow upwards – so we can’t really say he’s a real fraud!”.

But then Jonah – an insane, pampered, rightwing political whore of a hedonist – draws the same conclusion about the political parties (…only with utterly false reasoning which, in the majority of countries on the planet, any six- year old will be able to point out… by explaining Jonah shat his pants and tries to explain it away) from the point of view of the US political elite (meaning, he’s one of the guys who goes over their writing before publication to remove every instance of “He” and “We”, where he means to write “I”, and then just mixes it up so it’s unreadable).

And what happens? He gets more publicity than anyone. And suddenly everyone is against stupid poltical writing by pompous elites with oral diarrhoea. I mean, any minute now, it’s going to be popular to revere the constitution again, isn’t it.

Well I don’t believe you, do I. I bet you’re just biding your time in order to find the right excuse to go back sucking on Hillary’s teat, and go – “well, we really do just want a more /competent/ piece of elitist shit to run our lives, all right. Honestly, we enjoy voting for bullshit every four years, and we just don’t think we can make a damn difference – and I just don’t care about it either as long as a big- mac costs a dollar, and I can believe in getting seriously rich one day! And so what if a bunch of countries get invaded to please our egos, or to make it seem like our lifestyle is the best in the world? What do I care! It’s democracy! It’s the way of the world, innit (now where’s that remote..)”.

which makes him an ideal source for a quote-mining fraud like Goldberg. dig around enough, you’re bound to find something he said to support your thesis – just ignore the rest.

He wields words like a scalpel, and one day he will learn which end of a scalpel is the end you hold onto.

Smut, I liked that line so much I wanted to see it again.

The common thread for Jonah is that these three men all talk about how the country is divided and needs to be unified.

You know, “One nation, under God” sort of stuff…”E Pluribus Unum”…

Oh damn, the Founders were fascists!

True, he did get upset that 8,000 Jews were deported to Germany and exterminated, but the King expelled Mussolini from his post mostly because of those laws and that statement it made.

Since he explains on Page 13 of Teh Book that “The Italian fascists were protectors of the Jews”, the probable answer is Sadly,No.

http://calitreview.com/2008/01/08/liberal-fascism-jonah-goldberg-explains/

Here’s where he explains why it’s a good idea not to coddle the down-on-their-luck:

The nastiest forms of fascism seem to arise when people are angry and frightened, such as the Weimar Republic. Isn’t fascism a more likely possibility in rust belt America where people are without health care and unable to support their families, than say a socialist European country?

“I think you make a fine point. Politically, fascism is indeed a form of populism. It was in Italy and it was in Germany. Huey Long and Father Coughlin were both populists and came fairly close to creating an American brand of fascism (particularly Coughlin). The sort of mass-movement we usually associate with classical fascism usually reaches out to “forgotten men” who feel left-out or run-over by rapid economic and social trends. Richard Hofstadter painted a picture of progressivism as quasi-fascistic and attributed it to “status anxiety” of the middle class. I think we are experiencing a frighteningly populist moment in American politics. The worst practitioner is John Edwards. His “two Americas” rhetoric strikes deeply fascistic chords. Mike Huckabee is another guy who plays this us-versus-them card deftly. Lou Dobbs is another.”

If we just don’t talk about yucky things like income inequality or lack of health care, it won’t occur to people to join the bad Lib-Fascers.

Yes, George W. Bush has stated he’d prefer to be a dictator at least three times, according to BuzzFlash.com:

* * *

“You don’t get everything you want. A dictatorship would be a lot easier.” Describing what it’s like to be governor of Texas.
(Governing Magazine 7/98)

– From Paul Begala’s “Is Our Children Learning?”

“I told all four that there are going to be some times where we don’t agree with each other, but that’s OK. If this were a dictatorship, it would be a heck of a lot easier, just so long as I’m the dictator,” Bush joked.

– CNN.com, December 18, 2000

“A dictatorship would be a heck of a lot easier, there’s no question about it, ” [Bush] said.

– Business Week, July 30, 2001

“Marie-Anne Matard-Bonucci has upheld, to the contrary, the idea that anti-Semitism founded its roots in the Fascist movement itself: with the establishment of the Fascist state and Mussolini’s anthropological project of creating a “new (Italian) man,” the needs arose of creating the figure of the “anti-Italian,” symbolized by the Jewish people. “The persecution of the Italian Jews was one of the inner components of the totalitarian logic,” thus wrote Matard-Bonucci “

Sound familiar, Fudgie?

Y’know, if he really had this idea in his head when he set out to scribble goop on 500 pages write his tome, he might have gotten a little insight into convergence theory, the thought that the further out to the extremes you go, the more circular political philosophy becomes (right approaches left, left approaches right) and might actually have made a decent bo– Oh, who the fuck am I kidding? It’s Pantload, fercrissakes!

All we’re doing is artificially inflating his ego for him. The best thing to happen to his world view is to see how quickly his book dies on the vine after SuperDuper Tuesday…

(…)is that his pals are the ones who would love a biologically enforced hierarchy with preserves for the irredeemable filthydirtyhippies.

Mm. But you know, what’s maddening is that he’s making a – calm down – an actual sound assessment once in a while. I mean, except he’s basing it off something completely ridiculous. Listen (from the salon- interview):

Rather I think it[fascism] is a religious impulse that resides in all of us — left, right, black, white, tall, short — to seek unity in all things, to believe that we need to all work together to go past any of our disagreements and that the state needs to be, almost simply as a pragmatic matter, the pace-setter, the enforcer of this cult of unity. That is what I believe fascism is.

And, well, that may sound like exceptionally childish equivocation.. like some hopeless student might try to pass off on a mid- term paper as intelligent speech, to cover up for the fact that he played ww2 war- games all week instead of reading about fascism. Or it may sound like the most insane explanation yet on how any form of political organisation with an agenda is fascism.

But what he actually is doing is expressing, like he always does, a genuine reflection of the narrative that describes what’s going on in his reality.

Where leaders always must lead by inherent bestness. Where it doesn’t matter what they say, but how audacious they say it. And where political creed is at once something the masses seem to care about for some reason – but which also is a personal test of faith for the good leaders. I.e., their “ideology” is decided to be good by what sort of success and conviction they have as leaders, depending on what sort of tortured framework they’re currently wrestling with – such as “continuity and order”, or “responsibility&progress”.

And that’s completely insane, but I’ve been having many run- ins with these fucks lately, and I can tell you for a fact that these people exist on every side of the american political spectrum. And they think exactly like what Goldberg describes, and they’re completely serious.

And obviously Goldberg knows this – he probably knows the whole lot of these assholes by their first names – and in his world, fascism is some sort of curiously fuzzy ideology that they somehow happen to bash their opponents with, because the small people associate it with bad things. But which they can’t define well, because that’s just something you don’t do – you associate things with fascism, but fascism is not to be defined.

But instead of just stopping there and whacking the liberal hordes, he inexpertly seeks some sort of intellectual and (I’m sure in his head) honest explanation for a phenomenon he “sees” in the (his) world, such as how fascism actually is a mind- set, or a philosophy tied to a particular type of state- oriented solution – that’s difficult to place politically in one camp or the other. And I don’t know where he’s read that, but there’s an element of truth to that: the far right and the far left can obviously shake hands when it comes to fascism. But the interesting part is how he somehow figures out that it’s not just abusing the powers of a state to enforce a solution that’s the problem. No, it’s using that power in the direction the unwise masses are pulling that’s the crisis. It’s making the project run amok with no fundamental guidance and safe constraints that is “bad”. And his attempt to justify his own views in that way, that describes something essential about the political elite in the US at the moment. And here Jonah is spilling the beans – on how it intellectually must be done in order to somehow keep the unargued narratives going.

And you know.. it’s unfortunate that Jonah’s attempt to make everyone laugh themselves silly detracts from what he’s explaining about his reasoning here. Because he really has – all right, easy – something important to tell us.

OK, dammit, I would pay twice as much for THAT book, preferably written by HTML and Glenn Greenwald, then the cover price of Pantload’s POS.

By the way, if you liked “Jonah” you should see Lukas Moodyson’s Tillsammans, which is sort of a Swedish take on some of the same questions.

If Orwell were alive today that line would read “Picture a doughy lœdedhösen, sitting on a human face, forever.”