We know Ellis Washington loves to smear Barack Obama as a Nazi. So it’s no surprise that he would smear Obama as a fascist, too.
Washington does exactly that in his Jan. 17 WorldNetDaily column, claiming that “I see Barack Obama mimicking the fascist and socialist policies of President Wilson.”
Huh? Woodrow Wilson was a fascist? Washington has been reading Jonah Goldberg, it appears. We’ll concede the point since the New York Times seems to agree, but it’s a desperate stretch for Washington to claim that Obama is acting like Wilson.
Washington is even less convincing when he references “the fascist and socialist legacy of Wilson, FDR, LBJ, [and] Carter.” More Goldberg influence apparently. At this point, though, the Times diverges from agreeing with Goldberg:
Is something missing here? Goldberg races from Wilson to Roosevelt to Kennedy and on to Bill Clinton with barely a glance at what happened in between. The reason is simple: for Goldberg, fascism is strictly a Democratic disease. This allows him to dispose of the politics of the 1920s in a single sentence. “After the Great War,” he writes, “the country slowly regained its sanity.” What Goldberg may not know — or is afraid to tell us — is that the 1920s were anything but sane. This was the decade, after all, that contained the largest state-sponsored social experiment in the nation’s history — Prohibition — and it lasted through three Republican administrations before Franklin Roosevelt ended it in 1933. The 1920s also saw the explosive spread of the Ku Klux Klan in the Republican Midwest, a virtual halt to legal immigration under the repressive National Origins Act and an angry grass-roots backlash against the teaching of evolution in public schools.
Goldberg briefly enters the Eisenhower 1950s to tease liberals for whining about the supposedly trivial impact of McCarthyism. “A few Hollywood writers who’d supported Stalin and then lied about it lost their jobs,” he says. What’s the big deal? For the Reagan 1980s there is near-silence — hardly a word. I had entertained the slim hope that Goldberg might consider the “fascist” cult of personality surrounding Reagan’s 1984 “Morning in America” hokum (“Prouder, Stronger, Better”). But, alas, such scrutiny is reserved only for the Clinton presidential campaign of 1992, with its “Riefenstahlesque film of a teenage Bill Clinton shaking hands with President Kennedy.” Indeed, even George W. Bush’s spectacularly staged landing on an aircraft carrier in full battle regalia to declare “mission accomplished” in Iraq escapes notice here. It doesn’t take a village for Goldberg to play the fascist card; a single Democrat will do.
Funny that Washington doesn’t mention that, isn’t it? Indeed, Washington dismisses George W. Bush as merely having “utopian tendencies.” Nope, he’s not a fascist at all.
But Goldberg gives Washington cover to smear Obama as a fascist — never mind that Goldberg’s book has been soundly dismantled — and that’s good enough for him.