Richard Spencer

August 22, 2009

When Barney Frank is in distress, Clark Stooksbury’s sword doth leap from its scabbard!

Or something like that. At any rate, it wasn?t particularly surprising to read of Stooksbury?s great concern over Frank’s mistreatment at the hands of a female healthcare protestor at a Massachusetts town hall meeting (er, excuse me, Stooksbury won’t “dignify” these assemblies with the “town hall” moniker, whatever that could possibly mean…)

While reading one of his favorite Mother Jones bloggers, Stooksbury came across footage of Frank evoking his ?ethnic heritage? and yelling at a constituent, who held up one of those Obama = Hitler signs, that she spoke only “vile contemptible nonsense” and that he wasn?t going to listen to another word. Here, here, says Stooksbury, Barney has brought ?substantive? argumentation back to the public debate!     

I generally don’t go in for the whole “Liberal Fascism” thesis, but there’s no question that it contains a kernel of truth. For people like Frank, Stooksbury, and other MoJo subscribers, “Nazism” is just another word for anti-Semitism and intolerance?vile, contemptible nonsense that should never be associated with an American President. (In this regard, I like how Barney fretted over the ?defacing? of the Obama icon with a Hitler mustache.) But the fact is, it wasn’t called national socialism for nothing, as Hitler & Co. were into massive public works projects, a “4 Year Plan” for industry, the banning of public smoking, euthanasia, and, yes, many aspects of socialized medicine. I think Ernst Notle is mostly correct when he contended that Nazism was a “right-wing imitation of Bolshevism.?

Put simply, that woman in Massachusetts was getting at something with her image. And it?s rather ridiculous for someone like Stooksbury, who’s uninterested or incapable of making a ?substantive? contribution to the healthcare debate, to annoyingly act like he?s some enlightened gatekeeper who can tell everyone what they can and cannot say.