STILL MORE LEDEEN OMG FASCISM ETC. Michael Ledeen has published a second installment of his claim that the bailouts and stimulus mean "We Are All Fascists Now." First, a recap from part one:

What is happening now... is an expansion of the state's role, an increase in public/private joint ventures and partnerships, and much more state regulation of business. Yes, it's very 'European,' and some of the Europeans even call it 'social democracy,' but it isn't. It's fascism...

When Roosevelt was elected in 1932, in fact, Mussolini personally reviewed his book, Looking Forward, and the Duce’s bottom line was, “this guy is one of us.”

And then he wrote:

It is no accident that the campaign to drive religion out of American public life began in the 1940s, when the government was consolidating its unprecedented expansion during the Depression and the Second World War...

There's a lot of yap in there about Tocqueville, but we can summarize that FDR => smoking bans => stimulus => Hitler. There, I saved you ten or fifteen minutes.

The Wolverines howl in comments, and Ledeen feels obliged to step in:

I quite explicitly said that America is not on the road to fascism; it’s just that the economic porkulus that just passed is not, as Newsweek said, a socialist bill, but a fascist one.

Fascist economics, not politics. Not all tyrants are fascists, you know.

This fine distinction does not stop the baying, nor, I think, was it meant to -- it's just a little plausible deniability to keep him from being officially demoted to the lunatic fringe.

The blue-seaters are not dissuaded. Another brother cries, "We may be forced into a sort of Confederacy of opposition against this tyranny between now and a point of no return to save America," and Riehl World View says that failing the reelection of the Republicans, "nothing but an eventual collapse and near re-invention of American government offers conservatives much hope."

The Age of Obama seems to encourage this Jonah Goldberg schtick of imputing fascism right up front, then claiming as the chairs are being thrown that you really meant something else. It would be disturbing if the chairs were not virtual. While it's possible that some yokels might take it up a notch, at present it seems that for possibly the first time in his life Chris Muir may be onto something: the nerdoisie would rather let their avatars fight the New Revolution. Though, as I've pointed out, political blog posts share some resemblance with the Journals-Affiche, if their present-day authors had to go out in the night and paste them to walls, few would ever be seen.

But we may reexamine this if it comes to breadlines. Ledeen, Goldberg et alia have no stomach to fight the oncoming depression, but they are keenly interested in winning the spin on it once it's here.