FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

Sort of the theme song here at alicublog.

•   It's like Jonah Goldberg is actually trying to live down to the role in intellectual history I've assigned him.

Huckabee’s Hitler Comparison That Wasn’t

Huckabee, you'll recall, said that by negotiating a treaty with Iran Obama "will take the Israelis and march them to the door of the oven." OK, the generously-inclined might say, maybe this is just a bagatelle for Goldberg, like Mencken's In Defense of Women. (Sorry, I just suffered an eternity in Hell for comparing Goldberg to Mencken.) But Goldberg's method is, unlike the Master's, charmless and bucket-footed. He tries to warm up the crowd by sneering at the silly liberals who would take offense at such an innocent statement ("Clinton even said she was 'really offended personally,' as if her feelings are what really matters"). Then he pulls out the big gun (or, in the more appropriate Virgil Starkwell usage, gub):

Now, I’ve never been a big fan of Huckabee’s style of politics — or policy. But a remotely fair reading of the statement strongly suggests that Huckabee was comparing Obama to Neville Chamberlain or some other member of the “Hitler is a man we can do business with” school. That’s the point of calling Obama “naive” for trusting the Iranians — the Hitler in Huckabee’s analogy.

We all remember the newsreel footage of Chamberlain marching Jews -- well, more like escorting them, he was a polite fellow -- to the ovens at Dachau, and saying, "in you go, there's a good chap."

We can parse more deeply if we must.

Oh Jesus.

Hitler didn’t march Jews to the doors of the ovens, but into them. The Iranians are the ones with sinister intentions in Huckabee’s description, not Obama, who, again, is described as naive and feckless, not sinister and evil.

Revise the imagery: Chamberlain escorting the Ashkenazim to Berchtesgaden, and Hitler going, "Thanks, Neville!" and Chamberlain going "not at all," and shuffling away saying "remarkable fellow that Hitler."

Huckabee probably shouldn’t have used the word “march” because it muddies his point.

"March" was actually very much to Huckabee's point, which is the one Goldberg is strenuously missing.

“Delivered to” or “abandoned at” would have worked better.

This is a man too lazy to even access an online thesaurus.

I think, as a general rule, one should pretty much always avoid talking about Jews and ovens unless discussing the actual Holocaust. And one could argue that Huckabee, who insists he never compared Obama to Hitler, was cynically hoping to be misconstrued in order to get some media attention — which he got.

And this is where ten years of farting-Goldberg analogies pay off: This really is the equivalent of Goldberg, exhausted from several paragraphs of holding it in, finally unloading the inevitable and, while hoping  the sofa cushions will filter the evidence, trying the distract us with even worse reasoning:

But on the merits, Huckabee isn’t saying anything that lots of serious people haven’t said, albeit more eloquently. In countless speeches, Bibi Netanyahu...

We can stop there, as it's a sad scene and the room is filling up with stank, but connoisseurs will be pleased to learn that at the running-out-of-the-room-crying stage Goldberg actually says this:

George W. Bush was routinely compared to Hitler with a fraction of the outcry Huckabee has received.

Like the guy waiting at the barroom door says, it's always 9/11 somewhere.

•   Can there be any hed more glibertarian than this:

The Gay Marriage Case Against the Minimum Wage

From A. Barton Hinkle's copy:

True, at present all of this seems thoroughly academic. The likelihood that the U.S. will abandon minimum-wage laws anytime soon sounds almost preposterous. Then again, once upon a time so did the idea of gay marriage.

Deep in my heart/ I do believe/ You will work for scraps, someday. Yea, even unto the Middle Ages.

•   Speaking of which, David Weigel:

Rand Paul's politics are a constant source of debate on the libertarian right and left. Some think he's lurched too far toward military interventionism. Some think he's too close to the Republican establishment. but Paul's abortion views are less nettlesome than liberal observers of libertarianism seem to think. In April, ThinkProgress's Judd Legum wrote confidently that Paul was "not a libertarian"; his first evidence was that the senator "vehemently opposes abortion rights." This week, Little Green Footballs's Charles Johnson wrote that "Rand Paul likes to present himself as a civil libertarian, but his stance on reproductive rights is straight from the darkest, most regressive part of the Republican Party’s war on women."

The evidence for Paul's heresy is his sponsorship of legislation to define life as beginning at conception -- something liberals see as antithetical to "choice." Doctrinal libertarians don't necessarily agree.

I'll say. I give Weigel credit for  1.) getting Megan McArdle to embarrass herself more than usual, and 2.) patiently explaining to the punters what those of us who've been paying attention have known for years and years: Forced childbirth is not an issue that interests libertarians, because to them there is no freedom even remotely as important as the freedom of capital and of those who possess most of it to do whatever they want -- and those guys tend not to be child-bearing. They only tell the rubes that The Movement will protect them from revenooers* and court orders from their bitch ex-wives to keep it from looking too obvious. (*Damn it, now I got this song stuck in my head).