Republicans have been struggling to reconcile crazed right-winger James von Brunn's assault on the Holocaust Museum with their Manichean worldview in which people on the right represent everything that is decent and good about the world, and liberals represent only the purest of evil. Jonah Goldberg, who has made something of a career out of trying to convince people that discredited right wing movements are actually products of the left, takes a stab at doing the same with Von Brunn. Dave Weigel reports:
“From what I can tell,” explained Jonah Goldberg, the author of the 2008 bestseller “Liberal Fascism” and a writer for National Review, “his hatreds echoed the kind of stuff we hear from the Kos crowd, Chris Matthews, Andrew Sullivan et al.” Goldberg called Von Brunn “objectively crazy,” but argued that “his hatreds would be easier to find at an ANSWER rally than at CPAC.”
That's right. A neo-nazi who hates blacks, Jews, and thinks Obama wasn't born in the United States is going to be more at home with a group called "ACT NOW TO STOP WAR AND END RACISM" rather than the political convention where they're selling Obama Waffles and conservative figures get applause for questioning Obama's citizenship.
Look, the desperation here speaks for itself. No one would mistake von Brunn for the average conservative. But their breathless attempts to distance themselves only draw more attention to the fact that many conservatives have come to embrace the kind of conspiratorial fantasies that von Brunn believed in.
-- A. Serwer
