Who says wingnuts can’t do cutting edge satire? You want proof? Why just sample this tasty dish from Pajama Media’s own Michael Ledeen and tell me he isn’t the next Jonathan Swift:

What is happening now–and Newsweek [a reference to Newsweek’s We’re all Socialists Now issue] is honest enough to say so down in the body of the article–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. Nobody calls it by its proper name, for two basic reasons: first, because “fascism” has long since lost its actual, historical, content; it’s been a pure epithet for many decades. Lots of the people writing about current events like what Obama et. al. are doing, and wouldn’t want to stigmatize it with that “f” epithet. […]

Back in the early thirties, before “fascism” became a pure epithet, leading politicians and economists recognized that it might work, and many believed it was urgently required. 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.”

Great, just great stuff. And I have to admit that, much as I have criticized Ledeen in the past, this is just an amazing piece he’s written. He’s taken this essay to a place in the literary canon few have ever visited, one only the Great Jonah Goldberg with his comic masterpiece “Liberal Fascism” has colonized before.

What? What’s that you say? He’s dead serious? Come on now. Who could call out both Obama and FDR as fascists in the same article and mean it? Only a dunce of monumental proportions would describe the modern Democratic party as an offshoot of the Nazis or Mussolini’s Blackshirts. A dunce — or a comic genius, that is. Well, I leave it to you to judge which label best fits Michael Ledeen.

Either way, it’s funny as hell.

Tip a me hat to Roy at alicublog

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