Hitler and Whole Foods

Jonah Goldberg, sometimes known as the Pillsbury Pantload, is an overweight, dull-witted wannabe pundit who capitalized on his family connections to get a job writing thrice weekly for the National Review Online, where he also wears the elevated title of "Editor-at-Large."

He's the son of Lucianne Goldberg, a D.C. literary agent and rumormonger who gained some degree of fame back in the day as a professional Clinton hater. His column inevitably exemplifies the sort of nonsensical and evidence-free rumination that passes for thought in the right blogosphere.

A year or more ago, rumors began to circulate that the Pantload had produced a book, and a cover and publisher's description duly appeared on Amazon. The red cover was embellished with a yellow happyface cartoon portrait of Hitler accompanied by the title, "Liberal Fascism: from Mussolini to Hillary Clinton."

Now, a year on, this purportedly completed volume still hasn't been released, and apparently we're going to have to suppress our eager anticipation until December. However, in the meantime the title has changed, and while the new title has been posted at the book's blurb site at Amazon, the accompanying graphic still bears the old title, which you can clearly see if you supersize it.

The old title made little enough sense, but the new one: "Liberal Fascism: from Hegel to Whole Foods," makes absolutely none. The mind can only flailingly conjecture what a purveyor of yuppie foodstuffs has to do with fascism, or the philosophy Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, or for that matter, Mussolini or Hillary Clinton.

So which is it, Jonah? Mussolini or Hegel? Hillary Clinton or Whole Foods? This is what you'd expect from a Dick Cheney fan, and while I'm waiting with bated breath for these questions to be answered, I must admit I'm not planning to read Jonah's analytical opus, whatever it may be called by the time it finally comes out. I'll let someone else suffer through that ordeal, and read his or her review for answers to my questions.

Goldberg is a monumental piece of work. His writing is not only devoid of cogency, but is frequently so senseless as to fulfill every possible meaning of the word.