On Friday night's Real Time with Bill Maher on HBO, the host mocked Michelle Malkin's new book on the ethically challenged Obama administration, then mocked Jonah Goldberg, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, and Glenn Beck with fake books that show how conservatives have "jumped the shark" [sic] in attacking Obama after only six months in office:  

He’s been in office, our president, for 6 months, and there is also, or there is already a book by Michelle Malkin. You know Michelle Malkin, she’s been on our show. She won’t come back, but. (Laughter.) But look at this. This is not a fake book we mocked up. This is a real book. Culture of Corruption. Look at him, it’s the American flag, he’s f—ed it up already. [Wrong. It's the Obama campaign logo.]

Six months in office! And already we can make this judgment! It blows my mind, because Bush always said ‘you can’t judge me now. Only history can judge me.' The long – we’ve got to wait 100 years to see how Iraq comes out.

On Monday’s Countdown show, MSNBC host Keith Olbermann slammed Jonah Goldberg of the National Review during the show’s "Worst Person in the World" segment because Goldberg complained about the treatment of neoconservatives by liberals, as the National Review Online editor recently charged that "mainstream liberalism and other outposts of paranoid Bush hatred have portrayed neoconservatives – usually code for conservative Jews and other supporters of Israel – as an alien, pernicious cabal."

Olbermann, who has a history of blaming conservatives like Glenn Beck and Bill O’Reilly for violent acts by extremists, accused the "far right" of "enabling" recent murders, and then claimed not to have ever heard the term "neocons" associated with a particular "religious or ethnic group." He went on to suggest that the word "neocon" may really be code for "belligerence, pig headedness, stupidity, wasteful, indifference to human life," and "paranoid."

Olbermann:

Despite all the criticisms of the Fox News Channel broadcasted on MSNBC for promoting tea party coverage, one thing hasn't been pointed out - how the NBC networks, including CNBC and MSNBC are given a pass for their shameless promotion of their Green Week and Green is Universal network events.

Jonah Goldberg, editor-at-large for National Review and author of "Liberal Fascism," appeared on Fox News Channel's April 18 "Fox News Watch" and commented on FNC's promotion of the tea parties, but the double standard of MSNBC's criticism of Fox News.

"I think that there's a perfectly legitimate criticism against Fox for not so much the coverage, but the commercials, you know - promoting the coverage, which was in effect advertisements for these things," Goldberg explained. "But, this was all transparent, people knew that's Fox was doing. But let's flashback to what GE, to pick up a point that Jim [Pinkerton] made - that GE basically issued a fatwa to NBC for Green Week, where they did hundreds of hours of environmental messaging in all of their dramas, news coverage, "Today" show - throughout the network and it was all hailed as a wonderful progressive thing. That is a much more pernicious promotion than anything Fox did."

On Tuesday’s Countdown show, at the beginning of a segment about the Obama family’s pet dog, MSNBC host Keith Olbermann and MSNBC political analyst Craig Crawford, joked about FNC host Bill O’Reilly being a dog. Picking up on Olbermann’s earlier suggestion that he gets tired of hearing about presidential dogs, Crawford opened the discussion by ribbing the Countdown host about the possibility of the show getting its own pet dog.

After Olbermann disagreed, Crawford came back with a lame joke: "Well, you’ve already got O’Reilly’s show.

Olbermann responded: "That would be a female dog."

The over-the-top name-calling against the FNC host came just minutes after Olbermann used his "Worst Person" segment to slam Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity as he lectured the conservative talk radio hosts that one does not have to "spend every waking hour trying to annihilate" a political figure because of policy disagreements.

But Olbermann is well known for devoting a large portion of his program daily for the last several years to slamming President Bush – not only calling Bush a "fascist," but also suggesting last December that Bush administration members, presumably including President Bush himself, deserve to be "in hell" for some of their actions in the Iraq war. Olbermann: "I don’t know what, if any religion you belong to, but I suspect you’ll agree that people who ignored that many foretellings of preventable death should have a long time to think about it in hell!"

Republican presidential nominee Sen. John McCain, Ariz., has acknowledged his technological shortcomings, but some in the media continue to portray him as a techno-phobe with no meaningful contributions to that sector of the economy.

The September 16 "NBC Nightly News" examined McCain's rhetoric on the campaign trail in the wake of a serious banking crisis.  Correspondent Kelly O'Donnell reported one campaign advisor cited McCain's legislative effort opening the door to technological advancements as evidence of his ability to steer Americans through the turbulent time.

"And Brian, when an adviser today was stressing John McCain's economic credentials, he told reporters that McCain quote ‘helped make this little miracle happen' - the Blackberry or cell phone - citing his work on the Commerce Committee," O'Donnell said.

The future of conservatism is something which has become something of a hot topic. It's become evident to many that the historical moment that made the so-called Reagan coalition possible has passed, raising the inevitable question: where do we go from here? Has the right lost its way? Should conservatism be dependent upon the Republican party? What sorts of ideas should 21st century conservatism project?

These are just a few of the topics I asked Jonah Goldberg in Part II of our NewsBusters Interview with the author of "Liberal Fascism." See the partial transcript below or download an audio copy. Here's Part I in case you missed it.

Along with racist, the word fascist is one of the most common epithets you hear tossed around. Has the constant repetition of the word made it lose its meaning? Does anyone really know what it means? These are questions that Jonah Goldberg seeks to answer in his #1 best-selling book "Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning."

If you haven't picked up a copy yet, this is one book you need to buy.

As part of our tradition of bringing you in-depth interviews with America's political leaders, I took the opportuntity to speak by phone with Goldberg about "Liberal Fascism." Our conversation is quite extensive but well worth the read. Given the length of the interview (which is available in audio format as well as transcript), I've broken it down into two portions: the first in which Goldberg discusses his many leftist critics including his confrontation with comedian Jon Stewart, and the second in which Goldberg discusses conservatism and where he believes it's headed. This is the first installment. Read the transcript below or download an audio copy.

Last week's issue of the Village Voice featured Roy Edroso's review of "10 conservative Web scribblers," described therein as "buffoons" and in the article's subhead as "a confederacy of dunces." (Actually, Edroso names twelve bloggers, arriving at his figure of ten by counting the Power Line trio as one person.)

Lefty snark aside, the piece is problematic in part because at least two of the bloggers Edroso scrutinizes, Ann Althouse and Megan McArdle, really aren't conservatives. Moreover, by emphasizing individual bloggers he almost completely ignores lively large-group sites such as the Corner (he examines only Jonah Goldberg's contributions to NRO) and, of course, NewsBusters.

National Review's Jonah Goldberg has a new book out, "Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left," that argues essentially that liberalism is a sort of happy-faced fascism. It's a reasonable argument when one thinks about the endless crusades of liberal nanny-state promoters (state-run universal pre-K, the food police, anti-smoking zealots eager to stamp out smoking in bars, etc.).

Yet apparently online bookseller Amazon.com thinks it's something of a joke, categorizing the book among a list of best-selling parodies such as "The Zombie Survival Guide" and "Our Dumb World: The Onion's Atlas of the Planet Earth, 73rd Edition." (see screencap below page break):

You don't normally associate liberal pet causes like global warming with fascism, but National Review Editor at Large Jonah Goldberg makes a good case for why you could.

Goldberg appeared on January 15 at a Borders Bookstore in downtown Washington, D.C. to promote his new book, Liberal Fascism. According to Goldberg, tactics like comparing climate change skeptics to people "who believe that the Earth is flat," is comparable to those used by the power brokers within the rise of fascism during the early 20^th century.

[Click Here For Audio]

"The only people who say we need to get beyond ideology, get beyond labels, are the people who want you to shut up, you to stop disagreeing and agree with them," Goldberg said.

On Yom Kippur, which ended just last evening, Jews quite literally beat their breasts while asking forgiveness for all the sins committed during the previous year. The confessional prayer enumerates literally dozens of different transgressions. But while the syllabus of sin is seemingly comprehensive, there would appear to be one lacuna. Nowhere in the menu of misdeeds does "schadenfreude" appear.

We might just have to petition to have it added in time for next year. Because Jonah Goldberg's I’m Rather Grateful is such a delightful dose of schadenfreude-on-steroids as to be as irresistible. Go ahead: read it and enjoy. There should be plenty of time to repent.

Excerpts [emphasis added]:

Six years after the fact, the attacks of September 11th seem to have lost their cultural relevancy for much of America. In a thought-provoking essay Jonah Goldberg wonders how we got to this point. In his view, it is largely a communication issue, something for which the media shares a significant amount of blame (h/t Ace):

[I]t’s important to remember that from the outset, the media took it as their sworn duty to keep Americans from getting too riled up about 9/11. I wrote a column about it back in March of 2002. Back then the news networks especially saw it as imperative that we not let our outrage get out of hand. I can understand the sentiment, but it’s worth noting that such sentiments vanished entirely during hurricane Katrina. After 9/11, the press withheld objectively accurate and factual images from the public, lest the rubes get too riled up. After Katrina, the press endlessly recycled inaccurate and exaggerated information in order to keep everyone upset. The difference speaks volumes.