While I was fetching the link to the transcript of my interview with Hewitt, I found this nice exchange between Mark Steyn and Hugh:
MS: Happy Wednesday to you, too, Hugh, and that is a great book, that Jonah Goldberg book.
HH: It really has gotten under the skin of the left, because I think it talks in an unpleasant for them terms about the reality of the leftist impulse towards totalitarianism.
MS: Yes, and I think he’s absolutely right about that, that totalitarianism in the Western world today, it’s not Il Duce strutting about in preposterous uniforms in a semi-militarized state. It’s in a much subtle but deeply damaging way of this belief that the state can in fact envelop you in its nanny embrace from cradle to grave. That is a totalitarian impulse.
HH: You know what I think the left hates, Mark, about Jonah, and you share this with him as well, is they can deal with the Russell Kirks of the new millennium. They can deal with the furrowed brow and the people who are talking in hushed tones. They hate the humor. They cannot stand dealing with people who are funny in replying to them.
MS: Yup. No, I think there’s a big part of that, because again, their sense of themselves is that they are the funny guys, that in fact, they take the view, which I think is almost exactly wrong, that humor is by definition left wing. And of course, that cannot be, because humor is about recognition and observation. And if you hedge yourself in with as many absurdities as the modern left does, so that you cannot accurately identify facets of radical Islam or whatever, you can’t actually identify the comedy in life. And that’s the problem that the left has, and why a guy like Jonah absolutely cleans up when he comes out swinging.