So I did a “bloggingheads”:http://www.bloggingheads.tv/diavlogs/8080 a few days ago with Dan Drezner, where we discussed the Jonah Goldberg liberofascism book, and whether or not it was fair to dismiss it without having read it (my answer was emphatically yes: when the dude stops “pretending to do research”:http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2005/10/off_in_bizarrow.html perhaps I’ll start pretending to take him seriously; then again, given his past form, my limited time resources etc, perhaps not). But in retrospect, maybe this was the wrong question to debate. I’m intrigued by the question of precisely why Goldberg apparently expects this book to be given sober consideration as an important intellectual contribution to debate between the left and the right etc. [click to continue…]