Beginning in 2007 during the beginning of the 2008 presidential election, many on the right began predicting that the election of one of the viable democratic contenders for president -- Clinton and Obama -- would result in a significant move toward a socialist state in the US. Some of the more... dramatic ones on the left, including my idol Glenn Beck, have succeeded in bluring the lines between socialism and communism.

Now, I’m sure many pundits and commentators, including the amazing, wonderful and entertaining Beck, really do know the difference between the two, but their flippant banter only confuses people.

This article Cathy Young over at Reason magazine explains the rhetoric pretty well and makes the observation that while Obama’s administration is certainly friendly to larger government chock full of social programs, this isn’t a course change by any means.

A headline in The Weekly Standard warns of "The Return of Big Government"; but big government never left, and certainly not under Bush. Obama may be seeking to reverse Ronald Reagan's legacy; but, as conservative economist Bruce Bartlett argued persuasively in his 2006 book, Impostor, that legacy was already betrayed by Bush. Many people will tell you we officially became "the U.S.S.A." with the bank bailout in October 2008.

Since the 2008 presidential election cycle was in full swing, Glenn Beck has been saying that both Republican and Democrat parties were both in favor of "taking us to the same place, only one is taking us in a steam train and the other is taking us in a jet plane."

It seems any time philosophical labels are brought up on the Internet, bad things tend to happen. I think part of the reason there has been so much back and forth discussion about these labels is due to Jonah Goldberg’s book Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning. People have ridiculed Jonah, but I think he’s dead-on.

Many people believe Hitler was the epitome of fascism and that fascism is an extreme form of right-wing thinking -- that had George W. Bush been able to go full-bore and do whatever he wanted as much as he wanted, we would have seen the second coming of Hitler. (Note: Bush is a poor analogy since he is, by far, a moderate Republican and not the poster-boy for the far-right.) Jonah Goldberg sets the record straight and I have to wonder why we ever wondered in the first place. After all, the Nazis stood for the "National Socialist German Workers' Party". "Socialist" and "Workers" should be the key words there. That’s something to think about.