I'm not a big fan of "gotcha" blogging, but this struck my fancy.

I've been reading with interest the debates surrounding Jonah Goldberg's new book "Liberal Fascism." Admittedly, I have yet to read it, but I did page through it at my local bookstore, and was struck by the epigraph at the top of the first chapter, taken from "An early version of the Cole Porter song "You're the Top" caught my attention. It reads:

"You're the top! You're the Great Houdini! You're the top! You are Mussolini!"

Goldberg uses Porter's praise of Mussolini as an example of American Liberals' sympathy for fascism in the 1930s.

Having just seen a production of Anything Goes, the musical in which "You're the Top" is featured, I decided to see just how "early" this version was. As it turns out, not only was the "Mussolini" version not "early" it wasn't even penned by Porter.

Goldberg most likely used a passage from Stanley Payne's A History of Fascism: 1914-1945 as the basis for his "early version" assertion.

However, it appears that the "Mussolini" line appeared first in the 1935 London production, which was adapted by P.G. Wodehouse in an effort to make some of the American references in the songs more in line with British popular culture. It should be noted that the previous link, as well as this one are sourced to people connected with the Porter estate, who would understandably have an interest in passing the blame for this lyric to Wodehouse. Still it's hardly a certainty that Porter actually penned those words at any point, let alone an early version.

All of this was mildly amusing, considering this quote leads off the opening chapter of the book with a possible error. It jumped from amusing to postworthy, when, in my research efforts i came across this 1999 article by Jonah Goldberg. The article begins:

"In 1934 old barriers were torn down in societies around the world. In the United States Cole Porter wrote the score for Anything Goes. In Germany, Hitler thought anything goes as well and he ordered the murder of Austrian Chancellor Englebert Dolfuss. That very year the government of the United States sanctioned the murder of John Dillinger. Also in the United States, Franklin Roosevelt launched a series of social programs to temper capitalism."

Goldberg then goes on to compare list a few more events from 1934 that were destructive in one way or another. But, in the next paragraph, as he sets up his column bashing a PBS documentary for conflating unrelated events that happened contemporaneously, he writes:

Now, anybody who read the above paragraph with a glimmer of attention and even a dim spark of intelligence would find at least a few things wrong. Yes, all of these things happened in 1934. But the idea, for example, that Cole Porter's Anything Goes has anything to do with Nazi machinations in Europe is at least silly and is certainly offensive to many. (emphasis mine)

Silly, indeed.