Thursday, June 05, 2008

Idiots of the Right Wing Nut Job World

A comment from a reader yesterday:

reading your comments and some other jewish blogs,i realize how right Bob Grant[he is a talk show personality here in NYC]was,when he made fun of stupid jewish liberals,who are suicidal,and absolutely clueless when it comes to self preservation,and said in jest'that he is sure that would hitler be running on the democratic ticket,he would still get 70% of the jewish vote
Never mind the bad grammar and punctuation. Limited education does that to a person.

I want to address the Hitler comment, which is just dumb and variations of which I've heard before.

Hitler was evil. Hitler didn't help others. He helped himself. Hitler was very open about his hatred of all others, especially Jews, as described in his book, Mein Kampf. Hitler never gave promises to the masses of making life better through productivity. Now, the arguments will start that he did fix the economy, did get Germany to recover. Except pretty much EVERYTHING he did was to build his war machine, which led to a six year, devastating war that killed not only six million Jews, but about fourteen million others, including homosexuals and Gypsies, as well as huge numbers of military casualties on all sides.

Obama is promising to polish America's tarnished image, to end war, to create universal health care, to create jobs, to reassess bad trade deals like NAFTA, and to get the United States' economy back on its feet and stronger than ever.

The big irony of the above comment, aside from its total stupidity and complete wrongness, is that fascists, like Hitler, rise from the Right Wing Nut Job camp, NOT from the left, or even from the center. If you want to compare anyone to Hitler and other fascists, the best candidates are Bush and Cheney. They have warmongered for the last six years, entered into an illegal war against a country that had no WMDs and NO ties to Al Qaeda and NO connection to the Bush and Cheney's favorite excuse - 9/11. They, like Hitler, conjured up votes through fear. Fear of further attacks, fear of the unknown, fear of things not like them. They have lied over and over to the public, a public, Jewish or not, that is simply sick and tired of dirty politics that makes us all feel like the government that's supposed to be by, of, and for the people is really by, of, and for only the wealthy and powerful. And these politicians use fear to get people to vote for them, fear of a future the Republicans don't want because it would break their power over the people.

John McCain (McBush, McSame as Bush, etc) is set to continue these policies, policies that have come close to ruining this country economically, policies that HAVE ruined this countries reputation, policies that have caused the world to begin despising the United Stated of America. The brilliant move in promoting John McCain as the Republican candidate is he comes off as this really nice grandfatherly figure. The problem is, he, like Bush and his administration, lies continuously to the public about policy, about how he's not like Bush, about how ostensibly horrible Obama is, especially due to his "lack" of experience.

Here's another comment by a regular reader, one that addresses my post about experience: 
George Will (of all people) pretty much exploded the "experience" argument earlier this year:

"The president who came to office with the most glittering array of experiences had served 10 years in the House of Representatives, then became minister to Russia, then served 10 years in the Senate, then four years as secretary of state (during a war that enlarged the nation by 33 percent), then was minister to Britain. Then, in 1856, James Buchanan was elected president and in just one term secured a strong claim to being ranked as America's worst president. Abraham Lincoln, the inexperienced former one-term congressman, had an easy act to follow."
So, as I've mentioned before, where has "experience" gotten us? What has it gotten us? With all of Buchanan's "experience," the South seceded from the union during his presidency, and Lincoln had to work four long and bloody years to clean up that mess. Lincoln did NOT want a war. It was something into which he was forced. Bush, on the other hand, really wanted to go to war and because of his policies, both at home and abroad, he'll probably surpass Buchanan as the country's worst president ever.

As for the Hitler thing, I guess the Right, the Republicans happily running the show and screwing and raping this country and its people, will resort to anything, even going as low as comparing Barack Obama to Hitler, arguably history's worst villain, if only to suit their needs and prevent any real and positive change for this country.

Let's just hope people this time around are smart enough NOT to fall the Republican, RWNJ lies of the past. Let's hope Obama gets elected so the Democrats can clean up the mess the Republicans have made over the last fourteen years.

1 comment:

Kylopod said...

Good post.

In fairness, the Bob Grant quote was not comparing Obama to Hitler but arguing that Jewish liberals are so clueless they would support Hitler were he on the ticket. (It's a slippery-slope argument in the tradition of the cliche response to peer pressure: "If your friends told you to jump off a cliff, would you do it?") Even then, Grant was not being serious.

It still is a stupid thing to say and smacks of anti-Semitism.

Right-wingers in this country have been making Hitler comparisons for some time, but then they were simply adopting a tactic already common on the left. It's true that Nazism is generally regarded as more of a right-wing movement, but it is so far beyond anything in the American mainstream that comparing either Republicans or Democrats to Hitler is kind of ridiculous. The funny thing about the left-right spectrum is that if you go far enough in either direction you end up in pretty much the same place, which is totalitarianism. From a worldwide perspective, both major parties in America are well in the center.

The problem with Hitler comparisons is not just that they're inflammatory and hyperbolic in the extreme, but also that they're tired and old. I usually reserve such comparisons for actual genocides or fascist takeovers of democratic countries. While the Bush Administration has repeatedly acted in a fascistic way, the U.S. is not in any way even close to being a dictatorship, and however wrong-headed and deadly the Iraq War has been, it is in no way a genocide. We need to keep some perspective here, or else we're no better than propagandists on the right.