Jamie

Weinstein

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September 8, 2009

Liberals Haven’t Compared Their Rivals to Hitler? I’m Sorry . . . What?

“I never saw anywhere in the news a Democrat carry a picture to any kind of a rally with a picture of Adolf Hitler putting him with a characterization of Bush,” said liberal commentator Ed Schultz on his The Ed Show on MSNBC last week. Ed was challenging his guest, former Republican Congressman Tom Tancredo, who had just reminded big Ed about how Democrats did just that during President George W. Bush’s tenure in office.

It takes some sort of severe amnesia to not remember the constant references made by some liberals comparing Bush and his administration to Nazis. When I was an undergraduate at Cornell University, I attended a “Peace Festival” on campus where signs depicting George W. Bush as Hitler could be purchased as if it was completely normal. Anyone who remembers watching the anti-war rallies during the Bush years must have seen left-wing activists parade such signs around.

But it wasn’t just the rank-and-file left wing nuts that made the Nazi comparison. Prominent left-wing nuts compared Bush and his administration to Nazis as well.

George Soros, the mega-financier who acts as Sugar Daddy for various liberal organizations, suggested in one of his books that the attacks of Sept. 11 were Bush’s Reichstag fire, a reference to the fire that many believe Hitler staged and blamed on the communists in order to grab power by spreading fear of a communist takeover in Germany. 

Democratic Congressman Keith Ellison also proffered the same Nazi comparison. He told an audience that 9/11 was “almost like the Reichstag fire, kind of reminds me of that. After the Reichstag was burned, they blamed the communists for it, and it put the leader [Hitler] of that country in a position where he could basically have authority to do whatever he wanted.”

And let us not forget Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin’s absurd and outrageous comparison of Bush Administration interrogation tactics in the War on Terror to the tactics used by Nazi Germany.

But comparing Republicans to Nazis is not a new fad among liberals. It has been a long-standing practice. In his 1988 book The Culture of Terror, leftist icon Noam Chomsky compared Ronald Reagan’s America to Hitler’s Germany. The Associated Press reported that at anti-Reagan protests in three American cities in 1983, young protesters carried signs proclaiming “Reagan: Our Hitler.”

In 1995, Democratic Congressman Major Owens didn’t just compare the new conservative majority in Congress to Nazis, he stated that his conservative colleagues were worse. ''These are the people who are practicing genocide with a smile; they're worse than Hitler.'' Influential Democratic Congressman Charlie Rangel also jumped in on the action. “Hitler wasn’t even talking about doing these things,” Rangel said, suggesting the agenda of the new Republican majority in Congress was worse than Hitler’s agenda. 

But wait, there’s much more. America’s number one ally in the Middle East, Israel, is routinely branded as acting Nazi-like in certain liberal quarters. Not only is the comparison idiotic and factually unsupportable, it is also morally repugnant. Misusing Nazi analogies is always wrong, but libeling Israel as Nazi-like is particularly vile for obvious reasons.

So, yes Ed, liberal radicals are second to none when it comes to labeling their political opponents as Nazis. Do you need any more examples as evidence?

I have been out front criticizing the fringes on the right for some of their absurd attacks on President Barack Obama, particularly the ridiculous Birther movement. Some Republicans have also unfortunately tried to make the Obama-Nazi comparison, though some of the most famous examples of this are actually likely supporters of Lyndon LaRouche, a man who is certainly no conservative or Republican. Nonetheless, the left seems to be using the conservative fringe radicals as a pretext to attack the entire conservative movement as worthless and to rewrite history in the process.

During The Ed Show’s segment with Tancredo, Schultz also had Huffington Post founding editor Roy Sekoff on. Playing off big Ed, Sekoff argued that the right’s nuttiness was a direct threat to President Obama. To prove his point, Sekoff decided to give the viewers a “history” lesson.

“[Republicans] tried to dismiss it when the John Birch Society questioned John F. Kennedy‘s patriotism on November 22, 1963,” Sekoff said, “and we saw how that turned out. You can‘t dismiss this. This is getting dangerous, it‘s getting crazy.”

Hmm. Is that a brilliant example of the consequences of right-wing radicalism or a rewrite of history? Let’s see. The John Birch Society was rightfully delegitimized as a serious organization by conservative icon Bill Buckley. But for all its many, many faults, the organization was relentlessly anti-communist. Keep this point in mind.

John F. Kennedy was assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald. Did Oswald murder Kennedy because he didn’t think he was patriotic enough? Was Oswald riled up by radical right-wingers, like those of the John Birch Society, as Sekoff suggested? If so, Sekoff might have a point.

There is one problem, however. Lee Harvey Oswald was – wait for it – a communist! It was a left-winger that killed Kennedy, not a right-winger!

This is not to say that some of the loony radicals on the conservative fringes couldn’t be dangerous today. They could, and conservative leaders should categorically denounce their over-the-top rhetoric and outrageous conspiracy theories. But the liberal fringes are at least equally as dangerous, if not more so, and must be condemned as well. We also can’t allow liberals like Sekoff and Schultz to rewrite history. 

So if you are one of the few conservatives trying to make the Hitler-Obama comparison, stop it. It’s moronic. But Ed and his fellow liberal commentators shouldn’t be getting all self-righteous. Where were they when the Nazi label was being hurled against Republicans?

© 2009 North Star Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.

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