OK, the W.Post royally sucks, and proves it yet again and on a daily basis. Woodward and Bernstein, Where are you?

Conservatives have a pantry full of officially sanctioned straw boogeymen. Hitler, the 'Liberal Socialist', is one, as is Neville Chamberland, the spineless wimp, along with many others. When criticising your opponents, it is insufficient to criticise their policies on their merits--instead it is the rule that you must insist they are exactly like one of the official boogeymen from the pantry. That way you don't have to engage in any hard analysis or difficult thinking, you just get to react emotionally to the charge associated with the boogeyman. For this to work, however, the boogeyman must be officially sanctioned by those bearing the conservative symbols of authority. It is much the same way in Iran, where the Ayatollah Khamenei regularly trots out the Great Satan Boogeyman. This is the American variation on the same theme.

So does this mean that Obama's going to give the Czech Republic to himself? And would that violate monettary limits on gifts to the President?

Well, they could use the names Adolph Chamberlain or Neville Hitler.

Scholars who have studied the Radical Right note that it embraces both rightest and leftist themes. That makes a certain sense since the Radical Right is primarily a populist movement, which is a double-edged sword in its attacks against "elites" of any kind. Republicans have more skillfully turned populism against liberal elites for their own purposes, but populism wears clothing of both the Left and Right. Awhile ago when Congress was debating the stimulus bill and bank bailouts, I said mostly in jest that listening to Republican attacks against Obama for both giving AIG executives bonuses and taking America down the road to "European-style Socialism," you would have to believe that the American Right views Obama as a card-carrying Communist stoodge of Wall Street special interests. That formulation seems entirely contradictory, but in the strange world of American conservative populism it also has its own weird internal logic.

And I actually do know how to spell "monetary."

It's a floor wax AND a dessert topping!

It became apparent over the weekend listening to the venomous attacks against Krugman and Frank Rich who suggested that conservative rhetoric might be inciting violence, that the Right pays absolutely no attention at all to the substance of criticisms against it. The Right merely takes the FACT of criticism against it as proof that conservatism is the victim of liberal hate-speech and is a persecuted minority in a strange land.

The idea that the very specific and detailed criticisms of Rich and Krugman (who quoted radio shock jocks in detail) were presented as evidence of how conservatives are the target of an attempt by liberals to silence dissenting views from "liberal orthodoxy." But you can only get to that conclusion if you think and talk in the vaguest of generalities, siphoning all content from your attempt to frame everything in familiar left-right terms. Only in that way, without treating the substance of the attack on the merits, can you treat as entirely equivelent the obvious hate-speech directed at individuals and groups and the criticism that hate-speech inspires.

For example: If you call me a dirty rotten scoundral, and I call you a bigot for calling me a dirty rotten scoundral, to right wing conservatives both are equally examples of "hate-speech." This is what allows conservatives to say when attacked for their over-the-top rhetoric about Obama being a fascist or Marxist, that "both sides are equally guilty." You just can't talk to people who think like this.

Only in bizarro Conservamerica would an editorial decrying the power of charismatic speeches to enthrall hordes of gullible innocents to engage in ignorant mob-like behavior be published in a paper owned by Sun Myung Moon.

The ridiculousness our our times has no limit.

Just Dropping By on June 15, 2009 at 10:18 AM

Funny. That.

We liberals think this is absurd because we haven't grasped the full quantum-mechanical both/and power that is Barack Obama: he unites within himself the grasping megalomania of Hitler and the appeasement of Chamberlain, the economic-policy faults of both Hoover and FDR, the wimpy moderate evangelical christianity of Jimmy Carter and the reactionary islamism of Osama bin Laden.

And if he ever shakes hands with himself, the whole world will disappear in a shower of gamma rays.

like yesteryear's Germans, are building the Trojan horse for a future tyrant.

I thought it was Athenians that built the Trojan Horse. What are we going to do with it after we build it? They built it to defeat an opponent in battle. It sounds like this one is being built as an offering, though. Sorry, I'm a bit confused on this metaphor.

Of course, both of these memes are so moronically ridiculous and factually challenged as to make 2+2=5 look good. And we wouldn't have to deal with this stuff had not the MSM not only allowed wingnuts to spout obvious tin foil hat nonsense for over two decades with very little challange, but annointed the spouters as Very Serious People. Nonetheless, since I do believe in the intellectual consistency that wingnuts have long since jettisoned, I'd have to say that the juxtaposition of these two columns (which you seemed to have picked up from the Media Matters blog) is not logically inconsistent. I see no reason why Obama cannot be a domestic fascist while simultaneously being an international appeaser. He's neither, of course, but he could be. It's more the concurrent charges of socialism/communism and fascism that are intellectually inconsistent.

those historical comparisons are as ridiculous as cartoon ones...

how about obama as mighty mouse (and not as good as bush as superman, goddamit!) and simultaneously sylvester the cat...

(actually, the bush-cheney years have got wiley coyote written all over them -- beep beep)

Paul, that is a great comment. Somehow we have to mix in ying and yang, pairs of opposites and rest of eastern dualism. Or is it duelism?

So if he wakes up in the morning and doesn't kill himself, he's appeasing himself?

Cole Sear: I see stupid people.

Malcolm Crowe: In your dreams?
[Cole shakes his head no]

Malcolm Crowe: While you're awake?
[Cole nods]

Malcolm Crowe: stupid people like, in Washington? On TV?

Cole Sear: Walking around like regular people. They don't see people different than them. They only see what they want to see. They don't know they're stupid.

Malcolm Crowe: How often do you see them?

Cole Sear: All the time. They're everywhere. All over the south and the mid-west, and cable TV. They all have (R) before their names.

What's amazing to me is how limited today's conservatives are in their historical knowledge. It's like they only know about Hitler and Chamberlain from watching old movies and Hogan's Heroes. You rarely hear them draw comparisons from any other time or place in human history.

I'm not sure where this fits in the Hitler-Chamberlain spectrum, but Obama is also the Antichrist.

"if conservatives could pick or the other, it'd help make their absurd criticisms less grating."

I'd say it would be /more/ grating. At least by doing both at once, they look like idiots.

This blog has fallen into the same trap as most of the MSM media and talk shows, etc - an obsession with trivia. Like dogs sniffing each others' rear ends, most "political junkies" today can only talk about the daily gossip of polls, pundits and he said/she said crap.

Meanwhile, out in the larger world, civilization-threatening problems loom: mass extinctions, Peak Oil, melting glaciers, dying oceans, depleted farmland, fresh water shortages, creeping surveillance society, pharmaceuticals in the water supply, depleted fisheries, dying coral reefs, deforestation, antibiotic-resistant diseases, pollution and toxic waste, Big Pharma and Agribusiness trying to patent everything on the planet... Can we focus some of our energy and time on this stuff?

During the 1930s, appeasement was based upon the notion that a majority of Germans were decent people who simply wanted peace and national self-determination.

Once again the wingnuts prove their historical ignorance. The Tory policy of appeasement was not based on any delusions about what the Nazis intended to do. Hitler's intentions were fully laid out in the pages of Mein Kampf. The Tories thought that if they conceded Czechoslovakia to the Germans, then Hitler would point his army east and attack the Soviet Union (which, of course, he did--though not until after The Axis had gained control of almost all of western Europe and subjected the British people to the nightmare of The Blitz).

So, how many Americans, outside the REAL Republican base (that is, 70 - 90 year old white males) even know who Neville C or Adolf H were and how they are metaphorically effective, etc. I'm guessing this is another case of conservatives playing to the base and losing the 18 - 35 demo.

It's frightening to me that the far-right hate mongering is now seeping into main-stream conservatism. I have friends who think Obama is a Socialist or Marxist, and they use these words interchangeably.

I like the link Maddow on Friday with Joan Walsh from the 'Salon' magazine-- persistent and wide-range groups (it's Rush but not just Rush who insist Obama is not a citizen) are now making absurd claims in ways that objectify, dehumanize and do incite violence, makes the someone no longer a human being--an evil thing, a target to rid the world of.

If you don't like the person's policies, that's one thing clearly-- but to start calling Obama a Muslim, a communist, and to essentially accuse him of being elected illegally crosses a very critical line and allows all kinds of violence to be justified.
-----------------------------------------------
As an aside, does anyone know of good, cogent there articles/sites I can refer to that explain what a Marxist and a Socialist entail?

As an aside, does anyone know of good, cogent there articles/sites I can refer to that explain what a Marxist and a Socialist entail?

For what Marxism entails, I'd recommend both Capital and The Communist Manifesto, both of which are available a number of places on the web. Socialism is so broad as to be almost impossible to define in a form which is meaningful and captures more than a small part of what goes under the name, because there are many very different things called "Socialism"; it was fairly broad even at the time Marxism emerged, and its various strands of split and evolved in lots of different ways since.

"OK, the W.Post royally sucks, and proves it yet again and on a daily basis. Woodward and Bernstein, Where are you?"

Not that the Post doesn't feature a lot to criticize these days, but these articles appeared in the Washington Times, not Post. The Times is the paper that featured a column that speculated, as recently as a week or two ago, that Obama may in fact be a muslim. It's not a real paper and is best ignored.

So let me get this straight:

Conservatives said nothing about warrantless wiretapping of Americans ... signing statements that basically positioned the President as an all-powerful person who could ignore laws at will ... rescinding Habeus Corpus for detainees ... holding those detainees without telling them why, and doing so indefinitely ... authorizing torture ... violating treaties, and American and international law ... advocating policies that only benefited a select few ... writing energy policy in secret (with members of the energy industry, no less) and against federal sunshine laws ... using the tools of the state to spy on and/or punish political opponents ...

And, of course, they called anyone who disagreed with any of these things an un-American traitor, all while suggesting critics either leave or be locked away.

But, in their eyes, Obama is like Hitler because ... he wants health care for all by asking the rich to chip in an extra 3 percent, has toned down the bellicose rhetoric, and is trying to get military/intelligence actions in line with the rule of law?!

Really?

That's it--these people are insane. Clinically. F-ing. Insane.

Interesting how these conservative discussions of Hitler always leave out the part about how war-mongering and capitalism run-amok ran the German economy into a ditch just prior to the ascension of the Nazi Party and Hitler on the national stage. Two major shocks to their system, both caused by policies favored by today's conservatives. It's too bad that they're too stupid to see the valuable history lessons one could glean from such events.

The formula is simple:

Hitler was wrong.

You're wrong.

You're Hitler.

Nice and easy for a viewer of Fox News to understand.

"In Germany, it led to the Enabling Act of 1933: Law to Remedy the Distress of the People and the Nation. After all, who could be against a remedy to relieve distress?"

Maybe the leftwing members of the Reichstag, the parliament in the Weimar Republic, which by March 1933 were already in prison, but who in the vote on the Enabling Act were counted as 'absent without excuse'.

The title of the 1933 Enabling Act, which as parliamentary procedure had been used several times before Hitler came to power, was a 'Law to Remedy the Distress of the People and the Nation' in the same way

It might behoove the scribblers at the Washington Times to do a little bit more research before they try to abuse historical precedent for their political purposes.

Oh, and I see the Trojan horse has also been mounted.

Sorry, something got screwed up in my previous comment. The third last paragraph should have been.:

The 1933 Enabling Act, which as parliamentary procedure had been used several times before Hitler came to power, was a 'Law to Remedy the Distress of the People and the Nation' in the same way some of the Acts passed in the Bush II regnum were laws to to potect the environment.

The Athenians didn't build the Trojan Hourse, either--the High King of Mycenae did, with design work by the King of Ithaca.

Republicans think backwards from their insults. In fact, their entire intelligentsia is devoted to delivering justifications and rationalizations for their insults.

And then the Israeli's are not quite the Czechs. For one thing, a bad result could result in mushroom clouds in various places in the MidEast and maybe elsewhere. I trust the Israeli's as much as I trust my government. I support both, but....

Yesterday, in the Oregonian, a column by Jonah Goldberg was featured. He was ranting that the Holocaust Museum killer was not right wing. In his long tirade, he wrote that the alleged killer and Hitler had something in common, i.e., they both believed that Socialism was the answer to governmental problems. When, the hell is the right wing, including Goldberg, going to realize that just because the party placed the word Socialist in NSDAP, it had absolutely nothing to do with Socialism? The Nazis were quite content with allowing capitalism to go its merry way, as long as the capitalists supported the aims, especially, the war aims of Hitler. They did not nationalize industry. The word had been placed in NSDAP in order to seduce young unemployed farm boys into joining and becoming street bully boys. I can't count the times I have seen, either posts from RepuGs or such as the Constitution Party, bring up this "socialism" canard about the Nazis - The Nazis were very right wing; not leftists. They threw true Socialists into concentration camps.

berttheclock - Jonah and his ilk don't do nuance, like actually knowing the ideology and policies of the Nazis. You would think a little film called Schindler's List would shed some light (not an entirely accurate light, but you still get the idea) on the role of capitalism in the Third Reich, but oh well....