These people have sucked all the Hitler right out of Hitler. None of them understands how hard Hitler worked making true evil a lifestyle. He surrounded himself with similar evil people who shared his Aryan vision and went about conquering Europe to spread it, taking 13 years and a world war costing millions of lives. Comparing today’s political hacks to Hitler trivializes the impact the real Hitler had on the world, and reduces his crimes to sideshow status.
Last August a northern Iowa Tea Party group displayed a billboard featuring likenesses of Obama, Hitler and Lenin with the phrase “Radical leaders prey on the fearful and the naïve”. The billboard was rightfully denounced by the national tea party patriots group and was soon removed. Conservative talk show host and Tea Party express organizer Mark Williams has referred to both Barack Obama and Jimmy Carter as Nazis, to the consternation of CNN’s Anderson Cooper, whose show he appeared on in September, 2009. The NAACP reports only a smattering of Obama/Hitler signs and shirts at rallies.
National Democratic Jewish Council President David Harris commented on these actions in the Huffington post, saying “. . . more and more of these disturbing Nazi comparisons are cropping up – and they all seem to be coming from the heart of the Republican base” with no corroborating examples.
Liberals like Harris wring their hands and decry these scattered Obama/Hitler comparisons yet have conveniently forgotten the Bush/Hitler comparisons of years past that bubbled to the surface like the formaldehyde in which the Nazi head is immersed. “I worry that some people are entertained by the idea of this war.” Stated Linda Ronstadt to USA Today in 2004 referring to the re-elected Bush administration. “It's like Germany, before Hitler took over . . . people looked for a scapegoat. Now we've got a new bunch of Hitlers."
Some in the mainstream news media were also quick to invoke Hitler’s head when speaking of George Bush. Bill Burkett (he of the infamous CBS memo) wrote in March 2003 on Veteransforpeace.org that “America will again be asked to bow at the feet of this small man with big ideas. We must study the nemesis of France and how Napoleon was felled before understanding the damage a tyrant does to a nation and society. We must examine the ruthless and dictatorial rise of yet another of the three small men—one whose name is not spoken out of fear of reprisal, but his name was Adolf. We must examine history, in order to not repeat it, and to understand the mesmerism of a public to a murderous scheme [of] three small men.”
In September, 2002 national columnist and Greenpeace senior advisor Harvey Wasserman wrote at CommonDreams.org a piece entitled "Bush's 9/11 Reichstag Fire": “This unelected regime – Hitler also came to power with a minority of votes – has used the terrible tragedies of September 11 in much the way the Nazis jumped on the Reichstag fire."
Chicago Urban League Vice President for Research and Planning and ZNet contributor Paul Street wrote in 2003 that there is, apparently, only one particularly notable difference between Bush and Hitler: “Hitler wouldn't have allowed any looting of museums in Baghdad.”
Speaker of the house Nancy Pelosi spoke of being disturbed by swastikas (reported but never substantiated) at the Tea Party rally the day of the health care reform vote without mentioning the plethora of not only swastikas but Bush-as-Hitler signs, t-shirts and posters at a rally in her hometown of San Francisco in 2004 at the 1-year anniversary of the Iraq invasion.
The academic world is only too happy also to hoist Hitler’s head. Emeritus professor of psychology at the University of Minnesota, Duluth, Iver Bogen wrote in his article the “The Nazification Of The Republican Administration”: “Just as Hitler was installed (but not elected by the German people) as the Feuhrer by the Nazi party, so George W. Bush was installed as President of the United States by a conservative Supreme Court. While ‘lebensraum’ was a rallying cry for Hitler, Bush's ‘evil axis’ . . . was supposed to generate patriotic ‘no-think’ here in the USA.”
Most recently, On Bill Maher’s HBO show “Real Time” TV’s Meathead–turned-StaPuft Marshmallow man Rob Reiner made the prediction that the tea party could spawn the next Hitler, stating that charismatic leaders like Hitler emerge from groups who peddle hate and fear.
I propose a bipartisan Rule: From now on you have to kill at least 5 million people to be called or compared to Hitler – anything less and you’re Helen Thomas.
