File this under “NOT The Onion,” or “Pottery Barn Rules,” or “Houston, We Have A Problem.” It doesn’t matter what you call it, the cat is out of the bag. On Tuesday, the front runner for the Republican nomination for President of the United States, appearing on national television, was asked the following question by George Stephanopoulos:
"You're increasingly being compared to Hitler. Does that give you any pause at all?"
The man most likely to get the Republican nomination for President of the United States, answered:
No.
The Washington Post reports the exchange in more detail:
No," Trump responded, "because what I am doing is no different than what FDR -- FDR's solution for Germans, Italians, Japanese, you know, many years ago."
Stephanopoulos jumped in as Trump kept talking: "So you're for internment camps?"
"This is a president who is highly respected by all," Trump said of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. "He did the same thing -- if you look at what he was doing, it was far worse."
Not only is Trump embracing the comparisons with Hitler, he is claiming that FDR — the president who led the nation while we were at war against Hitler’s Nazi Reich — was every bit as bad as Trump and worse. To call that “offensive” is offensive to the word “offensive.”
Speaking of offensive, next week, December 16th, marks a grim anniversary for the United States. It was on that day in 1944 the German offensive now known as the Battle of the Bulge began. This surprise attack caught Allied forces completely off guard. United States forces bore the brunt of the attack and incurred their highest casualties for any operation during the war.
That sad distinction makes the Battle of the Bulge the WWII equivalent of:
Khe San (Vietnam War),
Pusan (Korean War),
The Battle of Argonne (WW I),
Gettysburg (American Civil War),
or,
The Battle of Camden (American War of Independence).
There is a reason you recognize most, if not all, those names. Every one of them marks the deadliest battles from wars we have sent our young men out to die in.
Trump’s indifference to the (now mainstream) comparisons of him to Hitler must have former Republican president, and Supreme Allied Commander, Dwight Eisenhower, spinning in his grave and clawing at his coffin in rage.
While I am sure that Trump’s embrace of internment camps will be applauded by internment's biggest fan, Michelle Malkin, serious adults in the Republican Party (Colin Powell, I am looking at you) will have to deal with this problem. After all, we know the rules:
You break it, you buy it.
This naked embrace of fascism, racism, and militarism is not an American problem. It’s a Republican problem. Republicans created this problem. Republicans have to solve it or suffer the natural consequences of their poor choices. No one else can help them or save them from themselves. That’s their responsibility.
There is only one response to this travesty that any decent American can have. As long as Donald Trump is a Republican candidate for President of the United States, we have to hang this albatross around their neck and remind everyone, every time Donald Trump opens his mouth, they are not listening to Donald Trump. They are listening to the Front Runner for the GOP nomination for President of the United States.
Ah ! well a-day ! what evil looks
Had I from old and young !
Instead of the cross, the Albatross
About my neck was hung.
-- Coleridge, The Rime of The Ancient Mariner