As we watch the Republican leadership officially distance themselves from Rep. Joe Barton's (R-TX) infamous apology to BP CEO Tony Hayward, their minions are picking up the slack, letting the base know how the GOP really feels.
And on Tuesday Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) took it to a new level as he approvingly quoted an article that likened the Obama administration's success in getting BP to set up a $20 billion escrow account to assist Gulf coast residents to something that Adolf Hitler would have done.
GOHMERT: There's a brilliant man named Thomas Sowell. And, um, I didn't vote for Barack Obama in 2008, but I sure would have voted for Thomas Sowell. This man, well, his article says quite a lot. His editorial, um, says here — and it's just been posted this week — but it says, "When Adolph Hitler was building up the Nazi movement in the 1920's" — and I'm quoting from Thomas Sowell in his editorial:
...leading up to his taking power in the 1930s, he deliberately sought to activate people who did not normally pay much attention to politics.
Such people were a valuable addition to his political base, since they were particularly susceptible to Hitler's rhetoric and had far less basis for questioning his assumptions or his conclusions.
"Useful idiots" was the term supposedly coined by V.I. Lenin to describe similarly unthinking supporters of his dictatorship in the Soviet Union.
And this isn't in the article — this is my comment — but we do have useful idiots today, who are heard to say, "Wow, what we really need is for the president to be a dictator for a little while." They know not what they say.
Just where in the Constitution of the United States does it say that a president has the authority to extract vast sums of money from a private enterprise and distribute it as he sees fit to whomever he deems worthy of compensation? Nowhere.
A perfectly reasonable comparison. One man pressures an oil company to compensate the victims of an oil spill and another is responsible for a world war and the murder of millions of people. In fact, someone owes Hitler an apology here.