shouldn't invoke Kristallnacht.

Bush's insane arugment by analogy has ripped the mask off any pretense of Republican civility in this campaign.  Fortunately, the spell cast by these nutjobs is losing its hold and folks in the media are starting to come out of their trances.

Here's what James Rubin is saying about McCain's flip flop on Hamas after he jumped into this mess:

McCain is the last politician who should be attacking Obama. Two years ago, just after Hamas won the Palestinian parliamentary elections, I interviewed McCain for the British network Sky News's "World News Tonight" program. Here is the crucial part of our exchange:

I asked: "Do you think that American diplomats should be operating the way they have in the past, working with the Palestinian government if Hamas is now in charge?"

McCain answered: "They're the government; sooner or later we are going to have to deal with them . . . it's a new reality in the Middle East."

After cracking McCain across the face with that brickbat, Rubin in the WaPo pulls out a crow bar and really lays into him ...

I don't care what Joe Lieberman thinks. Speaking as a Jew, President Bush's remarks at the Knesset today marked a new level of depravity.  I thought his solidarity through golf comment was asinine, but this...this...is beyond reproach. Among the galaxy of irresponsible, foolish, and generally incoherent statements George W. Bush has uttered during his presidency, this one hurts me the most.  He probably has said more universally damaging things during his tenure, but comparing Barack Obama to a Nazi appeaser just deflates my lungs. Sure, Nazi comparisons are made all the time, but to my ears, this was singularly the most hurtful thing he has ever said.

All we need now is some mayo, mustard and some bread. We've already got the baloney and the cheese.

Former Nixon speechwriter, terminally droll pretend smart-guy and eyedrop spokesperson Ben Stein, attacks those elitist scientists while invoking Godwin's law in the new crapumentary, Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. Scientific American viewed the film which apparently does a good job of living up to it's name by not displaying any intelligence.

It happened again last night- Barack couldn't explain his relationship with Wright in a satisfying way.  Of course Barack is inspiring and hopeful, but Wright isn't and this is very problematic.

I feel like I've been repeating myself every few months, so you'll pardon me if I don't put in quite the same effort this time around, even if this is a message that apparently needs to be repeated constantly for some of the more puerile users of this site.

My standard backgrounder for this message:

All four of my grandparents were survivors of the Holocaust, three of them the sole survivors from their own very large families. My mother's parents met in Auschwitz shortly before liberation; my father's parents met in a displaced persons camp not long after the war ended. They all eventually made their way to safety and freedom in the Milwaukee area.

And I have had more than my fair share of confrontations with contemporary Nazis, some of which I wrote about here.

So I think I'm pretty qualified to judge who and what deserve the Nazi label and who and what don't. A simple primer:

Thinking over the wonderful display at the Rose Parade by the White Rose Coalition, and the equally sickening state of American "values" today, I returned again to a quote from the White Rose that goes right to my heart:

"Wir schweigen nicht, wir sind Euer böses Gewissen; die Weiße Rose läßt Euch keine Ruhe!"

Translation: "We will not be silent. We are your bad conscience. The White Rose will not leave you in peace!"

(from the fourth leaflet)

Follow me over the jump:

From Lew Rockwell:

The new MSNBC/Newsweek poll on Iowa puts Ron Paul at 8% of likely GOP caucus-goers, 2 points above McCain.

But both MSNBC and Newsweek, who commissioned the poll, have omitted Ron Paul from the analyses.

What does this have to do with "getting Democrats elected?"

Well, consider this.

What would you do if Kucinich was excluded from poll results. Not much?

Now what about Edwards?

Obama?

Godwin's law; "As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one." Yet as any online discussion grows longer, the probability of anything being mentioned approaches one.   In fact, Godwin’s law itself seems to be invoked in discussion so often, that the new Godwin's law could even be stated to read; "As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a reference to Godwin's law approaches one."

Yet Godwin’s law is an understandable proposition, because the probability of a reference to Hitler, or Nazism, may be higher than the probability of many other references.  For Hitler and Fascism references and "comparisons" are not only popular, but also provocative, and extremely inflammatory.

Perhaps precisely because of this reason...

There has to be an Orwell Corollary to Godwin's Law, one that says any discussion of today's Republican Party will invariably lead to comparisons with 1984.  That's the easy place to run when trying to sum up the miasma of misdirection and jingoism that passes for Republican speech.  But, damn it, when the candidates insist on treating the utterances of the Ministry of Truth as a textbook, what can you do?

Orwell

Freedom is Slavery

Giuliani

"Freedom is not a concept in which people can do anything they want, be anything they can be. Freedom is about authority. Freedom is about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do."

Freedom is about authority.  Rudy not only follows the dissimulations of Orwell's fictional ministry, he exceeds them.

By the way, the other two pithy sayings on the side of the Ministry of Truth?  "War is Peace" and "Ignorance is Strength."  

"What no one seemed to notice," said a colleague of mine, a philologist, "was the ever widening gap, after 1933, between the government and the people.  Just think how very wide this gap was to begin with, here in Germany.  And it became always wider.  You know, it doesn’t make people close to their government to be told that this is a people’s government, a true democracy, or to be enrolled in civilian defense, or even to vote.  All this has little, really nothing, to do with knowing one is governing.

"What happened here was the gradual habituation of the people, little by little, to being governed by surprise; to receiving decisions deliberated in secret; to believing that the situation was so complicated that the government had to act on information which the people could not understand, or so dangerous that, even if he people could understand it, it could not be released because of national security.  And their sense of identification with Hitler, their trust in him, made it easier to widen this gap and reassured those who would otherwise have worried about it.

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Freddy Kreuger was a maniac who disemboweled teenagers in their sleep.  Dozens of them.  But George W. Bush is worse than that.

George W. Bush is responsible for far more deaths than Freddy Kreuger.  As far as I know, Bush didn't ever use a glove with knives for fingers to kill anybody, or pull anybody through a bed that gushed a geyser of blood, but he has done lots of bad things, like start bad wars and sell bombs to bad people.  Directly or indirectly, he is responsible for the deaths of millions, not dozens, of people, and is ergo (wait for it) worse than Freddy Kreuger.

More studied analysis after the fold.

 One does not have to call a neocon a Nazi to discern troubling parallels in the way rigid ideologues of various stripes think and act. A close reading of Albert Speer's Inside the Third Reich may provide some insights into the workings of ideologically-driven (in contrast to empirical, fact-and-reality-driven) minds and their consequent decision-making.

 Let us count the ways below the break.

You know Hitler never broke the law, he just made the illegal, legal. Welcome to Bush's America...

The Bush Administration has now done what we all knew was coming, they have turned our Justice System into a bona fide arm  of the political process. The Washington Post is reporting that the Justice Department will not be allowed to pursue contempt charges no matter what Congress says. That's it folks, you have just seen that the President has in proclamation stated that he and his administration is about the law, in fact, he says he is the law.

It's something that's brought out again and again.  In the past I had tended to agree with this comparison in spirit.  However, my study abroad experience has changed that drastically.

For those of you not aware, since March I've been living in Berlin and attending the Berlin School of Economics (Fachhochschule für Wirtschaft-Berlin) and living in the Schöneberg district.  Coincidentally enough, I'm on the edge of the Bavarian Quarter, which was formerly one of the central Jewish quarters and the home to Einstein.

  Summary: In ten to twenty years, we’re going to be asked how the Bush Administration got as far as it did with this country without being removed.  How would you answer that question?

I've pretty much lost track of all the times that the times that the Repuloicans have called the Democrats "Nazis." Democrats have not taken this very seriously so far, at least I have not seen jack boots or leiderhosen in Haight-Ashbury.

But it's really bizzare when the Conservatives claim to be persecuted just like the Jews in the Holocaust. Tom Delay, Michael Savage, Glenn Beck, Michael Smerconish, Judge Roy Moore, and Michael Horowitz all make the list.

Tom Delay -  The BugMan likes to compare the GOP to 6 Million Jews, when he isn't comparing himself to Jesus Christ. Tom really covers all his bases. Next week he'll be Vishnu or something.

It’s the same process. It’s the same criminalization of politics. it’s the same oppression of people. It’s the same destroy people in order to gain power. It may be six million Jews. it may be indicting somebody on laws that don’t exist. But, it’s the same philosophy and it’s the same world view.

http://www.dailykos.com/...
http://thismodernworld.com/...

Update:  I added a couple of the title ideas plus a meta tag.
Update 2: the title was too long, so I sort of put it back

It was a perfect plan.

Five Thousand Years of recorded history told them that it should work, they should be in complete control.  They followed the plan to the letter, and, for many years, scarcely anyone noticed what was going on.

They had all their bases covered.  No matter what happened, the nation would be theirs for the forseeable future.  They were right on the verge of total, uncontested, dominance...

and they failed.  

The big question is, Why?

The I/P diaries have become simply absurd.  They are so abusive, so heated, that all reason has simply disappeared.  I therefore suggest that we all take a bit of an hiatus, from both sides of the debate, and give it a month or two before returning to the subject.  The last straw is, or at least should be, This Diary, and the comments within it.