Last night Meteor Blades wrote a great post called
Should Iran Be Stopped? ... In it he quoted Newt comparing Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to Hitler. The comparrison was no surprise to me because I had been listening to Hewy Hewitt earlier in the day and Hitler came up in every third sentance. Having listened to Talk Radio for well over a decade I knew that this was going to be a major talking point because Hewy is consistantly the go too guy for GOP talking points.
So I headed over to Hewy's blog and read this post.
March 7, 1936/April 11, 2006
by Hugh Hewitt
April 11, 2006 04:44 PM EST
March 7, 1936 is the day Hitler ordered German troops to reoccupy the Rhineland, and the date genearlly believed to have been, in retrospect, the ideal time to have stopped Hitler's march towards the war that followed.
Britain and France did nothing, and the war came...
During Hewy's show yesterday he kept asking if there was anyone on the left who had the courage to "do what needed to be done" about Iran. Hewy wants to get a new war on and he's using the play book the GOP used to get The Iraq War on.
We all remember the play book used to get the Iraq War on. Some people here even fell for it. The majority of my friends did even though I was able to point out each and every lie almost as soon as it came out. They fell for it for a number of reasons. One reason many of them fell for it was because they just couldn't imagine anyone so desperately wanting to go to war that they would be willing to lie to accomplish their goal. You are supposed to be able to trust the President to tell the truth when he says that we must send our kids to kill and/or be killed in a foreign land. The idea that any President would be willing to lie to them about such a major thing was foreign to them.
The other reason they fell for it was because of the very effective Saddam=Hitler comparrisson. Not so much the acctual comparrisson between the two but the dream of what the world would have been had Hitler been stopped before he was able to get his war on. That is a very powerfull frame.
And so it will be a frame that the GOP Message Machine will use again. Of course they can't just rely on that frame alone. They have to use another frame to marginalize the people who oppose military action. So they are going to the Iraq War play book for other frames that worked.
While it doesn't do a lot of good to go on with the blame game that has broken out in many places --though this is an excellent quick summary of the case against James Earl Carter-- neither does it do any good to pretend that America doesn't have a military option, or to try and take that option off the table by asserting it must be nuclear to be effective.
Of course the United States can end the Iranian nuclear program and its despotic regime, though the costs would be high, just as in Iraq.
Britain and France could have stopped Hitler and didn't.
The United States can stop Iran, but there is a division among the country's elites as to whether we ought to.
In my conversations today with Larry Kord and Jonathan Alter, in Chris Matthews discussion with Barbara Boxer, and all across the web, we see an absolute refusal of the left and the party it controls to deal with the seriousness of this issue.
We could all see this one comming from a mile away. The Left isn't serious about protecting this country. The Left is only concerned with Blaming President Bush for everything wrong in the world. The effectiveness of this in the run up to the Iraq War was obvious. Not only were they able to use the frame to actually get their war on but they were also able to use it to take control of the Senate and maintain the House.
The press was a willing Bukakke recipient of these talking points. They took these talking points and spewed them back out as conventional wisdom. Will they do the same thing this time? Saddly I think the answer is going to be yes. Very little has happened in the past four years to give me any confidence that they learned their lesson.
For good measure, Hewy put out the final talking point that you knew had to be comming.
The hour is very late indeed, and the left is locked in its Bush hatred, and the GOP is self-destructing over a series of intra-party disputes.