I can hardly read an account of a healthcare town hall meeting without seeing a reference to Republican teabaggers calling President Obama a Nazi for daring to try to use his position to improve the lot of all Americans. It's gotten so widespread that the New York Times is writing about it. Never mind the obvious hypocrisy of Republican teabaggers referring to proponents of healthcare reform as Nazis when they reacted so heavyhandedly (though not without justification) when one submission to MoveOn.org's contest to submit 30-second ads critical of the Shrub tastelessly did the same thing, as Glenn Greenwald recently noted here and here. Greenwald's take is right on the money:
It's really amazing -- though not at all surprising -- that when an anonymous Internet user compares Bush to Hitler, the media goes into Full Hysteria Alert, but when the most influential conservative figure in the country does the same thing, they utter barely a peep of recognition.
So much for the so-called liberal media.
We all know that facts have a liberal bias, which might explain why the stenographers who make up the traditional media these days couldn't find a critical thought with a flashlight and a road map. In the hope that some might be capable of learning, though, let's take a minute to examine the myriad ways in which Republicans are, once again, full of guano.
I think I know a fair bit about Nazis. 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 -- note that my antagonists in the incidents recounted there are the very profile of the teabagger base.
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:
This is a Nazi:
This is not a Nazi:
These are Nazis:
This is not a Nazi:
These are Nazi images:
These are Nazi-like images:
These are things that aren't even remotely Nazi-like:
universal healthcare
taxes
people who have opinions that are different from yours (unless, of course, they actually are Nazis -- see the images above to make a proper determination)
civil liberties
people who support President Barack Obama
feminism
people who know that President Barack Obama was born in Hawaii
demanding equal rights for racial and ethnic minorities
same-sex marriage
abortion
people who aren't 100% in lockstep with your views, whatever they are (unless, again, they actually are Nazis)
Say what you will about abortion, but if you think abortion is like the Nazis, you don't know the first thing about the circumstances of women who have abortions. On the other hand, if you support murdering people like Dr. George Tiller, you are a hell of a lot closer to the Nazis than most people. And as for that last item, well, the Nazis liked to kill people who weren't 100% in lockstep with their views. Does that sound familiar, teabaggers? Have you seen this? Have you heard this?
It's a question of whether you have a solid grasp of reality or suffer from self-inflicted delusions, whether you're rational or hysterical, whether you have a genuine argument to make or are the rhetorical and moral equivalent of Falafel Boy and Rush Limbaugh, whether you care about Americans or merely claim to while hiding like cowards behind the flag and the troops. See, what the Nazis did was many orders of magnitude worse than having someone disagree with you, or insult you, or (God forbid!) try to address one of the biggest social and economic problems of our time. When you set Nazis and Nazism as the baseline against which to compare things that aren't even in the same universe in terms of evil -- or aren't even evil at all -- you trivialize the crimes of actual Nazis and the suffering of their all too real victims.
To paraphrase Mark Twain, it is better to keep your hands off your keyboard and let people think you are a fool than to violate Godwin's Law and remove all doubt. Though some of your signs really don't help there:
There's enough foolishness in the world these days without lying about the content of a healthcare plan you never even bothered to research. There's enough violence in the world these days without inciting the most gullible of your followers to commit more of it against people who have the unmitigated gall to have an opinion based on facts and justice rather than selfishness, and therefore different from yours. The members of the press who are fanning the flames of this idiocy and the first-degree idiots themselves like to talk a lot about the First Amendment, but they forget four important facts:
- The First Amendment also applies to people who disagree with you.
- Just because you have the right to say something stupid and inflammatory, doesn't mean you should.
- There comes a point where free speech crosses the line into incitement to commit a crime. When you cross that line and someone gets hurt or killed, you have blood on your hands.
- Objective reporting does not require that you "balance" the truth with teabaggers' lies. The teabaggers' lies are objectively, demonstrably false. Giving them equal weight with reality is just plain stupid.
Responsible members of the press will remember these facts and deny the liars their platform. That means that when someone like Jim DeMint, the wingnut Senator from South Carolina, claims that allowing the uninsured to buy vouchers with TARP money would decrease the number of uninsured without costing the taxpayers anything, he will be exposed for the buffoon he is. It means that when Republican House leaders John Boehner and Thaddeus McCotter claim the healthcare reform plan promotes euthanasia, they will be rebuked for attempting to defraud the American people. It means that when no one has proposed "death panels" as part of the healthcare reform plan, a liar like Sarah Palin who uses her parents and son as props to claim otherwise will be ridiculed like the Republican teabagger she is. (And who are we kidding, using Facebook to make a major policy statement?!? God, I hope Palin is the Teabag Party's nominee in 2012!)
So how about it, Republicans? Do you want to grow up, accept that you lost the election because, frankly, your "ideas" stunk the first time you tried them 50 years or more ago, and participate in rational discussion about one of our biggest problems as a nation? Or do you want to just reinforce your status as a fringe, regional, racist and otherwise bigoted party with a weird obsession with sexual imagery (e.g., "teabaggers" and the "Fuck you faggot. Suck my cock you pervert." kind of nonsense we see weekly in the Saturday hate mail-apalooza)?
And how about you, traditional media types? Do you want to rein in the inflammatory, offensive, obnoxious, sometimes criminally inciting rhetorical excesses of your more extremist, hypocritical members? Or do you want to continue to marginalize yourselves by defending them in the guise of the First Amendment while censoring those who oppose them?
On both accounts, don't worry. I know the chances of either group behaving responsibly are about the same as Harry Reid growing a spine. I won't be holding my breath.