You know you’re in trouble when Sullivan titles a post, “Consistency Revisited.”
And apropos of nothing, Andrew sure knows how ruin someone on the right — my reputation amongst my fellow Neocon Rightwing Death Beasts is forever tarnished, as Sullivan utters those dreaded words, “Ed Driscoll has a good point”:
I’ve noticed a few right-of-center blogs complaining of double standards on the left, in the denunciations of extremist rhetoric and imagery of the Tea Party marches. Ed Driscoll has a good point. The extremes of the anti-war left before Iraq were every bit as inflammatory and loopy as the Tea Partiers today. Now, they were opposing a war that turned out to be a catastrophe for all involved [Especially for Saddam -- Ed], while the Tea Partiers are just opposing the working poor having a chance to buy health insurance. But if Godwin’s Law is the point, many (but not all) on the left currently do not have a leg to stand on.
By 2007, Andrew found a neat way to make a subtle variation on the increasingly shopworn Bush=Hitler chorus, by arguing that Bush equaled Hindenburg(!), when Sullivan dubbed him “The Weimar President.” Back then, I wrote:
My current favorite is Andrew Sullivan’s newest riff, on “The Weimar President”. I can only guess that Andrew believes that President Bush is an elderly figurehead leading a weakened but relatively benign quasi-socialist administration suffering the ravages of hyper-inflation and that Hillary, Obama or whoever his successor is, is the next Hitler, about to install a terribly malevolent war machine and concurrent massive welfare state?
Further deconstruction of this lead zeppelin of an analogy, here.
As I suggested in that post, perhaps Sullivan was merely getting a jump on the next administration. And speaking of which, in May of 2009, Sullivan wrote:
This speech, to my mind, was a conservative one by a conservative president who seeks first and foremost to use existing institutions to address the new challenges of the moment, and then seeks pragmatic compromises, always open to future checks and balances, in those places where such institutions clearly need reform and adjustment.
So Kerry and Obama are conservatives; Bush, whom Andrew once staunchly defended for his decisive response in the wake of the terrorist atrocities of 9/11, was the president of the leftwing but impotent Weimar Republic.
On Tuesday’s Situation Room, CNN’s Suzanne Malveaux questioned RNC Chairman Michael Steele about the debate over ObamaCare, and alleged that protesters “from your own party…have talked about and compared President Obama to Hitler” at the health care town halls. The anchor also bizarrely asked Steele if he gave Attorney General Holder “credit…for breaking away from President Obama.”
Midway through her interview with the GOP leader, Malveaux made the left-wing allegation that Republican activists were using Nazi imagery against the President at the town halls: “How honest do you think the debate has been- the discussion? In light of some of the town hall meetings, some of the rhetoric that we’ve seen from both sides, but specifically those who are from your own party who have talked about and compared President Obama to- to Hitler.”
CNN has raised the issue of the Nazi comparisons at the health care town halls in the past weeks, all the while making three significant omissions. First, they neglected to mention that early in August, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi accused the anti-ObamaCare protesters of “carrying swastikas and symbols like that to a town hall meeting on health care,” which led to Rush Limbaugh pointing out the similarities between the DNC health care logo and a Nazi symbol. They have also failed to mention that supporters of leftist Lyndon LaRouche bore posters of President Obama defaced with a Hitler mustache.
Not to mention this infamous CNN moment earlier this year during an interview with Steele himself:
CNN host D.L. Hughley turned to the standard left-wing tactic of playing the Nazi card against Republicans on his program on Saturday evening: “The tenets of the Republican Party are amazing and they seem warm and welcome. But when I watch it be applied — like you didn’t have to go much further than the Republican National Convention….It literally look[s] like Nazi Germany.” He went on to say that blacks weren’t welcome in the party: “It just does not seem — like not only are we not welcome — not only are we not welcome, but they don’t even care what we think.”
And speaking of Steele (whom Jennifer Rubin interviewed today on PJTV), Erick Erickson of Red State.org is curious why the leader of the Republican National Committee is attacking on talk radio the presumptive Republican nominee for the United States Senate in Missouri, Roy Blunt?
At recent rallies, town hall meetings and “tea parties,” a few protesters have shown up with signs comparing Obama to Hitler (i.e. depicting him with a Hitler mustache), or displaying swastikas in the context of implying that Obama and/or his administration are Nazi-like.
One would think that this would not be particularly newsworthy, but Democrats, the White House and their supporters are expressing outrage at this “horrifying” and “menacing” turn of events. (Or faux-outrage, at least.) Pundits, bloggers, media outlets and even top politicians like Nancy Pelosi are claiming that such signs are unprecedented, racist, and even that anyone who brings a swastika to a protest must be self-identifying as a Nazi (instead of accusing their opponents of being Nazis). When anyone tries to point out that the Left continuously compared Bush to Hitler and brought swastikas to rallies for six straight years during the Bush era, Obama supporters mock such claims, demand proof, and then try to ignore any individual examples proffered.
Since I had a front-row seat between 2003 and 2008 at anti-Bush protests in the San Francisco Bay Area, where I saw literally THOUSANDS of Bush/Hitler comparisons and swastikas, I thought perhaps it would be useful to compile here in one place a small sampling of them — to prove beyond any doubt that Hitler and swastikas were referenced incessantly at basically every single protest during the Bush administration. Anyone who claims otherwise is lying, as is anyone who claims that people who bring swastikas to rallies are necessarily self-identifying as Nazis.
I’m not saying I “approve” of the new variant of this trend (comparing Obama to Hitler), nor that it is any more clever or insightful than comparing Bush to Hitler; I only post these images here to highlight the hypocrisy of anyone now expressing outrage that Obama could uniquely suffer such an indignity.
The pictures below were all taken by me at protests between 2003 and 2008 in the San Francisco Bay Area. One can easily find hundreds of similar photos on my site zombietime. And I am just one photographer in one city — there are innumerable similar examples by other citizen journalists in other cities across America.
John Hinderaker spots this disgusting moment from Tom Brokaw, which to his credit, President Obama backpedaled quickly away from:
Much has been made of President Obama’s “on the other hand” transition, in his speech yesterday, from the Holocaust to the travails of the Palestinians. Some thought that he implied a kind of equivalence. But the appalling Tom Brokaw reminded us that it could have been worse when he asked Obama about his visit to Buchenwald on the Today Show this morning:
BROKAW: What can the Israelis learn from your visit to Buchenwald? And what should they be thinking about their treatment of Palestinians?
Unbelievable. Obama, to his credit, squelched the analogy:
I thought, or rather hoped, that Powerline was kidding. Nope. You’ll find the exchange here, around 4:05. (Obama thankfully rejects the analogy.) For added disgust, note that this interview was conducted in Dresden, ground zero of the neo-Nazi revisionist movement to draw moral equivalence between Nazi atrocities and Allied bombings of German cities. You’ll fit right in at MSNBC, Tom.
A key moment in shaping the left’s current perception of Dresden was the first book by Holocaust denier David Irving No word yet if Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is a fan.
“Here we are now in the United Nations, an organisation created as a response to the atrocities of the Second World War and we have to protest against anti-Semitic speech.”
– Elie Wiesel, after someone in Ahmadinejad’s entourage shouted “Zionazi” at him, at the Durban II conference. As Allahpundit writes, “Don’t try parsing the logic: Why Iranians would consider ‘Nazi’ an epithet, especially given Dinner Jacket’s revisionism on genocide, isn’t clear.”
What is clear now, Roger L. Simon adds, is that “the Durban Review Conference is not an anti-racism conference; it’s a pro-racism conference, sponsored by the UN.”
Bush and Cheney were, in fact, more brutal in their “enhanced interrogation” than the Gestapo was. And note that I am not engaging in the slightest hyperbole here.
The long-dreaded 2004 Olympics in Greece will be the ultimate crossroads for sports and politics in this new and vicious century. The recent photos of cruelty at the Abu Grahaib all-american prison in Baghdad have taken care of that.
Yes, sir. We have taken the bull by the horns on this one, sports fans. These horrifying digital snapshots of the American dream in action on foreign soil are worse than anything even I could have expected. I have been in this business a long time and I have seen many staggering things, but this one is over the line. Now I am really ashamed to carry an American passport. Not even the foulest atrocities of Adolf Hitler ever shocked me so badly as these photographs did.
Of course back in 2007, Sullivan was calling Bush “The Weimar President”–somehow his administration morphed a decade in less than two years.
As longtime readers of the Blogosphere will remember, CNN president Jonathan Klein is the man who inadvertently inspired Pajamas Media’s name, in the midst of his defense of former employee Dan Rather in September of 2004, as John Fund wrote at the time:
A watershed media moment occurred Friday on Fox News Channel, when Jonathan Klein, a former executive vice president of CBS News who oversaw “60 Minutes,” debated Stephen Hayes, a writer for The Weekly Standard, on the documents CBS used to raise questions about George W. Bush’s Vietnam-era National Guard service.
Mr. Klein dismissed the bloggers who are raising questions about the authenticity of the memos: “You couldn’t have a starker contrast between the multiple layers of check and balances [at '60 Minutes'] and a guy sitting in his living room in his pajamas writing.”
He will regret that snide disparagement of the bloggers, many of whom are skilled lawyers or have backgrounds in military intelligence or typeface design. A growing number of design and document experts say they are certain or almost certain the memos on which CBS relied are forgeries.
Mr. Klein didn’t directly address the mounting objections to CBS’s story. He fell back on what high school debaters call the appeal to authority, implying that the reputation of “60 Minutes” should be enough to dissolve doubts without the network sharing its methods with other journalists and experts. He told Fox’s Tony Snow that the “60 Minutes” team is “the most careful news organization, certainly on television.” He said that Mary Mapes, the producer of the story, was “a crack journalist” who had broken the Abu Ghraib prison abuse story.
And as Tim Graham writes at Newsbusters, shortly after Klein first arrived at CNN, he canceled CNN’s 22-year old Crossfire show “because he agreed with liberal comedian Jon Stewart that this harsh partisan head-butting was ‘hurting” America.’”
As Limbaugh-bashing networks like CNN and MSNBC continue to play up a Rush vs. Michael Steele feud, the diversionary tactic isn’t just keeping people away from focusing on Barack Obama. It also prevents a focus on CNN host D.L. Hughley’s inflammatory statement that the GOP convention “looked like Nazi Germany,” and the man who put Hughley on the air – CNN president Jonathan Klein.
Klein is the man who killed Crossfire after 22 years in 2005 because he agreed with liberal comedian Jon Stewart that this harsh partisan head-butting was “hurting” America. Four years later, wild talk about Nazi conservatives is okay with CNN’s boss: he told the AP last fall that Hughley was given the instructions “Anything goes!”
On October 16, 2008, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that Klein hired Hughley because he was “well-informed,” deeply knowledgeable about the world (does that fit equating an American political convention to Nazi Germany?)
Update: Speaking of Klein taketh away, “CNN’s D. L. Hughley Ends Show, Days After He Called Republicans Nazis”–but according to CNN’s press release, the network remains “eager to continue our relationship with D.L., who is a tremendous talent and a valued colleague.”
Palin addressed a North Carolina fund-raiser Thursday night saying, “We believe that the best of America is not all in Washington, D.C. We believe…that the best of America is in these small towns that we get to visit, and in these wonderful little pockets of what I call the real America, being here with all of you hard working very patriotic, very pro-America areas of this great nation.”
The comment was quickly picked up by media outlets and the Obama campaign, whose spokesman Bill Burton asked in an e-mail to reporters, “What part of the country isn’t pro-America?”
Thank God that ABC lets its hosts of The View blog. Back in 2006, there was the sophisticated and nuanced prose stylings of Rosie O’Donnell, and successor Whoopi Goldberg is proudly upholding the same commitment to high-quality journalism that has made Big Media what it is today. In both cases, the 21st century medium of the Blogosphere allows them to share with us insights into their personalities–and dare I say it–views, that simply cannot be boxed into the tubercular blue small screen of television alone.
Such as the fact that Whoopi Goldberg doesn’t know the difference between “succeed” and “secede”, and sees in Sarah Palin, a conservative tax-cutting pro-life candidate with libertarian leanings, the return of a hard left racially driven socialist agenda governmental leviathan bent on euthanasia and ethnic cleansing.
Or as Tim Graham puts it, “Whoopi Goldberg: Palin Sounds Pro-Nazi, Wants to ‘Succeed’ From U.S.”
(And speaking of secession–I guess this means that the left has finally come to their senses on the Akaka bill, whose author has said could eventually lead to “outright independence” for Hawaii, and is supported by Barack Obama.)
Capital idea, Chris! In an age where brand synergy is all, I’m sure the fellas at Those Shirts and the legal bean counters inside the New Yorker’s offices could work out a licensing agreement that would be mutually beneficial. Considering how much the Manhattan-based print media have been suffering financially, I’m glad to see that Matthews is always on the lookout for ways to increase their revenues through carefully selected cross-promotional opportunities.
Seriously though, it’s amazing, isn’t it? A decade spent comparing President Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Rush Limbaugh, and more recently wishing that fellow Democrat Hillary Clinton would snuff it is all perfectly fine, but the left is positively apoplectic when their own firing squad turns circular.
Richard Brooks of the Times of London writes that Tom Cruise’s Valkyrie is being pushed back a year:
The fortunes of Hollywood actor Tom Cruise have suffered a blow with the news that his next big film has been postponed until 2009.
The release of Valkyrie, which tells the story of the 1944 assassination plot against Hitler, was first postponed from this summer to the autumn and is now not expected to appear until next year.
Soon to be ex-GOP Congressional candidate Tony Zirkle from Indiana speaks with neo-Nazis in Chicago:
U.S. Congressional candidate Tony Zirkle is facing criticism from one of his primary opponents, and a host of people on the Internet, for speaking at an event over the weekend that celebrated Adolf Hitler
Chaz Pazienza, the former CNN producer whom we briefly mentioned here last week after he was fired from CNN for his blog, has a post today on the HuffPo:
When I asked, just out of curiosity, who came across my blog and/or the columns in the Huffington Post, the woman from HR answered, “We have people within the company whose job is specifically to research this kind of thing in regard to employees.”
Jesus, we have a Gestapo?
Since you’re still able to type, the answer to that would “No.” On the other hand, Chez’s former employer has rarely met a government with a similar agency it didn’t want to prop up.
Quietly, while Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have been inspiring Democrats everywhere with their rolling bitchfest, congressional superduo Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi have completed one of the most awesome political collapses since Neville Chamberlain. [Nicely done Bush=Hitler Godwin's Law violation--Ed] At long last, the Democratic leaders of Congress have publicly surrendered on the Iraq War, just one year after being swept into power with a firm mandate to end it.
Not surprisingly, given that it’s Rolling Stone, that’s a fundamental misreading of the results of the November 2006 midterms.
(And apropos of nothing, Douglas Kern used the phrase “Chickendoves” three years ago over at Tech Central Station.)
