Found via LGF, clearly these are examples of a handful of overzealous fans of Family Guy having some harmless fun. Or maybe a bored academician blowing off steam.

Nothing to worry about here, citizens!

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As Mary Katharine Ham writes:

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?"

Well, there is a small company town in southern California whose chief industry routinely compares one American political party with an ideology that that ended 60 years ago, but not before killing tens of millions of people, while annually explaining away its own deeply entrenched support for an ideology that concurrently also killed tens of millions of people, and is still trudging along in one form or another.

Further answers here.

So is John McCain a Nazi or a Confederate slave owner? I wish the Obama campaign would make up its mind, and simplify its talking points for the media down to one useful all-purpose epithet, rather than the scattershot nailbomb approach of their advisors.

Progress of a sort, from Charlie Rangel: with his latest in a lifetime of ad hominems, at least he's no longer calling a Republican a Nazi.

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.)

Chris Matthews has an exceptional idea, as Newsbusters notes: Matthews Worries 'Right' Will Turn New Yorker Cover into T-Shirt."

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.

(Which actually happens with surprising regularity.)

Chicago Sun-Times: "Boeing as amoral as firms that aided Hitler."

John Glenn and Harry Reid could not be reached for comment.

Speaking of conspiracy junkies, here's one closer to home:

Asked what he thinks of McCain, Vidal calls him a “disaster,” then tells Deborah Solomon, “Who started this rumor that he was a war hero? Where does that come from, aside from himself? About his suffering in the prison war camp?”

Solomon replies: “Everyone knows he was a prisoner of war in North Vietnam.” To which Vidal responds: “That’s what he tells us.”

All merely a part of the master plan by the "fascist government ...which controls the media."

(And yet somehow, as the above interview with Deborah Solomon of the New York Times illustrates, it keeps quoting and publishing him without reprisal. Go figure.)

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.

“We were originally expecting the film to be released in June,” said a senior executive at one of Britain’s leading cinema chains.

“I know there have been all sorts of problems with this production and we will not be screening it at all this year.”

The film is not only a blow to Cruise as an actor but in his more recent incarnation as a movie mogul at United Artists (UA), the studio which made the film.

One critic in Hollywood has declared “Valkyrie is dead”, with another arguing that the film’s problems could also wreck the revival of UA.

Not to mention totally bumming out these fellas.

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’s birthday.

Zirkle confirmed to The News-Dispatch on Monday he spoke Sunday in Chicago at a meeting of the Nationalist Socialist Workers Party, whose symbol is a swastika.

When asked if he was a Nazi or sympathized with Nazis or white supremacists, Zirkle replied he didn’t know enough about the group to either favor it or oppose it. “This is just a great opportunity for me to witness,” he said, referring to his message and his Christian belief.

He also told WIMS radio in Michigan City that he didn’t believe the event he attended included people necessarily of the Nazi mindset, pointing out the name isn’t Nazi, but Nationalist Socialist Workers Party.

As the director of the play within the movie The Producers said after reading its script, "Did you know, I never knew that the Third Reich meant Germany. I mean it's just drenched with historical goodies like that!"

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.

(Via Greg Pollowitz.)

Update: Speaking of propping up...

Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi writes:

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.)

Is David Duke trolling the Blogosphere these days?

Paging Mr. Godwin:

This is the cover of the new issue of Pat Buchanan’s American Conservative magazine, featuring an article by the far left’s most dishonest blogger, Glenn Greenwald. It’s a monumental convergence of idiocies.

Ahh, another election year, another Buchanan harmonic convergence with the far left. Has the magazine's big Michael Moore cover story and interview happened yet? It's only a matter of time.

As Roger L. Simon writes, "Huckabee is funny...He's come up with the best laughs so far of the campaign... maybe the only laughs:

Some have suggested there is an image of a cross behind Huckabee's shoulder as he talks to the camera in the ad, but Huckabee dismissed that Tuesday.

"That was a book shelf behind me, a book shelf," Huckabee told reporters while campaigning in Houston, Texas.

Huckabee was asked if his language crossed the line between faith and politics: "Absolutely not," he said.

Huckabee went on to joke, to the delight of the reporters in the room, "I will confess this; if you play the spot backwards it says 'Paul is dead, Paul is dead, Paul is dead.'"

Well, brain-dead at least, if you know just a scintilla of the history of the 1920s and '30s.

Someone is taking the title of Jonah Goldberg's upcoming Liberal Fascism just a mite too seriously:

The only positive thing I can think of about Hitler’s time on earth–I’m sure he would have eliminated all bloggers. In Colonial times, bloggers were called “Pamphleteers.” They hung on street corners handing them out to passersby. Now, they hang out on electronic street corners, hoping somebody mouses on to their pretentious sites. Different medium, same MO. Shakespeare accidentally summed up the genre best with these words from a MacBeth soliloquy: “. . .a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. . .”

As Ace writes, "That's a quote from a Philadelphia sportswriter responding to a baseball blogger who, fairly politely and rationally I think, wrote him an email telling him that his pick for MVP was wrong."

Shades of another former sportswriter's reductio ad Hitlerum.

Four years ago, Dennis Miller told The American Enterprise magazine:

The Left is so busy saying John Ashcroft is Hitler, and President Bush is Hitler, and Rudy Giuliani is Hitler that the only guy they wouldn’t call Hitler was the foreign guy with the mustache who was throwing people who disagreed with him into the wood-chipper.

And since in the future, everyone will be Hitler for 15 minutes, this week's candidate for the business end of Reductio ad Hitlerum is NBC's Tim Russert, with Rudy Giuliani closing fast for the coveted, if readily available, slur.

Update: "What exactly have they put in the water at The New Republic?"

The New York Post reports:

A swastika was found today spray-painted on the office door of a Jewish professor at Teachers College who studies the Holocaust and vehemently opposed the visit to the Columbia campus by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, cops said.

The reviled image, painted in brown, was discovered at 9:30 a.m. on the office door of Dr. Elizabeth Midlarsky, 66, co-chairwoman of the counseling and clinical psychology department at the college.

As the History News Network wrote last month, Columbia invited Hitler to speak on campus in 1933:

As Prof. Stephen Norwood of the University of Oklahoma has found in his research on the academic community’s response to Hitler in the 1930s, Columbia was not the only prominent U.S. university to behave shamefully with regard to the Nazis. Harvard hosted a visit by Hitler’s foreign press spokesman, Ernst “Putzi” Hanfstaengl. American University chancellor Joseph Gray visited and praised Nazi Germany. MIT Dean Harold Lobdell personally tore down posters for a rally against a Nazi warship docked in Boston’s harbor, and MIT participated in a 1937 celebration at the Nazi-controlled University of Goettingen. Yale, Princeton, Bryn Mawr, and others continued student exchanges with Nazi Germany into the late 1930s, and more than twenty U.S. colleges and universities took part in the 1936 Heidelberg event.

But Columbia is unique in one important respect. Its administration alone seems to have learned so little from the mistakes of the 1930s that it is prepared to welcome the leader of yet another antisemitic, terrorist regime.

It shouldn't be an entirely unexpected consequence that a related symbols of hate, then and now, defiles its campus.

In my "Hollywood Nihilism" post from earlier this week, I quoted a story told by writer/director Lionel Chetwynd when he pitched a WWII movie to Hollywood execs:

When Chetwynd was a successful Hollywood writer specializing in historical dramas, he told the Dieppe story during a Malibu dinner party — as a sort of tribute to the men who died there so people could sit around debating politics at Malibu dinner parties. One of the guests was a network head who asked Chetwynd to come in and pitch the story.

"So I went in," Chetwynd told me, "and someone there said, 'So these bloodthirsty generals sent these men to a certain death?'

"And I said, 'Well, they weren't bloodthirsty; they wept. But how else were we to know how Hitler could be toppled from Europe?' And she said, 'Well, who's the enemy?' I said, 'Hitler. The Nazis.' And she said, 'Oh, no, no, no. I mean, who's the real enemy?'"

Horrified onlookers of the daily television entertrainwreck The View saw that mindset played out this morning by Whoopi Goldberg.

Tim Blair has "Possibly the ultimate leftist slogan of 2007"; no that's not it in Tim's headline above, click on over to see it for yourself printed on--where else?--a t-shirt.

Charlie Rangel would no doubt approve, as would the authors of this book.

A year ago I wrote, "What is it with colleges in the state I grew up in and The Reich Stuff, anyhow?" It looks like the disease is spreading beyond its incubation on the Garden State's campuses out into its signature farmland.

In the Commentary essay (reprinted here) that inspired his new book, Camelot and the Cultural Revolution, James Piereson wrote:

There is much about Oswald and the assassination that can now never be known for certain. Of one thing, however, there can be little doubt: there would never have been any serious talk about a conspiracy if President Kennedy had been shot by a right-wing figure whose guilt was established by the same evidence as condemned Oswald. Such an event would have been readily understood in terms of then prevailing assumptions about the dangers from the Right. Kennedy’s assassin, however, bolted onto the historical stage in violation of a script that many people had assimilated as the truth about America. Instead of adjusting their thinking accordingly, they strove to account for the discordance by taking refuge in conspiracy theories.

As I've written before, this sort of paranoia was associated in the 1950s and early-60s with the fringe elements of the right, before the inability to process Oswald's ideology was one of the first key sign of a far left becoming increasingly batty.

Similarly, the overheated language of the modern left, such as Al Gore’s recent attempt to demonize his critics as “Digital Brownshirts” also begins to grow out of this mid-1960s period. “Just as the Birch Society had accused Eisenhower of being a communist”, Piereson recently told me in an interview, “by the late sixties, the liberals and leftists were accusing everyone else with being Nazis and fascists."

You can see both elements at play here:

The nation’s first Muslim congressman said Tuesday that he erred in comparing the Bush administration’s response to Sept. 11 to an event that led to Adolf Hitler’s consolidation of power in Nazi Germany.

At an appearance before a group of atheists in Minnesota on July 8, Rep. Keith Ellison, D-Minn., called Sept. 11 “the juggernaut” that led to war, tolerating torture and increased discrimination against religious minorities.

“It’s almost like the Reichstag fire, kind of reminds me of that,” he said. “After the Reichstag was burned, they blamed the Communists for it and it put the leader of that country in a position where he could basically have authority to do whatever he wanted.”

Ellison has since issued a sort of non-apology apology for his remarks; the whole thing is very much in line with the "blurt and retreat" strategy that Steven Hayward described recently in regards to an even more prominent member of the left.

Well to be fair, the nation does have quite a bit of prior experience in regards to mixing a "progressive" post-Christian cult-like pagan religion with made-up pseudo-science; best to cut them some slack on this one.

And incidentally, given the inevitable comparisons the film is sure to draw if it is completed, did Peter Mehlman do any work on its screenplay?

Update: Allison Kaplan Sommer links to Defamer:

There are suspicions that the decision was based “on an early treatment developed by Cruise, in which his von Stauffenberg character attempts to slowly kill Hitler by depriving him of the many self-actualizing services offered by Scientology, causing the Fuhrer to die from the despair of knowing he’d never reach his potential as a fully clear leader without the help of daily auditing sessions.”

So it's Downfall meets Battlefield: Earth, I guess. The Color of Reichsmarks.

Or perhaps it's the daily post surveying the crazed fringe. In any case, Robyn Blumner of The Columbus Dispatch is in high dudgeon mode about those mean, mean Men In Black:

Often you can sum up the collective actions of the Supreme Court under a particular chief justice with one word. The Warren Court always will be remembered as liberal, the Burger Court as pragmatic and the Rehnquist Court as conservative. The Roberts Court in its short tenure has already earned the moniker mean.

The addition of Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito to the heartless duo of Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas has cemented a plurality for cruelty. If there's a choice between casting a lot for the little guy or putting a foot on his throat, it's a safe bet that these four will put on their jackboots.

Funny, I've never confused Clarence Thomas with Roland Freisler myself, but I guess that's just my own naiveté.

Yesterday, I quoted from Victor Davis Hanson, who noted, as had James Piereson, the flip-over of conspiracy theorists from the fluoridated John Birch right of the 1950s to today's left. As the passage I excerpted from VDH concluded:

But over the years, conservatism came to terms with civil rights and anti-Semitism. Free markets, not socialism, enriched America and brought a level of affluence undreamed of it to the poor. (When I was seven, outhouses and unpaved roads were common in West Selma; today in the same neighborhood you see SUVS, new tract houses, and I-pods and blue teeth in the ears of illegal aliens.). And so the Klan, Birchers, and other assorted embarrassments were peeled off.

The left in the 1940s and 1950s had likewise gotten rid of its communist wing, and ostracized its fellow travelers. Henry Wallace was taken off the ticket. Dean Acheson and George Kennan had made liberal anti-communism logical rather than paradoxical.

But now the Left, still going on the fumes of the 1960s, has the greater problem with its extremists. Of course, the “base” can attack Bush on immigration, gay marriage, etc. but not from a position of sheer lunacy. The same is not true of the netroots or the Cindy Sheehan/Michael Moore wing on the Left. They openly praise our enemies, whether in Syria or Iraq (“Minutemen”). They prefer the unfree world of Chavez and Castro to our own. And their language and methodology are as uncouth and repulsive as were the old tactics of the Birch Society.

Proving Hanson's point, here's Peter Mehlman, former Washington Post sportswriter turned writer and producer for Seinfeld, in the Huffington Post today:

You could argue that even the world's worst fascist dictators at least meant well. They honestly thought were doing good things for their countries by suppressing blacks/eliminating Jews/eradicating free enterprise/repressing individual thought/killing off rivals/invading neighbors, etc. Only the Saudi royal family is driven by the same motives as Bush, but they were already entrenched. Bush set a new precedent. He came into office with the attitude of "I'm so tired of the public good. What about my good? What about my rich friends' good?"

How can anyone not see it? It's not that their policies have been misguided or haven't played out right. They. Don't. Even. Mean. Well.

It's been a while since I've referred to Jonah Goldberg's quote on the topic, but it sounds like the perfect rebuttal to Mehlman's conspiratorial ("How can anyone not see it?") rant:

I don't say this because I feel a passionate need to defend George Bush. I would make the exact same points if Al Gore were president. I would make the exact same points if anybody running for the Democratic nomination were president. This has nothing to do with partisanship. It has to do with the fact that such comparisons are slanderous to the United States and historical truth and amount to Holocaust denial. When you say that anything George Bush has done is akin to what Hitler did, you make the Holocaust into nothing more than an example of partisan excess. Tax cuts are not genocide, as so many Democrats have suggested over the years. (For example,. during the Contract with America debate, Charles Rangel complained that "Hitler wasn't even talking about doing these things" that were in the Contract with America. In other words, the Contract with America was in some way worse than what Hitler did. At the end of the day, that is Holocaust denial.)

"Darn those Republicans" does not equal "Darn those Nazis." The Patriot Act is not the final solution. The handful of men in Guantanamo may not all be guilty of terrorism, but it's more than reasonable to assume they are. And no matter how you try to contort it, Gitmo is not the same thing as Auschwitz or Dachau. There are no children there. You don't get carted off to Cuba and gassed if you criticize the president or if you are one-quarter Muslim. And, inversely, there was no reasonable justification for throwing the Jews and the Gypsies and all the others into the death camps. The Jews weren't terrorists or members of a terrorist organization. To say that the men in Guantanamo — or any of the Muslims being politely interviewed by appointment — are akin to the Jews of Germany is to trivialize the experiences of the millions who were slaughtered. Even if you think Muslims are being unfairly inconvenienced, when you say they are the Jews of Nazified America you are in essence saying the worst crime of the Holocaust was to unfairly inconvenience the Jews.

Just as newspapers historically have had editors to--hopefully--tamp down on their writers' excesses, so to does Hollywood have story editors, directors, producers and network standards and practices divisions to keep their own writers' extremes in check.

Fortunately, the Huff Post gives them the perfect salon in which to bare all their thoughts.

Dean Barnett writes:

Speaking honestly here, and straight from the heart, I can’t believe the McCain campaign is so blind. Republican voters detest McCain/Kennedy. They hate the way the bill’s proponents have “sold” the bill even more so. The primary selling method, from the White House on down, has been to attack the bill’s critics.

Here’s what the misguided salesmen don’t get, and I’m including the president in this assessment. Only 26% of the public supports the bill. Democrats hate it almost as much as conservatives. Even if we assume for the sake of argument that the bill is wonderful and people just oppose it because they don’t understand its particulars (a tough case to make since the only people who seem to have read the bill are people who don’t like it like me and Hugh), why do the bill’s proponents think it’s a successful tool of persuasion to insult the people with whom they differ?

Fortunately for George Bush, he won’t have to endure the Republican electorate’s wrath over the immigration compromise. But if he did, he would find out that sending out his lackeys to call members of his own party Nazis would not be a winner. (I can’t win. Andrew Sullivan implies I’m a Nazi; the administration implies I’m a Nazi. Is there anyone out there who doesn’t think I’m a Nazi?)

As Beautiful Atrocities wrote a couple of years ago, in the future, everyone will be Hitler for 15 minutes.

How much did the critical meltdowns by the usual suspects over 300 fuel its success this past weekend? Probably not a huge amount, but still. As Allahpundit wrote last week in response to Slate's Dana Stevens, "I wasn’t going to go, but now that she’s turned it into a blue state/red state thing, I sort of feel obliged. Good work, Dana".

Stevens' over-the-top criticism (with yet another Godwin's Law violation, which seems inevitable for film critics these days) was astonishingly reminiscent of similar hair-pulling freakouts when The Passion debuted three years ago. Both immediately made their respective movie the film to see, if only to understand what all of the fuss was about.

But compare the leftwing critics' reactions to the American Christian right, who have been assaulted by four decades worth of Hollywood movies challenging their sensibilities.

Eventually, they finally learned their lesson with Hollywood and the media. Here's Michael Medved in 2006 on Brokeback Mountain, in USA Today:

The publicity blitz surrounding Oscar front-runner Brokeback Mountain not only challenged stereotypes about gay relationships, it simultaneously cleared away persistent misunderstandings about the nation's Christian conservatives.

Instead of reacting with outraged calls for censorship or condemnation, the much-reviled minions of the so-called religious right have mostly ignored the movie, allowing it to collect every sort of honor with shockingly scant controversy. While derided by prominent liberals as “the Taliban wing of the Republican Party,” conservative Christian leaders have displayed a new sense of security and confidence, in dramatic contrast to the paranoid Muslim mobs that riot across the globe over a dozen disrespectful Danish cartoons.

This doesn't mean that cultural traditionalists in the USA have abandoned their principles and suddenly embraced the much-discussed “gay cowboy movie”: People who revere biblical strictures against same-sex relationships can scarcely commend a film that provides a lyrical celebration of a homosexual affair that wrecks two marriages.

Nevertheless, the publicists and activists involved in promoting Brokeback Mountain seem almost disappointed that religious conservatives have expressed so little indignation. No major organizations called for a boycott of the film, or threatened its producers, or made any serious attempt to interfere with those who might enjoy this artfully-crafted motion picture (it has become a modest commercial success). In the heartland of Evangelical America, Brokeback has generated more ho-hums than howls of protest (or hosannas).

Or as Mark Steyn wrote in his 2006 National Review cover story on politicized Hollywood's box office woes and Oscar snoozefests:

The more artful leftie websites have taken to complaining that the religious right deliberately killed Brokeback at the box-office by declining to get mad about it.

Will film critics learn a similar lesson about films that challenge their own religious beliefs and understand that collectively blowing a gasket over these movies merely helps to fuel their box office returns?

"Robin Aitken, author of Can We Trust the BBC?, talks about the fact that a depiction of George W Bush as Adold Hitler was posted in the main current affairs office of the BBC and no one objected".

(Neville Chamberlain could not be reached for comment.)

As Roger Ailes said yesterday about the American media, "The greatest danger to journalism is a newsroom or a profession where everyone thinks alike. Because then one wrong turn can cause an entire news division to implode".

Frontline, which bills itself as "India's National Magazine" has a piece that Drudge is currently linking to, titled "Dangerous denial", with the following subtitle:

If all the people of the world had the same living style as the average American, the holocaust would have already visited us.

Of course, when it came to the real Holocaust, the world's most celebrated Indian was the very personification of "Dangerous denial", as Richard Grenier wrote in Commentary in 1983 as a mammoth rebuttal to the even-more-mammoth biopic then making the rounds:

Since the movie's Madeleine Slade specifically invites us to revere the "way out of madness" that Gandhi offered the world at the time of World War II, I am under the embarrassing obligation of recording exactly what courses of action the Great Soul recommended to the various parties involved in that crisis. For Gandhi was never stinting in his advice. Indeed, the less he knew about a subject, the less he stinted.

I am aware that for many not privileged to have visited the former British Raj, the names Gujarat, Rajasthan, and Deccan are simply words. But other names, such as Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, somehow have a harder profile. The term "Jew," also, has a reasonably hard profile, and I feel all Jews sitting emotionally at the movie 'Gandhi' should be apprised of the advice that the Mahatma offered their coreligionists when faced with the Nazi peril: they should commit collective suicide. If only the Jews of Germany had the good sense to offer their throats willingly to the Nazi butchers' knives and throw themselves into the sea from cliffs they would arouse world public opinion, Gandhi was convinced, and their moral triumph would be remembered for "ages to come." If they would only pray for Hitler (as their throats were cut, presumably), they would leave a "rich heritage to mankind." Although Gandhi had known Jews from his earliest days in South Africa--where his three staunchest white supporters were Jews, every one--he disapproved of how rarely they loved their enemies. And he never repented of his recommendation of collective suicide. Even after the war, when the full extent of the Holocaust was revealed, Gandhi told Louis Fischer, one of his biographers, that the Jews died anyway, didn't they? They might as well have died significantly.

America's would-be modern day Gandhi has a long record of using ridiculously exaggerated Holocaust metaphors (a trait that has since been acquired by his acolytes) to breathlessly describe his pet cause, as Jonah Goldberg noted last year:

In his 1992 book “Earth in the Balance,” [Gore] wrote that “today the evidence of an ecological Kristallnacht is as clear as the sound of glass shattering in Berlin.” He repeatedly refers to the unfolding ecological holocaust” and invokes Martin Niemoller’s famous quote (“When the Nazis came for the Communists, I remained silent; I was not a Communist. ... When they came for the Jews, I did not speak out; I was not a Jew. ...”) to label himself and other environmentalists “the new resistance.”

In “An Inconvenient Truth” and in interviews, Gore sticks to his guns. He quotes Churchill’s warning about the gathering storm of fascism and declares: “The era of procrastination, of half-measures, of soothing and baffling expedients, of delays, is coming to a close. In its place we are entering a period of consequence.”

And yet, as Betsy Newmark wrote when she linked to Jonah's post, "if addressing the crisis of global warming demands the same diligence and dedication that fighting the Nazis demanded, why isn't Gore proposing similar sacrifices today to fight global warming?"

For a start, they should be out there denouncing the movie Cars for glorifying the weapons of mass destruction that cars are in this global crisis. They should be campaigning against NASCAR. But, of course, they won't be doing these things because it would be political suicide. So, now we know where they draw the line. They'll talk a good game, but they won't actually propose anything or say anything that would offend potential voters. As Goldberg writes:

Once you compare a problem to the Holocaust — even remotely — you’ve lost your moral wiggle room. No politician, indeed no responsible person in this country, would endorse a comedic cartoon about genocide, never mind take their children to it. Give PETA credit. While it repugnantly compares the raising of chickens and cattle to Auschwitz, the organization at least has the courage of its convictions, and protests virtually everything that treats animals as anything less than people.

Environmentalists like Gore who invoke the Holocaust are too afraid to follow through. They want all the credit for denouncing what they consider a moral horror, but they’re unwilling to actually face the real consequences of their rhetoric. I don’t believe global warming is akin to the Holocaust. But if I did, I’d like to think I’d have more courage about it than Gore is showing.

Coulter was right about Gore's Edwardian digs:

“I kind of respect him more, it shows he is not stupid enough to believe all this global warming nonsense. He’s trying to get us to believe. Okay, fine, he may be a hypocrite but at least he’s not a moron.”

It's an "Inconvenient Hypocrisy" as Bill Hobbs writes, via Glenn Reynolds.

Update: Perhaps the Goracle isn't Gandhi, but another icon immortalized on the big screen:

It’s great that he’s using solar panels and all that, but notice he’s not disputing how huge his electric bill still is. What the hell is he doing in there? Is he a Terminator from the future and requires constant recharging? (That would explain pretty much everything.)

I blame Cyberdyne Systems.

Richard Miniter asks, "aren’t you tired of the whole 'you’re-a-fascist' line?"

The Fascists and the Nazis are only on the right if you yourself are communist—and therefore, they are barely to the right of you on the political spectrum. To the rest of us, Fascists, Nazis and communists are different sub-species of the same murderous monster, a blood-drenched beast that believes in the power of the state and seeks to dismember or murder every individual and every group in society that refuses to bend to its will.

Those of us who believe in free speech and, its economic equivalent, free trade, limited government, tolerance, the equal freedom of the artist and the entrepreneur, the separation of church and state, and so on, are the enemies of fascists and, their ill-clothed counterparts, communists. Indeed, capitalism is the opposite of fascism, which favors government control of the every economic decision. Calling us (liberals and conservatives) “fascists” simply reveals the Left’s nostaglia for truly evil enemies (like Nazis) and its current reluctance to engage in a battle of ideas.

Spot-on--don't miss the rest.

Tim Blair writes:

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad explains things to Time magazine:

TIME: Why do your supporters chant “Death to America”?

Ahmadinejad: When they chanted that slogan, it means they hate aggression ...

And the Time reporter just mindlessly takes it all down, like a stenographer, even down to Ahmadinejad's tacit praise of incarcerated Holocaust denier David Irving.

Paul Hacket violates Godwin's Law: "Video: Hackett calls Dan Senor 'Unterfuhrer'".

As the Beautiful Attrocities blog noted last year, "In the future, everyone will be Hitler for 15 minutes".

Including the second year coach of a struggling NFL franchise:

Jets running back Kevan Barlow apologized to 49ers coach Mike Nolan for comparing him to Adolf Hitler in a newspaper interview.

Barlow, who was traded from San Francisco to New York on Sunday for a fourth-round pick, made his inflammatory comments to the Contra Costa Times in Wednesday's editions. Jets coach Eric Mangini said Wednesday he has spoken with Barlow, and the player is sorry for what he said.

"I thought his comments were inappropriate," Mangini said. "After he said it, he wished he could have those words back. But he can't. Kevan has already called coach Nolan to talk to him about that, which I think is important."

Barlow was upset with the trade, mainly because Nolan assured him he wouldn't be dealt. He told the newspaper Nolan was a "first-time head coach with too much power."

"He walks around with a chip on his shoulder, like he's a dictator, like he's Hitler," Barlow told the paper. "People are scared of him. If it ain't Nolan's way, it's the highway."

After making the comments, Barlow called back to say he didn't mean to make the comparison, blaming his outburst on his emotions.

"I was kind of harsh on him, saying he's a dictator. That's bad. Saddam Hussein is a dictator," Barlow said. "I was speaking on emotion."

Gee, you think? Of course, Barlow's far from the only person these days to equate someone whose authority he doesn't respect with the very definition of absolute evil.

Back in March, when Slobodan Milosevic assumed room tempature, Austin Bay described the progression of his ideological beliefs moving "from red to brown" as the Cold War ended:

Milosevic orchestrated the Serb-Croat war and crafted the Serb strategy of “creeping aggression.” He was also the bully behind “ethnic cleansing” in eastern Bosnia. He epitomized the move from “red to brown” in eastern Europe– moving from Communist to ultra-nationalist fascist as the Cold War ended.

Earlier, as World War II transitioned into the Cold War, the career path of Nobel Literature Prize-winning German author Gunter Grass jagged in the opposite direction, as Mona Charen writes:

How disgusting. We now learn that Soviet-appeasing, Western-despising, America-detesting Nobel Literature Prize-winning German author Gunter Grass was a member of the Waffen SS in his youth. Grass earned his lofty reputation by indulging every fashionable far-left cliché of his time. Europe’s elite opinion shapers rewarded this with the Nobel Prize and he received kow tows throughout his long and verbose career.Victor Davis Hanson has the details.

He now reveals that he did not just serve the German Wehrmacht in World War II (obviously millions did so both voluntarily and involuntarily) but in the SS, the unit hand-picked for atrocity work; Holocaust a specialty.

Did he believe that his anti-Americanism somehow expiated the sin of Nazism? That’s certainly the way Europe’s elites would see it. For those not sunk in total moral obtuseness however, Grass career betrays his consistency. He went from being a participant in one tyranny to being an apologist for another – all the while heaping scorn on the humane power that opposed them both.

Austin added this in his post about Milosevic:

The Nazis and Communists both knew they were cut from the same hideous human mold. They both share a disdain for liberalism and a disregard for human life. They are also permanently anti-American. Hitler called the US cowboys– remember that next time you hear the US “cowboy” disparaged. You can see these traits displayed by the Stalinists still among us.

And as I wrote at the time, it's almost like the two ideologies are intertwined...

Update: Tim Blair spots Grass being dubbed "the country’s moral guide for decades" by the press and responds thusly:

Germany’s “moral guide”, was he? Tough gig.

Heh! Indeed. ^TM

What does it take to be considered anti-Semitic, especially by the legacy media?

Mel Gibson rightly earned the world's contempt when he spouted off phrases such as ""F*****g Jews... The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world." during his DUI bust late last month. But if you're Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a bit more work is involved--in fact, a lot more work is involved. You can say things such as this:

TEHRAN, Iran - Iran’s hard-line president called for Israel to be “wiped off the map” and said a new wave of Palestinian attacks will destroy the Jewish state, state-run media reported Wednesday.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad also denounced attempts to recognize Israel or normalize relations with it.

“There is no doubt that the new wave (of attacks) in Palestine will wipe off this stigma (Israel) from the face of the Islamic world,” Ahmadinejad told students Wednesday during a Tehran conference called “The World without Zionism.”

“Anybody who recognizes Israel will burn in the fire of the Islamic nation’s fury, (while) any (Islamic leader) who recognizes the Zionist regime means he is acknowledging the surrender and defeat of the Islamic world,” Ahmadinejad said.

Ahmadinejad also repeated the words of the founder of Iran’s Islamic revolution, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who called for the destruction of Israel.

“As the imam said, Israel must be wiped off the map,” said Ahmadinejad, who came to power in August and replaced Mohammad Khatami, a reformist who advocated international dialogue and tried to improve Iran’s relations with the West.

And you can combine such hatred with a megalomania which would make even Mel Gibson or your average Hollywood mogul blush:

Prague, 29 November 2005 (RFE/RL) — According the report by baztab.com, President Ahmadinejad made the comments in a meeting with one of Iran’s leading clerics, Ayatollah Javadi Amoli.

Ahmadinejad said that someone present at the UN told him that a light surrounded him while he was delivering his speech to the General Assembly. The Iranian president added that he also sensed it.

“He said when you began with the words ‘in the name of God,’ I saw that you became surrounded by a light until the end [of the speech],” Ahmadinejad appears to say in the video. “I felt it myself, too. I felt that all of a sudden the atmosphere changed there, and for 27-28 minutes all the leaders did not blink.”

Ahmadinejad adds that he is not exaggerating.

“I am not exaggerating when I say they did not blink; it’s not an exaggeration, because I was looking,” he says. “They were astonished as if a hand held them there and made them sit. It had opened their eyes and ears for the message of the Islamic Republic.”

And you can deny the Holocaust ever happened:

Ahmadinejad last week questioned whether the Nazi destruction of 6 million European Jews during World War II occurred and said Israel should be moved to Europe. He also provoked an international outcry in October when he called for Israel to be “wiped off the map.”

But Wednesday was the first time he publicly denied the Holocaust. Touring southeast Iran, Ahmadinejad said that if Europeans insist the Holocaust happened, then they are responsible and should pay the price. ...

Today, they have created a myth in the name of Holocaust and consider it to be above God, religion and the prophets,“ Ahmadinejad told thousands of people in the southeastern city of Zahedan.”

And say this:

BERLIN (Reuters) - Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told Germans they should no longer allow themselves to be held prisoner by a sense of guilt over the Holocaust and reiterated doubts that the Holocaust even happened.

In an interview with Germany’s Der Spiegel magazine, Ahmadinejad said he doubted Germans were allowed to write “the truth” about the Holocaust and said he was still considering traveling to Germany for the World Cup soccer tournament.

“I believe the German people are prisoners of the Holocaust. More than 60 million were killed in World War Two ... The question is: Why is it that only Jews are at the center of attention?,” he said in the interview published on Sunday.

“How long is this going to go on?” he added. “How long will the German people be held hostage to the Zionists?... Why should you feel obligated to the Zionists? You’ve paid reparations for 60 years and will have to pay for another 100 years.”

Oh, and this, too:

"The Zionists think that they are victims of Hitler, but they act like Hitler and behave worse than Genghis Khan," Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said on Sunday. He was quoted by the Iranian News Agency.

(But how can Ahmadinejad think Israel is acting like Hitler if he doesn't think the Holocaust occurred? Must be all those Israeli road building programs, I guess...)

So after all that, Mike Wallace, fresh off a one-on-one interview with Ahmadinejad, goes on Sean Hannity's radio show, and has this astonishing exchange with the host:

MW: He (Ahmadinejead) is not trying to project an image. Look, it's very difficult. I know...I found it difficult to understand, but the more that I sat there, and the more time that I spent with the man, he is...I'm not suggesting...he despises, if you will...oh, he doesn't despise, but he doesn't like the United States. He doesn't like the United States for the reason that it's supporting the Zionist entity. He doesn't talk about Israel.

SH: So you don't think he's an anti-Semite?

MW: He himself, an anti-Semite, an anti-Jew...anti-Jew?

SH: Yes.

MW: No, I don't.

Golden Yellow Fluffo, indeed. I'd love to know what actually would have qualified for anti-Semitism in Wallace's book--maybe Mel should skip Oprah and sit down with Mike if he wants the media to believe he's cleaned up his act. Or at least get the starring gig on CSI: Tehran.

And Victor Davis Hanson is spot-on: welcome back to the 1930s. Although without Fred Astaire and Duke Ellington to soften the endless appeasement and cynicism by the world's "liberal" elites.

Fox News CEO Roger Ailes claims that MSNBC's Keith Olbermann's wearing a cardboard mask of Bill O'Reilly and gaving a Nazi salute yesterday at a summer meeting of the Television Critics Association is "over the line". It culminates a dark, unending obsession that Olbermann seems to have with his ratings better; Brent Bozell notes that Olbermann named O’Reilly the “Worst Person in the World” 42 times in the last year. That's 40 more times than Saddam Hussein earned Olbermann's signature sobriquet:

Olbermann’s constant, stalker-like obsession with O’Reilly, who normally has about eight times his ratings, lacks all sense of proportion. How do you explain that Olbermann named O’Reilly his “Worst Person in the World” 42 times in the last year? (Saddam drew the brickbat only twice, and Osama bin Laden? Not once.) He named O’Reilly the world’s worst human seven times just in the month of April.

If this obsession is drawing ratings, who then is being attracted to “Countdown”? Olbermann isn’t just cultivating some vague “anti-Fox niche.” Nightly, he bays at the moon in search of the hard-core Left, the devotees of MoveOn and Michael Moore and Daily Kos. In 2004, he was just about the last person inside a TV studio (or outside a mental facility) to claim that John Kerry actually won Ohio, not withstanding that nagging 120,000-vote discrepancy.

But in spite of Olbermann’s best efforts at unveiling the fraud, Bush was still re-elected, so now the MSNBC host is painting him as a dangerous proto-fascist.

Olbermann recently invited on old Watergate figure John Dean to promote his new book, “Conservatives Without Conscience,” which argues that the conservative movement is deeply authoritarian. Since when did John Dean become an authority on the conservative movement?

Jonah Goldberg answers that question:

Here's a short rule of thumb for how to tell who is a "respectable" conservative in the eyes of liberals: any conservative out of power or not seen as supportive of those in power. An even shorter rule of thumb would be: conservatives are respectable if they are useful to liberals. Pat Buchanan became respectable, even adorable, among a loose coalition of liberals leftists, from MSNBC's Chris Matthews to Ralph Nader, when he turned on the GOP establishment. Kevin Phillips, David Gergen and John Dean have been "real" Republicans — though rarely conservatives — for decades because they are willing to confirm the assumptions of liberals. An even more telling example would be the "neocons." Before the Iraq war, neocons were the nice conservatives, the good conservatives, the idealistic conservatives the un-racist conservatives, according to academics, The New York Times and others. This is not to say that they aren't nice, good, idealistic and un-racist. Rather, it's to point up the way in which conservatives become evil as they become influential, relevant, or otherwise inconvenient to liberals. John McCain was touted as a good choice for president by The New Republic and other liberal voices. Today, McCain is increasingly villified by many of these same voices because, it turns out, he's actually a Republican.

Similarly, William F. Buckley is suddenly the voice of humane and decent conservatism, according to liberals. A more humane and decent man, you'll never meet. But it's doubtlessly true that if WFB had the president's ear, the same voices cheering him would once again be calling him a fascist. And, needless to say, if Bush governed on Pat Buchanan's playbook, Chris Matthews would lose his crush on him awfully fast.

Exactly.

Update: More here. And speaking of McCain and other Republicans courted by the media and other Democrats, Debra Saunders writes that it's a one-way street:

I think McCain in the White House could go a long way in healing the country's ugly partisan divide. Then again, I added, Democrats have their own maverick -- Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman. Unlike Dems who ran from their support of the Iraq resolution, Lieberman has remained stalwart. He has forged relations with the Bush White House and joined McCain and Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., in fighting pork-barrel spending.

That's when the table got quiet. It is one thing for Democrats to feel superior to rube Republicans who don't like McCain because he is not sufficiently doctrinaire. When, however, a Democrat gets along with Republicans and espouses moderate positions, well then, he is a turncoat, plain and simple. The episode demonstrated how voters value bipartisanship -- from the other side, only.

Read the rest.

Based on the duds he's been sporting lately, evidently, Prince Harry has read Edward Feser's brilliant 2004 essay, "The Mustache on the Left", and has decided to live out an Internet article as performance art.

Either that, or he's just another morally brain-dead radical chic idiot.

We report--and deride!

Meanwhile, Michelle Malkin asks, "What's next--a keffiyeh?" Actually, that would be the sort of fashion territory his father has long since been exploring.

Update: In related topics, Charles Johnson spots "Echoes of Nazism in [Lebanon's] Tyre"; Dean Barnett writes, "Some Americans believe that Israel should not exist. And these are the Americans that [Joe Lieberman's opposition, Ned Lamont] and other Democrats have so eagerly embraced".

Jonah Goldberg and Betsy Newmark have some thoughts on Al Gore's language--both in 1992's Earth In The Balance and this year's An Inconvenient Truth comparing global cooling (sorry, that was the 1970s), global warming, climate change, or whatever the expression du jour is, to the Holocaust. Betsy writes:

But, Goldberg asks, if addressing the crisis of global warming demands the same diligence and dedication that fighting the Nazis demanded, why isn't Gore proposing similar sacrifices today to fight global warming? For a start, they should be out there denouncing the movie Cars for glorifying the weapons of mass destruction that cars are in this global crisis. They should be campaigning against NASCAR. But, of course, they won't be doing these things because it would be political suicide. So, now we know where they draw the line. They'll talk a good game, but they won't actually propose anything or say anything that would offend potential voters.

Oh, I don't know--Arnold Schwarzenegger's been doing a pretty good job of taking his conservative base for granted, with all of his recent talk about global warming.

Update: Jonah debates Mark Schmitt of The Decembrist and the New America Foundation on this topic in a video podcast at Bloggingheads.tv.

Debbie Schlussel notes that while Egyptian Culture Minister Farouk Hosni claims that his nation bans "any book that insults any religion", including The Da Vinci Code, there are definitely exceptions that he's willing to make.

Like Mein Kampf. Oh, and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, both burning up Egypt's best seller lists.

But hey, other than those...

Update: Not surprisingly, Iran's doing a fair amount of banning as well: Middle Eastern ban:

It is the second time in two years that Iran has prohibited a publication of international repute for failing to use the term "Persian Gulf" in its maps. In November 2004, it banned the National Geographic atlas when a new edition appeared with the term "Arabian Gulf" in parenthesis beside the more commonly used Persian Gulf.

Tehran believes in aggressively defending the historical term "Persian Gulf" against "Arabian Gulf," which it regards as a name dreamed up by Arab nationalists. While Iran dominates the eastern side of the waterway, the western shores are held by Arab countries.

Meanwhile, Betsy Newmark looks at more homegrown censorship.

Update: Egypt's Big Pharaoh has some thoughts on the banning of Da Vinci:

People downloaded the movie from the internet and passed it from one PC to the other. It was even uploaded to my company's shared network. Banning books and movies will do nothing except raise people's curiosity who end up doing everything to see the controversial material.

As Michael Medved noted last month, American Christians have only recently begun to understand that their getting up in arms about Hollywood's product is expected by Hollywood, and deliberately incorporated into its marketing plans.

James Taranto notes that World Net Daily has removed the offending passage of columnist Vox Day's essay on immigration that we mentioned a couple of days ago. As Taranto notes however, "'Day,' however, stands by his story, which he has posted here".

Big Media, of course, aren't the only ones who make poorly chosen analogies from time to time. See if you can spot the Godwin's Law violation in this essay on immigration:

Not only will [mass deportation] work, but one can easily estimate how long it would take. If it took the Germans less than four years to rid themselves of 6 million Jews, many of whom spoke German and were fully integrated into German society, it couldn't possibly take more than eight years to deport 12 million illegal aliens, many of whom don't speak English and are not integrated into American society

The author has a bitchin' wicked Flock of Seagulls hairstyle though, and with a name like Vox Day, a nom de pundit that would make Bono and The Edge proud. That's got to count for something, right?

(Via Andrew Sullivan.)

(With apologies to Elwood and "Joliet" Jake for paraphrasing one of their riffs.)

What is it with colleges in the state I grew up in and The Reich Stuff, anyhow? Last year, Fairleigh Dickinson had on its staff an admitted Neo-Nazi. Now Mahwah's Ramapo College is running an art exhibition featuring paintings that look like they're straight out of Joseph Goebbels' private collection:

The guest curator is Isolde Brielmaier, a Ugandan art professor from Vassar College who seems to have a particular affection for anti-social “art” including explicit anti-Jewish themes. One work featured in the exhibit, created by artist Deborah Grant (who has no relationship to Ramapo College), depicts a Jewish rabbi dressed in phylacteries with a Star of David on his yarmulke, holding up Torah scrolls with the Nazi swastika instead of text. The inscription below the image reads: “The Old and the New Testament.” The implication could not be clearer: the Jews’ holy text is fascism and they are the new Nazis. [Don't miss the photo that accompanies the article--Ed]

The exhibition is part of African Ancestry Month. What does such an anti-Semitic image have to do with African ancestry? One also wonders what American taxpayers would make of the exhibition which they are funding in part by grants from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts/Department of State, a Partner Agency of the National Endowment for the Arts.

For obvious reasons, the college has not been eager to publicize its controversial exhibition. Indeed, I learned of the art only after a Jewish student, upset with the college’s insistence on keeping it in the exhibit during its entire six weeks run, provided a photograph she had secretly taken of it.

That an outsider obtained a copy of the photo did not go down well with the college publicist, Bonnie Franklin, the Vice-President of Communications at Ramapo. Her initial reasons were bureaucratic: the campus gallery discourages photos of exhibits and especially their release to the public. But Franklin was eager to defend the artist’s right of self-expression. Although admitting that she personally found the work “offensive,” she stressed that it “has been extremely stimulating on our campus as an educational instrument.” She further explained that the campus had held several forums to discuss the work. “The piece is subject to interpretation, people have read other things into it. Some have seen it as anti-Christian for example. There have been a number of interpretations.” Finally, she fell back on the default position that the college is a “public institution and such things are protected by the first amendment.”

The simple truth is that Grant’s image equates Jews with Nazis, as curator Isolde Brielmaier admits. Speaking in the post-modernese language of Grant’s work, she says that it “frequently engages in pop culture and politics, issues of race, neo-colonialism, oppression, violence against women, and the history of fascism.” Brielmaier also notes that artist Deborah Grant studied the style of Nazi film propagandist Leni Riefenstahl—a fact that reveals much about her intent in contrasting the Old Testament, the holy book of Jews, Muslims and Christians, with a New Testament of Nazism.

Ramapo president Peter Mercer said that when he first saw Grant’s piece, he contacted the state attorney general to determine whether exhibiting it was illegal. Informed that it was legal, he proceeded to give his go-ahead, after being assured by Isolde Brielmaier that the artist had “no intention to shock anybody.”

Is there any reason to paint something like this...

a Jewish rabbi dressed in phylacteries with a Star of David on his yarmulke, holding up Torah scrolls with the Nazi swastika instead of text. The inscription below the image reads: “The Old and the New Testament.”

...without the intention of epatering the bourgeois?

(Via Atlas Shrugs. For more examples from the Reactionary Art World, click here and here.)

Update: Compare and contrast Ramapo College's art exhibition with NYU's panel discussion on those cartoons. Notice what's curiously missing from the latter: the actual artwork!

Tim Blair notes "It’s been a great week for informing the kids"--via the riff that refuses to die:

"The only difference between Bush and Hitler,” says Kurt Vonnegut, “is that Hitler was elected. You all know, of course, that the election was stolen. Right here.” (In Ohio)

* * *

[Geography teacher Jay Bennish]: I'm not saying Bush and Hitler are exactly the same, obviously they're not. OK? But there are some eerie similarities to the tones that they use.

Hey, I'm not saying Vonnegut and Bennish are exactly the same, obviously they're not. But there are some eerie similarities to the sclerotic cliches that they use.

Brendan Loy writes:

Okay, here's a question for you. If the chairman of the NAACP were to equate Republicans with Nazis, compare conservative judges to the Taliban, and call Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell "tokens," that would be pretty newsworthy, don't you think?

Now, what would you say if I told you that it happened, during a speech Wednesday by Julian Bond at Fayetteville State University, and yet the "journalists" who covered the event for the Fayetteville Observer and News 14 Carolina apparently felt his incendiary remarks weren't worthy of mention in their stories about the event?! Instead, they wrote blandly positive puff pieces about Bond's speech, discussing such earth-shattering breaking news as the importance of Black History Month and how "the fight for equal rights is not over."

Pretty incredible, huh? My expectations of the MSM are fairly low these days, but the lack of news judgment here is really astounding.

Brenden has a great post, but I'm not sure if it's a "lack of news judgement". The media definitely made a judgement--they judged that Bond is an ally who's exempt from attack. We haven't quoted Amon's Law recently, but it's still very much in force.

Ed Morrissey and Betsy Newmark have some thoughts on Colleen Rowley, a former Time "Person of the Year" who is now running for Congress against Representative John Kline of Minnesota. As Morrissey writes:

She has descended far into the fever swamp during her brief yet notorious campaign to unseat Mr. Kline. When last CQ heard from Ms. Rowley, she had just missed her chance to draft off of Cindy Sheehan's momentum in Crawford, Texas. Rowley had trekked down to her campout just as Sheehan gave up on her protest. Unfortunately, she has resurfaced to start her campaign -- and in doing so, she decided to depict the Marine Corps veteran as a Nazi:

This is the nadir of Democratic demagoguery, referencing anyone with whom they disagree as a Nazi. This slur is especially egregious when directed at a man who served his country faithfully for 25 years in the Marine Corps and then for two terms in Congress. No one disputes anyone's right to disagree with Rep. Kline's positions, but to call the man a Nazi goes beyond political debate and into character assassination.

Rowley later took the picture off the website but never issued an apology or even an acknowledgment that it had been posted. Fortunately, others did a screen grab of the site before the cowards at Rowley's headquarters went into full retreat. If Minnesota Democrats have any sense of honor and respect, they will call for the immediate withdrawal of Rowley from the race. She disgraces not just the Second District but all of Minnesota with this kind of campaigning.

The many violations of Godwin's Law over the last three years or so become numbing: when I first saw the screen grab of Rowley's slanderous Photoshop exercise, I thought "ho-hum, another Republicans are Nazis slur, here we go again". And that same numbing effect works in reverse, making it an ad hominem that becomes all the more easier to use. But as Jonah Goldberg wrote shortly Dick Durbin's Springtime For Gitmo meltdown:

Hitler holds our fascination because of his singular villainy. But this shouldn’t crowd out our ability to make distinctions. Hitler is supposed to define the outer limits of evil, not the lowest threshold.

Exactly.

Update: More here and here.

Must be something in the air today: if George Galloway's hijinks weren't enough, Harry Belafonte violates 57 varieties of Godwin's Law. Hugh Hewitt has the details; once again, The Political Teen has the video.

(Some background on Belafonte, here.)

Update: Betsy Newmark adds:

The mere fact that this guy can go on TV and spout this nonsense is proof that he's wrong. Do you think that someone could have gone public with such criticism of Hitler and not have been arrested by the Gestapo? Not only isn't he not arrested, but he wins an award from AARP and gets to be all over the TV. (Though, AARP has issued a press notice that they want to disassociate themselves with some of Belafonte's more asinine statements. The funny thing is that before they gave him that award Belafonte had already made his offensive comments to call Colin Powell a house slave, but that, apparently, wasn't enough to stop them from recognizing him with an award.)

For a look at how dissent in the Third Reich was treated, click here.

Another Update: David Warren is writing about the Canadian elections tonight, but the gist of this passage could apply equally well to CNN and the rest of America's legacy media:

In short, the Internet has broken the stranglehold the Liberal Party had over sympathetic media, and created an information environment in which you had better be darned sure what you are saying is the strict truth, because there’s an army of fact-checkers out there. Moreover, an army that cannot easily be intimidated by off-the-record threats from Party lawyers, or made to desist by peer pressure. For even when (as we saw in the delayed release of Gomery testimony) a legal ban on publication can be obtained, the information simply passes through electronic space across the border, and we can all read the banned material on such sites as Captain’s Quarters from the USA.

It's much, much tougher to drop an ad hominem attack on TV these days as well, because, as Warren wrote, there’s an army of fact-checkers out there.

When Jodie Foster announced she was planning to shoot a biography about Leni Riefenstahl, whom Foster was quoted as saying has been "libeled so many times" about the dark deeds of her role in the Nazi Party, I wrote:

Whitewashing Leni Riefenstahl's place in history was only a matter of time I guess, as all the films airbrushing Che's reputation are becoming old hat.

In a similar vein, Dean Esmay has some thoughts on Prussian Blue, the Neo-Nazi answer to the Olsen Twins we looked at yesterday:

There's apparently a significant kerfuffle over two 13-year-old singers who are gushy about Nazism, and I find myself strangely unable to get excited about it. Not because I have anything nice to say about Nazism, but because I've been watching the entertainment industry speak endearingly of vile totalitarian ideologies for most of my life.

This is the same entertainment industry that lionizes Che Guevara and Fidel Castro. The same industry that made heroes out of the mass-murdering Sandinistas. That to this day pretends that the McCarthy era in America was nothing but one long paranoid nightmare wherein nobody, not even people like Alger Hiss, Julius Rosenberg, or Harry Dexter White, was guilty of anything but being a bit too liberal.

Some of these people still can't admit that Pete Seeger, Paul Robeson, and Mary Travers were communists for God's sake.

A couple of years ago I was in a Denny's when I spotted a kid wearing a bright blood-red shirt with a big yellow hammer and sickle. I wanted to walk over to him and slap him in the face. But instead I shrugged. He was 21 or 22 at the oldest, maybe more like 18 or 19. He couldn't possibly have known the depths of the evil his shirt represented. The Soviets, when they invaded Afghanistan, murdered a million innocent Afghans. This out of a country of only 6 or 7 million people. That was going on as recently as the 1980s. You think those Afghans today would find Nazi chic more offensive than Communist chic?

I also, a year or two before that, got into an argument with a friend in his early 20s who actually thought I was "melodramatic" when I pointed out that Stalin had killed, by the most conservative estimates available, about 20 million people in cold blood. (Others place his body count over 60 million.) Yet you can go around the world and find restaurants, drinks, and music that extols the virtues of him and communist dictators just like him.

It's all sick of course. Depraved even. If I were Jewish I'd be particularly stung by "Prussian Blue." If I were Ukranian or Chinese or Vietnamese or Cambodian or Afghan, on the other hand, maybe it would all seem just sadly familiar. Hitler not so bad? Why not? Next up: pop songs about the glories of the Laogai!

By all means, let's kick around "Prussian Blue." Let's especially kick around their parents and their producers. These 13 year old twits likely have no idea what they're talking about, but the adults in their lives have no such excuse. But while we're doing it, let's remember all the other cases of covering up for, even romanticizing, hateful totalitarian ideologies. I think we'd be doing more good in the long run that way.

It can't hurt, but as all of the examples that Dean includes in his post illustrate, it's asking far too much of the entertainment industry to be that self-policing.

(H/T: Murdoc Online.)

Pajamas Media writes that Teen People came this close to singing the chorus to "Springtime For Hitler":

According to Media Orchard, a public relations blog, "Teen People came close to publishing a story on the white-supremacist singing duo Prussian Blue that did not mention the words 'hate,' 'supremacist' or 'Nazi.' The writer had agreed with the teen duo's mother not to use these terms, but instead the more palatable "white pride." Media Orchard then goes on to add, "And you thought my "Anderson Cooper Interviews Hermann Goering" post was an exaggeration? Blogging Baby is also relieved that Teen People has killed a forthcoming article about the 13 year-olds, who pen paeans to "Rudolf Hess, man of Peace" and wear t-shirts featuring a smiley-face Hitler. "It seems someone at the pub (Time Inc., Teen People’s publisher, blames it on the omnipresent "junior staffer") assured the twins they would avoid using the terms "hate", "supremacist", and "Nazi" in the write-up. (But apparently, comparing the duo to the Olsen twins wasn’t off-limits.)"

It's Anthony Burgess' world, we just live in it, when the left can compare an American president to Hitler seemingly daily, but a liberal magazine can't be bothered to call an actual pro-Hitler singing duo Nazis.

(Maybe Jodie Foster can direct their music videos.)

Germany seems to be rapidly back on the road to 1939: "The official Iranian pavilion at this year's Frankfurt Book Fair prominently featured virulently anti-Semitic literature, in violation of German law", complete with one of the most evil and virulently destructive fakes in history: The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, which was made into a 30-part mini-series for Egyptian TV in 2001.

Germany's response? "No action was taken against the Iranian pavilion by the German authorities or the Fair organizers, even though the illegal material was in plain view."

There's a shock.

(Via Charles Johnson.)

(Oh God, am I whoring for hits with a headline like that, or what?)

After the past four or five years of watching Hollywood produce hagiography about international communists such as the murderous Che Guevara, Castro, and the Stalin-worshiping Frida Kahlo, and stores as mainstream as Burlington Coat Factory selling Che T-shirts, I can't say I'm at all surprised that National Socialists are worshipped in Hong Kong. It is, after all, under control by a regime with a similarly bloodthirsty totalitarian lineage:

Akasi, a quarterly publication for the discerning Nipponophile, has become the latest convert in Hong Kong’s love affair with Nazi Germany. The October issue of the top-shelf glossy is dominated by pictures of an attractive young lady partially dressed as a tank commander and cavorting with wartime general Heinz Guderian.
But unlike every other local business that naively or cynically cashes in on Nazi notoriety, Akasi has yet to generate a single raised eyebrow. Until this reporter spotted a copy on the top shelf in a Causeway Bay 7-11 last week.

In Hong Kong’s English language media, there are few subjects more likely to generate an outraged print campaign than the use of Nazi memorabilia as a marketing gimmick.

There's nothing a Hong Kong girl loves more than a man in Hugo Boss with a handbag. To many Hong Kongers, Nazis represent the epitome of desirability. Their tanks were made by Mercedes and Porsche; their uniforms were original Hugo Boss. Twenty years after the last British skinhead tired of the joke, it’s still not unusual to see a Hong Kong teen in an Adolph Hitler European Tour t-shirt.

And whether it be a karaoke den with photos of Germans executing prisoners (a strange choice of decoration, admittedly), a fashion store decorated with swastikas, a TV station describing its ad breaks as “the final solution” or a coffee shop picking Hitler for its daily quote, German wartime symbolism is never far from the editor’s outrage button.

From Simon's World, which has the above article minus its photos, and a link to the article itself, which should you follow it past the Simon's World blog, is most definitely not safe for work. (Found via Charles Johnson.)

Jodie Foster has already announced that one of her next projects will be a biography about Leni Riefenstahl:

In an interview in the latest issue of Premiere magazine (September 2005), Ms. Foster was asked: "For years, you've been planning a biopic about Leni Riefenstahl, who directed the Nazi propaganda film Triumph of the Will and who died two years ago. Are you still going to make it?"

Foster replied: "Yeah, we're still working on the script, and I'm still going to play her. I met her a couple of times...She wrote a biography that's almost all lies, but it's interesting. I wanted her archives, but I didn't want her involvement (in the film) -- and that's something she really wanted, because she'd been libeled so many times. She was not a member of the Nazi Party, and she was not Hitler's girlfriend--that's just stupid. But she's a complex morality tale."

[Dr. Rafael Medoff, director of the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies] said: "Foster is wrong. There's nothing morally complex about what Riefenstahl did as Hitler's favorite filmmaker. The only thing complex is Foster's confusion on this issue."

Should do boffo box office in Hong Kong's cinemas, particularly if Max Bialystock and Leo Bloom produce it.

Update: Sadly, this isn't too surprising either, come to think of it. Hey, attractive young women sporting Nazi paraphernalia--they aren't just for Hong Kong anymore!

Thirteen-year-old twins Lamb and Lynx Gaede have one album out, another on the way, a music video, and lots of fans.

They may remind you another famous pair of singers, the Olsen Twins, and the girls say they like that. But unlike the Olsens, who built a media empire on their fun-loving, squeaky-clean image, Lamb and Lynx are cultivating a much darker personna. They are white nationalists and use their talents to preach a message of hate.

Known as “Prussian Blue” — a nod to their German heritage and bright blue eyes — the girls from Bakersfield, Calif., have been performing songs about white nationalism before all-white crowds since they were nine.

“We’re proud of being white, we want to keep being white,” said Lynx. “We want our people to stay white … we don’t want to just be, you know, a big muddle. We just want to preserve our race.”

Lynx and Lamb have been nurtured on racist beliefs since birth by their mother April. “They need to have the background to understand why certain things are happening,” said April, a stay-at-home mom who no longer lives with the twins’ father. “I’m going to give them, give them my opinion just like any, any parent would.”

April home-schools the girls, teaching them her own unique perspective on everything from current to historical events. In addition, April’s father surrounds the family with symbols of his beliefs — specifically the Nazi swastika. It appears on his belt buckle, on the side of his pick-up truck and he’s even registered it as his cattle brand with the Bureau of Livestock Identification.

“Because it’s provocative,” explains April of the cattle brand, “to him he thinks it’s important as a symbol of freedom of speech that he can use it as his cattle brand.”

As Rob Port (currently profiled on the Pajamas Media site) adds:

What an ironic thing for a Nazi twit to say. Ideals like “freedom of speech” don’t exist when the Nazis are in charge.

Exactly.

To paraphrase something that Jonah Goldberg wrote this past summer, and Simon's World quoted elsewhere in his post above, Nazism is supposed to define the outer limits of evil, not the lowest threshold. That its symbols are joining its linguistic expressions (ala Dick Durbin, Janeane Garofalo, and many, many others), to slowly become part of the dumbed-down pop culture vernacular is a depressing sight to observe.

As I posted recently, Jodie Foster is apparently beginning work on her dream project: a film which will rehabilite the reputation of Leni Riefenstahl.

Meanwhile, Charles Johnson looks at a film that's currently making the rounds of the Deutchland art house circuit: Paradise Now, which Charles writes, is "about a Palestinian suicide bomber who blows himself up to murder a bus full of Jews":

The “World Cinema Fund,” who sponsored (paid for) the film, has named it their film of the month because it invites the viewer to “think about the assassin’s motives.”

And according to Davids Medienkritik, Amnesty International has also awarded the film a “peace prize,” because it’s neither “lecturing nor moralizing.”

(Hat tip: Gateway Pundit.)

P.S. At the 55th international film festival in Berlin 2005, “Paradise Now” won the Publikumspreis (“audience award”) and the Blue Angle for best European film.

P.P.S. Have I mentioned lately that we seem to be seeing a replay of 1938 in Germany?

Indeed, to borrow the Insta-adverb.

Debra Orin writes that Congressman Charlie Rangel (D-NY) has an advanced case of BDS--and it's getting the better of him:

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Last year, Charles Krauthammer coined his "Pressure Cooker Theory" for the explosion of hatred from the left, after an all-too-brief respite in the culture war after 9/11:

The loathing goes far beyond the politicians. Liberals as a body have gone quite around the twist. I count one all-star rock tour, three movies, four current theatrical productions and five best sellers (a full one-third of the New York Times list) variously devoted to ridiculing, denigrating, attacking and devaluing this president, this presidency and all who might, God knows why, support it.

How to explain? With apologies to Dr. Freud, I propose the Pressure Cooker Theory of Hydraulic Release.

The hostility, resentment, envy and disdain, all superheated in Florida, were not permitted their natural discharge. Came 9/11 and a lid was forced down. How can you seek revenge for a stolen election by a nitwit usurper when all of a sudden we are at war and the people, bless them, are rallying around the flag and hailing the commander in chief? With Bush riding high in the polls, with flags flying from pickup trucks (many of the flags, according to Howard Dean, Confederate), the president was untouchable.

The Democrats fell unnaturally silent. For two long, agonizing years, they had to stifle and suppress. It was the most serious case of repression since Freud's Anna O. went limp. The forced deference nearly killed them. And then, providentially, they were saved. The clouds parted and bad news rained down like manna: WMDs, Abu Ghraib, Richard Clarke, Paul O'Neill, Joe Wilson and, most important, continued fighting in Iraq.

Stripped of his halo, the president's ratings went down. The spell was broken. He was finally once again human and vulnerable. With immense relief, the critics let loose.

A very large component of what President Bush's critics let loose with have been non-stop comparisons of President Bush with Adolf Hitler, and America in general with Nazi Germany. Both of which are disgusting examples of moral equivalence that are subtle--and sometimes not so-subtle--forms of Holocaust denial, which Jonah Goldberg noted when the first "Bush=Hitler" ads appeared courtesy of Moveon.org in late 2003:

I don't say this because I feel a passionate need to defend George Bush. I would make the exact same points if Al Gore were president. I would make the exact same points if anybody running for the Democratic nomination were president. This has nothing to do with partisanship. It has to do with the fact that such comparisons are slanderous to the United States and historical truth and amount to Holocaust denial. When you say that anything George Bush has done is akin to what Hitler did, you make the Holocaust into nothing more than an example of partisan excess. Tax cuts are not genocide, as so many Democrats have suggested over the years. (For example,. during the Contract with America debate, Charles Rangel complained that "Hitler wasn't even talking about doing these things" that were in the Contract with America. In other words, the Contract with America was in some way worse than what Hitler did. At the end of the day, that is Holocaust denial.)

"Darn those Republicans" does not equal "Darn those Nazis." The Patriot Act is not the final solution. The handful of men in Guantanamo may not all be guilty of terrorism, but it's more than reasonable to assume they are. And no matter how you try to contort it, Gitmo is not the same thing as Auschwitz or Dachau. There are no children there. You don't get carted off to Cuba and gassed if you criticize the president or if you are one-quarter Muslim. And, inversely, there was no reasonable justification for throwing the Jews and the Gypsies and all the others into the death camps. The Jews weren't terrorists or members of a terrorist organization. To say that the men in Guantanamo — or any of the Muslims being politely interviewed by appointment — are akin to the Jews of Germany is to trivialize the experiences of the millions who were slaughtered. Even if you think Muslims are being unfairly inconvenienced, when you say they are the Jews of Nazified America you are in essence saying the worst crime of the Holocaust was to unfairly inconvenience the Jews.

Since shortly after this blog started, we've been documenting the many examples of Godwin's Law violations as they've occurred, but it took until today for us to give them their own category. If your stomach is up to the task, click here and start scrolling to read its archives.

(Of course, I can understand if you'd rather not. Seeing all those examples of horrendous equivalence one after the other is enough to make anyone want to turn his head away from the verbal carnage.)

Update: For even more examples of the left's Reich Stuff, check out The Brothers Judd's "Obligatory Nazi Reference" archives.

The Brothers Judd link to to this story, whose headline reads, "Historian links Germany's new Left Party to Nazis":

BERLIN - Germany's new Left Party, which polls show will win 12 per cent next month's general election, draws on a concept of 'National Socialism' from the Nazi era, a prominent German historian alleged on Wednesday.

"This is not an accident - it's intentional," said Goetz Aly who recently published a book arguing that Hitler's Nazis won allegiance by creating a huge social welfare state funded by property stolen from the Jews and people in Third Reich-occupied Europe.

A leader of the Left Party, a rebel former Social Democratic (SPD) chairman Oscar Lafontaine, said in a speech last month that German workers had to be protected to prevent foreigners stealing their jobs.

"The state is obligated to prevent family fathers and women from becoming unemployed because 'Fremdarbeiter' (foreign workers) are taking away their jobs by working for low wages," said Lafontaine at a rally in the eastern German city of Chemnitz near the Czech border.

Germany's Brockhaus dictionary says the term 'Fremdarbeiter' is a Nazi expression used to describe foreign and often slave labour brought to Germany during World War II.

"In Lafontaine's propaganda of the past weeks, elements of the National Socialist concept can very clearly be recognised," said Aly in a Handelsblatt newspaper interview.

Color me unsurprised.

Mark Steyn is really knows how to punch those keys--especially when given a subject like Sen. Dick Durbin. Durbin is the Democrat's Senator from Illinois, and the following essay appears in today's Chicago Sun Times:

Throughout the last campaign season, senior Democrats had a standard line in their speeches, usually delivered with righteous anger, about how "nobody has a right to question my patriotism!" Given that nobody was questioning their patriotism, it seemed an odd thing to harp on about. But, aware of their touchiness on the subject, I hasten to add that in what follows I am not questioning Dick Durbin's patriotism, at least not for the first couple of paragraphs. Instead, I'll begin by questioning his sanity.

Steyn's just getting warmed up, adding "give Durbin credit" though:

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Last year, when I visited New Orleans, I picked up a copy of the second volume of Ian Kershaw's mammoth two-part biography of Adolf Hitler, which covers from 1936 to 1945 (they didn't have volume one for sale, in case you're wondering) at the National D-Day Museum. Kershaw writes that it was during the battle of Stalingrad, which killed well over 300,000 German soldiers, that the first signs of Germany's discontent with Hitler were spotted. Here's how the Nazis handled that rebellion:

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Jonah Goldberg wonders why during the current hysteria over Guantanamo Bay, no one has brought up the names of Louis Pepe or Mamdouh Mahmud Salim:

Salim, a reputed top lieutenant of Osama bin Laden, was being held at the Metropolitan Correctional Center, a high security federal jail in lower Manhattan. Pepe was a guard there. On November 1, 2000, Salim plunged a sharpened comb into Pepe's left eye and three inches into his brain. Salim and a compatriot also beat Pepe savagely, in their effort to get the guard's keys and orchestrate an escape for himself and two fellow terrorists awaiting trial. Believing Pepe was dead, the attackers used his own blood to paint a Christian cross on his torso. Pepe was an experienced correctional officer, a member of the elite MCC Enforcers Disturbance Control, and he weighed in at 300 pounds. He survived the attack with brain damage, crippling disabilities, and an unending stream of surgeries.

The reason Pepe and Salim are relevant should be obvious. There are good guys and bad guys in this story, and as much as it pains some to hear it, we are the good guys. We are not talking about confused teenagers caught up in events larger than themselves. We aren't talking about mistaken identities. We're talking about the cream of our enemy's crop in the war on terror.

Meanwhile, via VodkaPundit, Rusty Shackleford has a graphic reminder--and it is very graphic--of what real torture looks like. Hint: it doesn't involve air conditioners or Christina Aguilera songs.

Maybe somebody should email that link to Dick Durbin's office.

Update: Speaking of Durbin, Hugh Hewitt's producer Duane Patterson writes:

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Actually, it was the trifecta of smears for Senator Dick Durbin (D-Il): not just the now usual complaints from the left that Americans are Nazis, but also Communists as well:

If I read this to you and did not tell you that it was an FBI agent describing what Americans had done to prisoners in their control, you would most certainly believe this must have been done by Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime—Pol Pot or others—that had no concern for human beings. Sadly, that is not the case. This was the action of Americans in the treatment of their prisoners.

Charles Johnson has more details and additional links.

We posted some thoughts by Patrick Ruffini and Jim Geraghty yesterday at who actually is arguing from a position of weakness employing this sort of rhetoric.

I wonder how this Gitmo=Gulag silliness is all playing in the Middle East. Perhaps Al Qaeda and their brethren are that much more scared of actually ending up there. Or maybe they more than anybody can see how idiotic complaints such as these are.

Earlier today, in a post titled, "The Hysteria Spreads", Glenn Reynolds wrote that Rep. Charles Rangel (D-NY) compared President Bush's foreign policy to the Holocaust. (And that's after George Galloway (Baathist-UK) recently made similar Godwin's Law-violating statements on Al Jazeera). Glenn Wrote that "Bush's ability to drive his opponents stark, raving bonkers is almost supernatural".

Like the Bush Derangement Syndrome that dominated in the months prior to the election, this new strain is spreading.

September will be the fourth anniversary of 9/11, and it's only about three months away. But 9/11 was only one of several attacks on this country whose origins were in the Middle East. Today, Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), the minority leader of the house, say that she thinks--(strike that, thinking is the wrong word, for it implies reason)--feels that we need to close the Guantanamo Bay detention center in order to give America "a clean slate in the Muslim world."

Paul Mirengoff responds:

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Call it Warhol's Law, I guess: Beautiful Atrocities rounds up all of the recent (and a few not so recent) violations of Godwin's law and declares that "In the future, everyone will be Hitler for 15 minutes".

Well, not everyone, of course. As Dennis Miller said in 2003:

The Left is so busy saying John Ashcroft is Hitler, and President Bush is Hitler, and Rudy Giuliani is Hitler that the only guy they wouldn’t call Hitler was the foreign guy with the mustache who was throwing people who disagreed with him into the wood-chipper.

Exactly.

Ed Morrissey proposes a senatorial addendum to Godwin's Law:

The next time someone uses Hitler or Nazis to construct an analogy or comparison to American politics during a Senate debate, his or her party loses an hour of floor time. Right now we're even between Robert Godwin Byrd and Rick Godwin Santorum, meaning that we have now restored the all-important balance of stupidity between the parties just as our Founding Fathers intended.

If any Senator feels the need to try to pervert that balance, the end result will be that we have to hear even less idiocy from the World's Greatest Deliberative BodyTM. Everybody wins!

Sounds good to me. I'm sure P.J. O'Rourke would be in favor as well.

(Incidentally, any man who's as great a writer as O'Rourke, and whose first initials are "P.J." definitely needs to be hooked up with Pajamas Media!)

Update: Lorie Byrd has some thoughts on the subject that are also well worth reading, including this point:

For those getting more of their news from Jon Stewart than from Brit Hume, and who have heard for more than four years now that Bush = Hitler, I wonder how bad a guy they think Hitler could have been?

As others have noted before, Bush=Hitler is a backhanded form of Holocaust denial. Diana Mosely would have been proud.

Soxblog looks at the strange case of Jacques Pluss, a former adjunct professor at Farleigh Dickinson University who sounds like he's been in the audience for "Springtime for Hitler" long after its opening night:

The students’ story had numerous classic vignettes: There was Professor Pluss whining in regard to his dismissal that he had been “stolen away in the night.” There was a student who observed, “Now that I think about it, Dr. Pluss seemed to have a morbid fascination with Hitler and Nazism.” And then there was Professor Pluss again castigating the university for “following the typical Jewish, lawyerly, Hebrew line."

Lest you think the modern Nazi only dislikes Jews, Professor Pluss also had some rather negative observations regarding Farleigh Dickinson’s mostly African American basketball team, alleging that the players were “n***** to the core” and prone to listening to “ghastly rap music.” As perhaps the crowning touch to a story that seemed too surreal to be true, Farleigh Dickinson did not dismiss Professor Pluss because he was a hate-spewing Nazi. Rather, they found his six absences during the past academic semester to be his sole hanging offense.

But of course.

By the way, this is an unintended classic, found at the top of a quick Google search under Pluss's name. The National Socialist Movement (no, I hadn't heard of them either, at least not since '45) has issued a press release on Pluss's purging:

The NSM officially condemns Fairleigh-Dickinson University for engaging in acts of left-wing McCarthyism.

This past Monday, Professor Jacques Pluss, was removed from his teaching position at this university apparently for no other reason than being a member of [the National Socialist Movement].

If that isn't reason enough, what is?!

(Via Charles Johnson.)

Orrin Judd has had several recent posts that have highlighted the darkest aspect of what the Terri Schiavo drama could portend: that Germany's obsession with euthanasia, and eventually wholesale assembly line-style slaughter in the 1930s and 1940s, actually pre-dated the rise of the Nazis, just as anti-Semitism was present long before as well. The Nazis simply stoked both ideas and then perfected the dark technology to carry them out.

This is actually consistent with much current historical thinking about pre-WWII Germany. In the past, most historians viewed the Nazis as a strange alien virus that subverted the will of the peaceful and enlightened Germans, as Orrin himself wrote a few years ago:

When it comes to popular history on the Nazi era, a subject about which very little deviation from the norm is tolerated, the one book that you'll most often see cited is William Shirer's Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. A perfectly acceptable relic of its time, this book treats Hitler and the Nazi Party as complete aberrations, imposed on a slumbering Germany by a freakish set of circumstances. This view, understandable in a liberal West which finds it necessary to aver "it couldn't happen here" and which found it necessary to rehabilitate Germany into a worthy Cold War ally, has prevailed for the better part of sixty years now.

Current thinking seems to be quite different: as Ian Kershaw described in his two-volume biography of Hitler (full disclosure: I haven't read Vol. 1 yet), Hitler was accepted quite enthusiastically by the bulk of the German people, at least until the invasion of Russia went south.

Scientists in particular led the way for much of Germany's culture of death, as Mark P. Mostert noted in the fall 2002 Journal of Special Education:

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It's fascinating to read of the large minority of both Russian and German citizens who want to relieve their totalitarian past. It just seems bizarre to me that they'd want to go back.

But actually, it's not that bizarre, all things considered.

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Anthony Lane of The New Yorker goes Inside Deep Throat, so you don't have to.

Found via Jonathan Last, who calls it "a snort-your-coffee review". Personally, I had a couple of medium chuckles (plus a quick eye roll at the inevitable Republicans are Nazis reference that seems obligatory in most Manhattan-based publications), not a Danny Thomas spit-take, but you're warned that there's a possibility that beverages and monitors could interact.

Take appropriate precautions.

UPI says that a hotel will built on the site of Adolf Hitler's Alpine retreat at the Obersalzberg in Bavaria:

OBERSALZBERG, Feb. 24 (UPI) — A Jewish leader in Germany has termed as tasteless a luxury hotel set to open March 1 on the site of Adolf Hitler's Alpine retreat at Obersalzberg in Bavaria.

Michael Friedman with Germany's main Jewish organization said the 138-room Intercontinental Resort Berchtesgaden is "tasteless and robs the place of its history," the BBC reported.

But Kurt Faltlhauser, Bavaria's finance minister, said: "There can be no covering up and absolutely no glorification of the Nazi regime."

The hotel has been built on the spot where Hermann Goering, the former Nazi air force chief, had his summer residence.

Guests will pay about $264 per night for a room.

Hitler developed Obersalzberg as a second seat of government for his regime after becoming German chancellor.

Actually, it wouldn't surprise me to read of more developments like this in Germany, just as there are ongoing efforts to relive the days of the Soviet Union in Russia. (That both trends are concurrent is a further reminder of just how interconnected the two ideologies are.)

John Hawkins looks at Janeane Garofalo, her Nazi salute on cable TV, along with the far, far left in general and their cognitive dissonance.

As Anne Applebaum once wrote about a completely different subject, "Sometimes in the course of a great American debate there comes a moment when the big battle guns fall silent, the pundits run out of breath, and -- unexpectedly -- the long, bitter argument suddenly turns into farce".

This is one of those moments: replying to the cute but harmless idea of wearing purple ink on one's fingers to show solidarity with brave Iraqi voters, Air America's Janeane Garofalo issues a little symbolism of her own: the Nazi "Zieg Heil" one-armed salute.

Peter Robinson wrote yesterday that:

The Left is no longer in the position of mocking George W. Bush alone. To go on insisting that Iraq represents a debacle, they must mock human courage itself.

Many seem to have no problem doing just that.

Update: Ironically, given Ms. Garofalo's profession, the quote of the day on the Internet Movie Database homepage is:

Neutrality does not exist in the face of murder. Doing nothing to stop it is, in fact, choosing. It is not being neutral.

It's from this film, incidentally.

George Bush, at least for today, is no longer Hitler in the left's eyes. Because today, according to Ted Turner, it's Fox News' turn to play Hitler:

Ted Turner called FOX an arm of the Bush administration and compared FOXNEWS's popularity to Adolph Hitler's popular election to run Germany before WWII.

Turner made the controversial comments before a standing-room-only crowd at the National Association for Television Programming Executives's opening session Tuesday.

His no-nonsense, humorous approach during the one-hour Q&A generated frequent loud applause and laughter, BROADCASTING & CABLE reports.

While FOX may be the largest news network [and has overtaken Turner's CNN], it's not the best, Turner said.

He followed up by pointing out that Adolph Hitler got the most votes when he was elected to run Germany prior to WWII. He said the network is the propaganda tool for the Bush Administration.

"There's nothing wrong with that. It's certainly legal. But it does pose problems for our democracy. Particularly when the news is dumbed down," leaving voters without critical information on politics and world events and overloaded with fluff," he said.

As Dennis Miller said in 2003:

The Left is so busy saying John Ashcroft is Hitler, and President Bush is Hitler, and Rudy Giuliani is Hitler that the only guy they wouldn’t call Hitler was the foreign guy with the mustache who was throwing people who disagreed with him into the wood-chipper.

Of course, I guess for Ted, comparing Fox News to a hairy-faced strong man is a compliment--he's certainly always been eager to whitewash or make deals with them.

Mark Steyn puts Prince Harry's Nazi dress-up moment in context:

Personally, I found the sight of the Prince of Wales climbing into the full Highgrove hejab for dinner with that bin Laden brother a week after the 9/11 slaughter far more disquieting: it seemed a rather more conscious act of identification than his son's party get-up. But a good indication of societal decadence is when it prefers to obsess over fictional offences rather than real ones.

I suppose it's possible that, should fate bring Harry to the throne, he'd turn into a Victor Emmanuel or King Carol of Romania and lend a constitutional figleaf to some Fascist regime. But worrying about a minor Royal schoolboy's alleged Nazi bent seems something of an indulgence at a time when the neo-Nazis get as many votes in Saxony's elections as Gerhard Schroeder's Social Democratic Party; when from Marseilles to Paris, Jews are being attacked and their homes, schools, kosher butchers, synagogues and cemeteries burnt and desecrated in a low-level intifada that's been going on so long the political establishment now accepts it as a normal feature of French life; and when the Berlin police advise Jews not to go out in public wearing any identifying marks of their faith. It's not just Nazi insignia you don't see in Germany these days; Nazi wise, the uniforms are the least of it.

Read the whole thing.

Update: James Lileks (in a pretty brave column for a blue state newspaper) wonders what sort of reaction Harry would have received if he had been photographed "wearing a hammer and sickle or a Che shirt".

In England, the BBC writes that "Prince Harry has apologised for wearing a swastika armband to a friend's fancy dress party".

Meanwhile, an Italian soccer star (whom Power Line notes, "had good things to say about Mussolini in his autobiography") gave the fascist straight-arm salute to a packed stadium in Rome.

And Reuters reports that French "far-right leader Jean-Marie Le Pen [said] the Nazi occupation of France during World War Two had not been 'particularly inhumane'."

And we're worried about passing the global test?

(Incidentally, this post is probably as good a place as any to hang Theodore Dalrymple's sage essay at how modern Germans are still impacted--hamstrung actually--by their ancestors' actions sixty years ago.)

Reuters reports:

Nearly half of Britons in a poll said they had never heard of Auschwitz, the Nazi death camp in southern Poland that became a symbol of the Holocaust and the attempted genocide of the Jews.

That's staggering--but not all that surprising, to be honest. For the Blogosphere's take, click here. Jonah Goldberg's comments are particularly worthwhile.

“People don’t realize that by voting Republican, they voted against themselves,” she says. Of Iraq in particular, she adds, “I worry that some people are entertained by the idea of this war. They don’t know anything about the Iraqis, but they’re angry and frustrated in their own lives. It’s like Germany, before Hitler took over. The economy was bad and people felt kicked around. They looked for a scapegoat. Now we’ve got a new bunch of Hitlers.”

Allow Dennis Miller to rebut that astonishing bit of crystalline logic:

The Left is so busy saying John Ashcroft is Hitler, and President Bush is Hitler, and Rudy Giuliani is Hitler that the only guy they wouldn’t call Hitler was the foreign guy with the mustache who was throwing people who disagreed with him into the wood-chipper.

I think Linda's just trying to be one of "the squeaky wheels shrieking for grease (Soy-based non-petroleum recycled post-consumer grease, please)".

Almost forgot--if you did vote Republican, remember, Linda doesn't want you in her audience. Or doesn't want to be in the same audience with you. Or something like that. Because music is a universal force for good, helping to change the world and bring people together. Except for eeevil, eeevil, icky Republicans.

Back in 2002, Garrison Keillor smeared newly-elected Norm Coleman of Minnesota. In mid-2004, he released a book called Homegrown Democrat: a Few Plain Thoughts from the Heart of America , which demonstrated the warm feelings he plainly thought about the people who make up the heart of America.

The day after the elections this month, Keillor again demonstrates his superior tolerance and willingness to accept a diversity of ideas and opinion.

Meanwhile, Amnesty International, which once ran TV ads featuring celebrities toasting freedom, demonstrates their new-found contempt for the idea. (Note the poster in that above link. I read it as moving beyond believing the idea that "Bush=Hitler". That poster is implying that America=Nazi Germany. Gee, nice, Amnesty.)

Paul Mirengoff of Power Line places these sorts of temper-tantrum-like actions into context:

Liberals don't want to give the public much credit even when it elects Democrats, and this fact reinforces my thesis. The liberals attributed Clinton's win in 1992 to "the economy, stupid" coupled with "Bubba's" ability to connect with rednecks. If they viewed Clinton's win in 1996 as the result of anything more uplifting, I guess I missed it. Compare this to the way Republicans talk about Reagan's victories or Bush's recent triumph. All of this suggests that leading Democrats don't hold the public in contempt because they are now the minority party; rather they are now the minority party because they hold the public in contempt.

I think there's much truth there. And in a way, they have only themselves to blame: their actions, all year, but especially in the weeks before Election Tuesday, were not a signal to middle-America that these were sophisticated grown-ups you wanted to let run the country. Despite Garrison's opinion, Red Staters aren't stupid--and can smell contempt and condescension for their ideals and beliefs a mile away.

Update: David Limbaugh agrees, writing:

Voters can usually detect counterfeit peddlers of faith and morality. For candidates to resonate in this area they have to do more than talk. They must show they truly believe in what they're selling. But it's more than that. In the end, it ultimately turns on what they're selling.

For presidential candidates to garner the conservative Christian vote — which is the block of voters we're mostly talking about here — they can't get too far by just promoting any issue and wrapping it in the language of morality.

It will be very interesting to see where--and how--the left goes from here.

Update: Charles Eklund has some advice for Keillor:

Keep talking.

Keep pushing the Democratic Party further away from the life experiences of the average American. Keep demonizing group after group. Gun owners, small business people, the professional middle class and now Christians. Run 'em off, tell 'em the Democrats can get by without their sorry arses.

See if that's the way to win elections.

I dare ya.

Somehow, The New York Times manages to invoke Godwin's Law in a review of The Polar Express, a Christmas movie:

It's likely, I imagine, that most moviegoers will be more concerned by the eerie listlessness of those characters' faces and the grim vision of Santa Claus's North Pole compound, with interiors that look like a munitions factory and facades that seem conceived along the same oppressive lines as Coketown, the red-brick town of "machinery and tall chimneys" in Dickens's "Hard Times." Tots surely won't recognize that Santa's big entrance in front of the throngs of frenzied elves and awe-struck children directly evokes, however unconsciously, one of Hitler's Nuremberg rally entrances in Leni Riefenstahl's "Triumph of the Will." But their parents may marvel that when Santa's big red sack of toys is hoisted from factory floor to sleigh it resembles nothing so much as an airborne scrotum.

For the Times, Michael Moore, whom many Red Staters would actually consider to be the second coming of Leni Riefenstahl (except that Leni was a better filmmaker), is "a credit to the republic", but in an animated Christmas movie, they manage to find not just subliminal Nazi references, but Freudian phallic symbols (well, scrotal symbols(!), to be accurate) as well.

Merry Christmas, all you simple hicks living in the Red States, from the enlightened, compassionate elites at the Times!

(Via a comment posted on VodkaPundit.)

Bob Novak writes about a new phenomenon in American politics: out and out hatred and rancor by urban leftwing protestors:

While the 1968 demonstrators foolishly risked street combat with the Chicago cops, their 2004 brethren wisely kept their distance from New York's finest. Unlike their predecessors of 36 years earlier, last week's protesters wanted to single out individuals with verbal abuse that was often vile for the sole reason that they were presumed to be Republicans.

Tim Carney, a reporter for this column, got a taste of that last Thursday night as he left the Garden. He was wearing a three-piece suit and presumably was mistaken for a delegate by a young woman, who yelled at him: "Get out of New York!" She added to Carney, a native New Yorker: "You don't belong here!"

That was much milder treatment than one journalist (who preferred his name not be used) underwent one day when he probably also was mistaken for a delegate. Walking out of the arena, he was called a "Nazi." That was a favorite epithet used by protesters, along with "fascist," "scumbag" and "crook." This reporter, who has spent much more time in Europe than I, says such harassment in the street is commonplace in European cities. He regrets its spread to this country.

Bob must be whoring for hits though. He mars an otherwise thoughtful and well written column with this:

I have covered every national political convention beginning with 1960 and never before encountered so unpleasant an atmosphere. Not even the infamous 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago approached last week's level of animosity. The irrational loathing expressed daily on the Internet by passionate, though poorly informed, bloggers was transferred into the streets.

Somehow I doubt very many well-known bloggers on either side of the political spectrum were out busting heads at either convention.

Because in sleepy Manhattan, there's just no place for a street fightin' blogger.

After being a key member of the Mercury Seven team of original American astronauts, and later the Keating Five team of American political grafters, John Glenn plays the Hitler card in describing the Republican convention last week.

Newsday, having been found wanting by a variety of bloggers, also violates Godwin's Law in their write-up of last week.

Kurt Vonnegut compares President Bush to--well, you know the rest.

Update: Taking a page from Mr. Vonnegut, North Korea also likens Bush to Hitler. I guess they'd prefer he'd be more like their own Kim Jong Il.

Did Al Gore call Bill Clinton a digital brown shirt yesterday? Because it's pretty obvious that the two don't see eye-to-eye on Iraq.

Of course, maybe Al just called himself a digital brown shirt, because his digitized version from the 1990s directly contradicts his current version. And an Al divided against itself cannot stand! (Apologies to both George Costanza and Jayson Blair. And probably James Taranto, too.)

At the start of the Clinton administration, there's no way I would have believed that Bill would be the calm, sensible one, out having fun, doing talk shows, looking to enjoy his retirement in a relaxed aging-but-still-youthful-but-elder statesman-like manner (I know, I know, he's made up stories out of whole cloth, but let me run with this) and that Al Gore would be out giving demonizing speeches and constantly breaking Godwin's Law. As I've said before, wasn't Al put on the ticket in '92 to be the moderate half of the equation?

UPDATE: Heh.

Godwin's Law * forces The Chicago Sun-Times to cease publication after this article. More here and here.

Stephen Green looks at a major bit of revisionism going on by the Germans at D-Day today:

if Germany wants to rewrite history to show that Hitler and the Nazis were some sort of occupying power in Germany, then they risk forgetting the lesson taught to them at the cost of millions of Allied lives. "Never again" becomes "Never what again?" becomes "It's happening again."

We can't afford to let Germany forget what happened, and who was to blame.

Ironically, Germany's efforts at revisionism come at a time when historians are finally starting to recognize just how welcome and accepted the Nazis were in Germany. And this is in marked contrast to the themes of previous tomes, such as William Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. As Orrin Judd noted:

A perfectly acceptable relic of its time, [Shirer's] book treats Hitler and the Nazi Party as complete aberrations, imposed on a slumbering Germany by a freakish set of circumstances. This view, understandable in a liberal West which finds it necessary to aver "it couldn't happen here" and which found it necessary to rehabilitate Germany into a worthy Cold War ally, has prevailed for the better part of sixty years now. In recent years however at least one book has come along to directly challenge this view, Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's excellent Hitler's Willing Executioners. But to my knowledge, British historian Michael Burleigh's Third Reich is the first major one volume history to rival Shirer's work and it is an invaluable corrective, precisely the kind of big idea contrarian history that we could use more of and which, even if the author's claims are ultimately rejected, can serve to clarify the thinking of us all on the issues he broaches.

Burleigh apparently draws on some academic work (for instance that by Saul Freidlander) with which I'm unfamiliar, but his central argument will ring a bell with anyone who's ever read Eric Hoffer's great book The True Believer. Burleigh considers the Third Reich to have been the product of a political religion, replete with symbols, hymns, liturgy, martyrs and a Messiah. From this perspective, the German people, defeated in WWI and impoverished by reparations and Depression, emerge, not as unwitting dupes, but as desperate believers in a new state religion propounded by Hitler, a true totalitarianism, suffused with racially motivated criminality, which sought to infiltrate every aspect of their lives.

As Orrin said, we needed to maintain the fiction that the Nazis were a strange alien virus imposed on innocent Germans, to resuscitate them into a worthy Cold War ally. But as Steve notes, the Germans themselves are returning to that fiction, just as she and France are returning to their shared anti-Semitic roots.

How else to explain this passage in his ESPN column:

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.

As I said last Sunday, Thompson and the late William S. Burroughs are the prime examples that sooner or later, decades of pharmaceutical excess catch up with a writer--and the results are not pretty. As James Lileks wrote that same day:

Thompson has less hope than the Islamists; at least they have an afterlife to look forward to. All we have is a country so rotten and exhausted it’s not worth defending. It never was, of course, but it’s even less defensible now than before.

He can say what he wants. Drink what he wants. Drive where he wants. Do what he wants. He’s done okay in America. And he hates this country. Hates it. This appeals to high school kids and collegiate-aged students getting that first hot eye-crossing hit from the Screw Dad pipe, but it’s rather pathetic in aged moneyed authors. And it would be irrelevant if this same spirit didn't infect on whom Hunter S. had an immense influence. He's the guy who made nihilism hip. He's the guy who taught a generation that the only thing you should believe is this: don't trust anyone who believes anything. He's the patron saint of journalism, whether journalists know it or not.

Does anybody at ESPN proof Thompson? Is there an editor who receives his copy and says, "Abu Grahaib is worse than the Holocaust. Yeah, sports fans will love this!" Rush Limbaugh and Gregg Easterbrook were fired from ESPN last fall because of their excesses. It should be interesting to see if anything happens to Uncle Duke.

UPDATE: And the Airbrush Award of the month goes to...ESPN. After the Drudge Report had a link to the article which contained the above quote, ESPN doctored it to now read:

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.

Gee, and I thought only the BBC airbrushed their stuff.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Drudge is mentioning the airbrush, here. Drudge writes:

But after being linked to the DRUDGE REPORT, a top editor demanded the sentence be immediately edited --without Thompson's okay, according to an ESPN.com staffer.

"Hunter can go too far sometimes," the Bristol-based ESPN employee told the DRUDGE REPORT.

Yes he can. So why aren't Thompson's excesses noticed before ESPN is deluged with email?

Of course, as Drudge notes:

As with the original, Thompson still concludes with the thought: "Now I am really ashamed to carry an American passport."

Why not move to France?

Remember Moveon.org's Bush=Hitler ads? Kerry has just hired Zack Exley, a strategist with MoveOn.org, as his director of online communications.

Joanne Jacobs notes a teachers' union official's attempt to equate charter schools with Nazis, and quotes from a newsletter which has this unintentionally hilarious line written by the president of the Federal Way Education Association, Michael Comstock:

To paraphrase what Joseph Gerbles, the Nazi propaganda minister said, 'Repeat anything enough times loudly enough, no matter how untrue it is, and people will begin to believe it.'

Neither Gerbles, Ron Vibbentrop nor Heimlich Bimmler could be reached for comment.

Advantage James Lileks, who writes in his latest Newhouse column:

Let's just be blunt: The North Koreans would love to see John Kerry win the election. The mullahs of Iran would love it. The Syrian Ba'athists would sigh with relief. Every enemy of America would take great satisfaction if the electorate rejects the Bush doctrine and scuttles back to hide under the U.N. Security Council's table. It's a hard question, but the right one: Which candidate does our enemy want to lose? George W. Bush.

England's far left Independent today (complete with Robert Fisk ad to the right of the story):

If the human race as a whole, rather than 50 states plus the District of Colombia, could cast a ballot this coming November, John Kerry would surely win the presidency by a landslide.

Unfortunately for President Bush-haters around the world, only the 200 million United States citizens of voting age will have that right - and the outcome is anything but sure.

And The Guardian, also from England, picks up the theme:

America's voters have done themselves a great favour. If they had picked Mr Dean, Mr Bush would have made mincemeat of him. By picking Mr Kerry, they have given the Democrats their best chance of recapturing the White House. That is something for Britons to welcome too. Nothing in world politics would make more difference to the rest of us than a change in the White House.

The free world has never had a stronger interest in the result of a US election than it has in the defeat of Mr Bush. Senator Kerry carries the hopes not just of millions of Americans but of millions of British well-wishers, not to mention those of nations throughout Europe and the world.

Of course, you could find similar articles at the time about the Republican who was in office in 1984, as well...

UPDATE: Speaking of the North Koreans, CBS News reports that North Korea is using The Diary of Anne Frank to teach kids about American(!) Nazis:

Anne's plea for peace is a curious message for these students, because North Korea is constantly preparing for war. Dictator Kim Jong Il spends the country's meager resources maintaining a powerful military. And it turns out that North Korea is using Anne's diary to tell students they must sacrifice for the military -- because war with America is inevitable.

“The Americans enjoy war. It excites them. It's part of their nature,” says one student.

Here, they teach that today's Nazis are the Americans – and that today's Hitler is George W. Bush. And, to hammer that home, whenever North Korean students refer to President Bush, or to other Americans, they're taught to call them “Nazis,” or “warmongers."

“As long as the warmonger Bush and the Nazi Americans live, who are worse than Hitler's fascists, world peace will be impossible to achieve,” says another student.

As James Taranto wrote, "Ever wonder where the Angry Left gets the loony idea that "Bush = Hitler"? Maybe from Pyongyang."

SHOULD GODWIN'S LAW BE UPDATED? Julian Sanchez writes, "Since 2001, the rhetorical trump-card role once played by Hitler seems to have been taken over by terrorists".

If we don't update Godwin's Law, the terrorists will have won!

(Or something like that.)

Back in January of 2001, close to three years before Moveon.org debuted their Bush=Hitler ads, Jonah Goldberg wrote:

I’ve never met a real social-welfare state leftist who could answer the following question without having to think real hard: "Aside from the murder and genocide, what exactly don’t you like about National Socialism?"

Bruce Bartlett lists some of the reasons why leftists have had to "think real hard" about that question.

Meanwhile, Suzanne Fields writes, "Mocking the horrors of the Holocaust has become a cottage industry in the dark corners of the anti-Semitic world, but who could have believed that in 60 years references to the Nazis would be played for laughs. An anti-Bush Web site parodies Time magazine's Person of the Year, pasting a swastika on the arm of an American soldier."

DID A EUROPEAN BROADCASTING AGENCY really utter the phrase, "in the US, where the Jewish question is notoriously sensitive"??

Yes the BBC did just that.

(Link via InstaPundit.)

UPDATE: Meanwhile in France:

A comedian's skit portraying a Palestinian guerrilla wearing a Jewish Orthodox hat and giving the Nazi salute on state-owned French television has raised an outcry and is under investigation by a Paris prosecutor for racial defamation.

Dieudonne M'Bala M'Bala, an often provocative French comedian, appeared on France 3 Television in December as a masked guerrilla wearing a Jewish Orthodox hat and called on "young people watching from suburban housing projects to convert like me ... and join the American-Zionist axis."

He then shouted "IsraeHeil" and made the Nazi salute.

I guess, especially after 1941, the Jewish question is less sensitive in France.

But hey, just a month ago, didn't Noam Chomsky say that anti-Semitism "scarcely exists now" in the West?

How much play are they getting in the mainstream media? Not very much, says Brent Bozell.

Meanwhile, equating the 43rd president with the leader of the Third Reich speaks volumes about the person making the comparison, says Edward Feser, in Tech Central Station.

It's also a unique form of Holocaust denial, as Jonah Goldberg wrote back in September:

By the way, I don't say this because I feel a passionate need to defend George Bush. I would make the exact same points if Al Gore were president. I would make the exact same points if anybody running for the Democratic nomination were president. This has nothing to do with partisanship. It has to do with the fact that such comparisons are slanderous to the United States and historical truth and amount to Holocaust denial. When you say that anything George Bush has done is akin to what Hitler did, you make the Holocaust into nothing more than an example of partisan excess. Tax cuts are not genocide, as so many Democrats have suggested over the years. (For example,. during the Contract with America debate, Charles Rangel complained that "Hitler wasn't even talking about doing these things" that were in the Contract with America. In other words, the Contract with America was in some way worse than what Hitler did. At the end of the day, that is Holocaust denial.)

"Darn those Republicans" does not equal "Darn those Nazis." The Patriot Act is not the final solution. The handful of men in Guantanamo may not all be guilty of terrorism, but it's more than reasonable to assume they are. And no matter how you try to contort it, Gitmo is not the same thing as Auschwitz or Dachau. There are no children there. You don't get carted off to Cuba and gassed if you criticize the president or if you are one-quarter Muslim. And, inversely, there was no reasonable justification for throwing the Jews and the Gypsies and all the others into the death camps. The Jews weren't terrorists or members of a terrorist organization. To say that the men in Guantanamo — or any of the Muslims being politely interviewed by appointment — are akin to the Jews of Germany is to trivialize the experiences of the millions who were slaughtered. Even if you think Muslims are being unfairly inconvenienced, when you say they are the Jews of Nazified America you are in essence saying the worst crime of the Holocaust was to unfairly inconvenience the Jews.

Maybe Godwin's Law should really be law.

In a surprise development, President Bush will be running for re-election unopposed in November, as his Democratic opponents disqualified themselves by violating Godwin's Law.

We'll have more on this, as it develops...

UPDATE: Seriously though, stock up on high blood pressure medication and Rolaids this year--you'll need 'em.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Daniel Drezner, subbing for Andrew Sullivan, proposes a new award for Sullivan's Blog--the Godwin award. I think the MoveOn.org ad would be a perfect nominee.

ONE MORE UPDATE: John Hawkins has some thoughts.

Byron York, in a rare Wall Street Journal article, looks at George Soros and declares, "At any given time, there is some small sliver of the American population that believes the president--any president--is a Nazi. Those people are usually thought of as nut cases. Now they can count among their number one of the world's richest and most influential men."

Jonah Goldberg and Byron York have articles on the Bush=Hitler crowd.

Does Godwin's Law work in real life? How many people have tuned the left out because of their hyperbole?

UPDATE: Speaking of Godwin's Law...

ONE LAST UPDATE: I just read Jonah Goldberg's syndicated column, after getting home. As he says, "'Bush equals Hitler' adds up to holocaust denial".

Even as James Lileks wonders why the left keeps calling Republicans Nazis, Stephen Green wonders why Maureen Dowd is comparing Bill Clinton to a Nazi general!

(I think I'll go watch The Producers.)

UPDATE: Here's more.

Remember the "News On The March!!" segment at the beginning of Citizen Kane? It follows right after the endlessly aped vertical tracking shot through Xanadu and Kane muttering "Rosssssssebuddddddd", dropping his small snow filled globe", because, as it must to all men, death comes to Charles Foster Kane. (To this day, my dad misquotes that line as "Death comes to Charles 'Citizen' Kane". Play it again, dad!)

During the "News On The March!!" segment, there are man in the street shots of men (in the street) reacting to Kane.

"Charles Foster Kane is a fascist!" one MITS shouts. Cut to another MITS, who shouts:

"He's a Bolshevik!"

That same sort of reaction is happening to Arnold Schwarzenegger. The day after he announced he was running for the governorship of "Collyvornia", Jamie Lee Curtis (his True Lies co-star) described Arnold has "a social Democrat" in Republican clothes, even as Katie Couric was breathlessly mentioning that Arnold's father was a Nazi. (With no mention of Arnold's grandfather-in-law's sympathies towards the Reich.)

And while there's no doubt that while Arnold will have an (R) next to his name on October's ballots, he's an awfully squishy Republican. Which, as a post on Dean Esmay's Weblog notes, is leading towards all sorts of unintended consequences:

Along with Hanks, pot-loving actor Woody Harrelson is set to join the fight against Schwarzenegger. "Woody is diametrically opposed to Arnold Schwarzenegger's political positions," a spokesman for Harrelson told PAGE SIX. "He does not support the candidacy."

As a writer on Esmay's site puts it, "Diametrically opposed? Since Arnold is pro-choice and pro-gay rights, what does that say about Harrelson?"

Probably that's he's in a Xanadu-like fog of his own.

NBC was forced to cancel all news shows, after Katie Couric violates Godwin's Law.

Orrin Judd notes that for Arnie, Nazism really is a family affair. (Scroll down if link does work--the Blogspot archive bug may be at work again.)

UPDATE: Here's more on Arnie's family affair with Nazism.

EU president violates Godwin's Law, European Union forced to disband: AP reports that "Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi provoked an uproar during a Wednesday speech to the European Parliament by telling a German critic he should star as a Nazi concentration camp guard in a movie."

UPDATE: On a serious note, Michael Ledeen is very impressed with Berlusconi. As he says, "That whining you hear indicates a victory."

Senator Patty Murray (Democrat from Washington, by way of Afghanistan), anti-American idiot.

I remember in the late 1990s and as recently as July of 2001, when, in a case of unwittingly updating Godwin's Law for the 21st century, several people (not the least of which were Bill Mahr, the host of Politically Incorrect and NAACP chairman Julian Bond) made cracks about "The Taliban wing" of the Republican Party. But I don't recall even Trent Lott praising Osama bin Laden, unlike Murray.

I'm only surprised she didn't make her speech from Baghdad.

"A respected Saskatchewan Indian leader said Friday Hitler did the right thing when he 'fried' six million Jews during the Second World War."

Oh, Canada!

Is it just me, or is Walter Cronkite not-so-subtely comparing Bush to Hitler when he complains about the military not allowing reporters in to battle?

“[In past conflicts], you wrote it to be the history,” he said. “We have no history now of the Persian Gulf War. We have only what the military reporters wrote and that’s what their bosses told them. That’s not good enough.”

Cronkite admitted that in some cases, such as the recent congressional report that outlined the country’s homeland security weaknesses, he wonders whether or not reporting all the facts is in the country’s best interest.

“It seems to me that as citizens, we should get this info so we can shout to Washington, ‘Let’s get this game going,’” he said. “But at the same time, there’s a terrorist cell sitting there saying, ‘That’s how we do it.’”

But for a country’s citizens to be truly free and the government to be held accountable, he said people must have a free press that gathers all the facts.

He said an example of the alternative would be a situation like what he witnessed after WWII, after the Nazi concentration camps were freed. The people who lived in nearby towns cried at the sights of the persecuted Jews and told reporters they had no idea of what was going on behind the walls of the camps.

Many were probably telling the truth, he said, but that did not make them any less responsible.

“They applauded as Hitler closed down the independent newspaper and television stations and only gave them his propaganda,” Cronkite said. “When they did not rise up and say, ‘Give us a free press,’ they became just as guilty.”

OK, maybe it's just me. But he is comparing the military to the Nazis--an analogy that's got to be getting a little worn out these days.

UPDATE: ScrappleFace has the inevitable denouement to this story. Of course, Cronkite should have seen it coming from a mile away.

UPDATE: As James Taranto notes, "Ah yes, the Weimar Republic--the Golden Age of Television."

U.S. News & World Report's John Leo writes that the left has lost its moral bearings:

Everywhere you turn these days, someone on the left is denouncing President Bush as Hitler, Satan, a terrorist or a tyrannical emperor. A Yale law professor said Bush is "the most dangerous man on Earth." A famous editor referred to Bush as "a lawn jockey" and "Pinocchio."

Some of the angry rhetoric flirts with the fringe idea that the United States planned the terrorist attacks. A Purdue professor said "there is no ground to be certain" that America and Israel aren't behind the 9/11 attacks. A Columbia law professor compared 9/11 to the Reichstag fire in Nazi Germany -- Bush is not responsible for 9/11, he said, but he exploited a national disaster to suspend civil liberties, just like Hitler. A Berkeley professor helpfully pointed out that some Indonesian groups think the U.S. planned the Bali bombing.

The rhetoric accurately reflects the current condition of much of the left -- bitter, stymied, alienated, politically impotent, full of loathing for America and the West, and totally unable to address the crisis wrought by 9/11, except to imply (or say) that the U.S. deserved to be attacked.

Nice essay by Tim Cavanaugh on Daniel Pipes' new organization, Campus Watch, in Reason. I particularly liked this idea:

We may in fact need an update of Mike Godwin's Hitler constant, with a corollary that the first person to use the word "McCarthy" in a debate automatically forfeits the point.

Good plan.

Found on The Wall Street Journal's Best of the Web Today section. I was tempted to call this "outrage of the week" when I first read it, then immediately came to my senses--it ranks fairly low in the outrage department compared to the rest of the headlines so far this week:

What's Next, Yellow Stars?
Nazi Germany forced homosexuals to wear pink triangles. Cleveland's WEWS-TV reports on a student Lakeland Community College "who we'll call Ian," whom the college tried to force to wear a Nazi-style triangle. "The assignment was to wear a pink triangle around school for the day as a symbol of gay rights and then write about the experience," the station reports. Ian objected to the assignment on moral grounds. "I asked 'What if a student were to feel uncomfortable with this--would there be an alternate assignment? [The instructor] said no."

Ian got an F and was threatened with expulsion, but WEWS says when it contacted the college, it backed down. "When NewsChannel5 spoke with Ian later in the day, his teacher had given him an apology note that read, in part, that the requirement was waived."

Paging Tom Wolfe--here's more grist for the book on academia.