It turns out that Hitler didn’t, contra wingnut lore, charm his way to power with dazzling speeches. I’m not sure if I am going to believe these excellent pieces of facts and evidence until I have a chance to cross-reference them with Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism.
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Corner Stone
Lay off the sauce kid.
Chad S
Is that supposed to be Obama in the middle? Because I’ve never noticed Obama’s double chin before…
The Dangerman
Wasn’t Reagan called “The Great Communicator” (and, shockingly, used teleprompters)?
Mike Kay (Team America)
does this mean obama isn’t gonna put palin in his FEMA detention camp?
:(
General Egali Tarian Stuck
Deep thought
If everyone is Hitler, then can anyone be Hitler.
Wordsmith
I don’t understand the first sentence. Could someone translate, please?
dmsilev
@General Egali Tarian Stuck: We are all Hitler. Except for Stephen Colbert; he’s Hitler’s grandson.
dms
Rick Massimo
Hmm. So tough economic times allowed a hard-line anti-regime party who saw enemies of the state around every corner to gain power in the national legislature.
Gosh, I wonder whether there’s any parallel to any potential contemporary political scenario.
brad
*stands up*
Hi, my name is Brad and I’m… damn this is hard
…
I’m Adolph Hitler. I have been for my whole life. I’ve tried to hide it but I’ve been living a lie.
I’m a liberal fascist, I want to force everyone to live a long, rich, rewarding life, at gunpoint. Grassfed steak and local organic produce or reeducation camps in the desert. Free quality health care or the gas chamber.
Sorry.
JGabriel
Hitler is Magic!
.
General Egali Tarian Stuck
@dmsilev: LOL
Mike Kay (Team America)
@dmsilev: his name isn’t stephen colbert, his real name is Ted Hitler.
Corner Stone
@Wordsmith:
Splitting Image
Speaking of Hitler, here’s some footage from the G-20 barricades this evening. This is from Queen St. and Spadina.
Hard-working cops versus anarchist rioters
Mike Kay (Team America)
Also too, obama didn’t charm his way to power with dazzling speeches. He won the nomination largely because he was the only candidate who opposed the invasion of iraq.
Elisabeth
But Obama is like Hitler in that he also wasn’t a citizen of the country he wanted to lead until right before he sought to become president.
Did Hitler have a birth certificate?
Wordsmith
@Corner Stone: Sometimes my brain freezes and I’m at a total loss….stuck. Thanks.
Corner Stone
@Mike Kay (Team America):
In what way? Which vote did he cast against the Iraq invasion?
Wordsmith
ANYone who write those words and doesn’t say shit (and absolutely DIDN’T) about or when the Bush regime was in control cannot be taken seriously.
Corner Stone
@Wordsmith:
Well if you are stuck…then it is a total loss.
Otherwise, let’s blame it on Cole having too much to drink and then posting.
srv
But did Hitler like Urdu poetry?
PPOG Penguin
“In toubled [sic] times,” warns the anti-Obama poster he reproduces, “the fearful and naive are always drawn to charismatic radicals.”
Oh, Sarah Palin fans. Have you no sense of irony?
Mike Kay (Team America)
@Corner Stone:
I guess to some Governor Dean’s and General Clark’s and Al Gore’s opposition to the invasion didn’t count because they didn’t actually cast votes, but primary voters, especially anti-invasion voters, saw it differently and choose obama.
I mean really, if Hillary opposed the invasion, Obama doesn’t even bother to enter the race.
Jon H
@Splitting Image: “Hard-working cops versus anarchist rioters”
You mean rioting trustafarians.
General Egali Tarian Stuck
@Corner Stone:
Here ya go sparky
That’s what I’m opposed to. A dumb war. A rash war. A war based not on reason but on passion, not on principle but on politics.
Ed Marshall
@Mike Kay (Team America):
2004 democratic primary voters picked “electability” as the reason they chose Kerry. They voted like pundits who thought that some mythical boob would be impressed with his vote for Iraq and that they would just go down in flames like McGovern if they brought in someone who didn’t vote for it.
It didn’t help that all the democrats who wanted to run for president felt the exact same way. They all remembered that Clinton ran the primary field thumping on his support for Gulf War I. If people out of that experience stopped thinking like dipshit, political pundits and started thinking more like political scientists that’s absolutely worth the lost election of 2004.
Ed Marshall
Although I hope the received wisdom that Hillary lost for her vote on Iraq sticks around. That’s pretty handy for future moronic democrats with ambition.
Joseph Nobles
Just think of how much awful Nazi Germany would have been if Hitler had. /wingnut
GregB
I have some proof that the Jonah Goldberg theory of liberal fascism has taken root in greater wingnuttistan.
This is an actual FaceBook post from a former business associate:
“…….is watching the NASCAR race and not the World Cup because I have dignity and self-respect. The United States never got caught up in soccer because we were too busy going to the moon and advancing medicine, science and technology. That is when we weren’t distracted saving soccer nations from left-wing tyrants like Hitler and Stalin.”
SRW1
Stephen Taylor is quite correct, Hitler did not become chancellor because he was elected by a majority in an election, he was appointed to that office as the consequence of a cabal of reactionary conservatives who were stupid enough to believe that they would be able to instrumentalize him for their purposes by ‘framing’ him with a conservative majority of ministers in his cabinet.
The tragedy was that the electoral support for the Nazi party was already waning, when that happened. You can see that if you look at the numbers in Table 2, which shows the percentage of votes the Nazis received in the national elections of July 1932 (37.3%) versus those of October 1932 (33.1%). Even after Hitler had been appointed chancellor and had called another snap election in January of 1933, the Nazis did not manage a majority of the votes.
MikeJ
@Ed Marshall: I thought Hillary lost because state’s with caucuses shouldn’t count. Or states with black people. Or states that Clinton lost.
Mnemosyne
@SRW1:
IIRC, the Nazi Party never received a majority of votes until all of the opposing parties had been banned.
It should be a cautionary tale about assuming that conservatives can control a small group of fanatics when in fact they will more likely be overtaken by them, but somehow it never gets told that way.
Mike Kay (Team America)
@General Egali Tarian Stuck: don’t bother. simply opposing the war when 70% of the country felt iraq was behind 9/11, during a time when the corporate media branded opposition to the invasion as treasonist was the easy route. Oddly, by the time 2007 rolled around, a lot of bloggers forgot how hated we were for marching against the war.
Mike Toreno
Hitler also doesn’t think the comparison is valid:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4RTkngOr3ag
Ed Marshall
@MikeJ:
Self-serving as it was, the Clinton camp were the people beating the drum for CW as political guide and making “electability” noises.
I know you are joking, but being serious the people making those arguments were saying that Obama couldn’t win in the general. Over the four years I noticed like 1:1 correlation between the people who were arguing for anyone but Dean in 2004 and anyone but Obama 2008 (eventually becoming the Hillary 08 deadenders).
Mike Kay (Team America)
@Mnemosyne: well, that’s already happened, hasn’t it.
the business republicans decided to partner up with the neo-cons and theo-cons in the 70s, and they were taken over. Now the party of rockefeller, buckley, and henry luce has to suck up to palin and bachman.
kay
@Mike Kay (Team America):
I always felt Edwards really screwed Clinton there. He took the “apologetic Iraq supporter” position, Obama had the Iraq opposition position, leaving Hillary with her conflicted and nuanced…explanation.
By then, of course, Edwards was opposing his entire Senate career, he was an entirely different person, so, really, it was just one more apology.
MikeJ
@Ed Marshall: Even worse, I am worse than Hitler. I added an extra apostrophe, after I taunted somebody else here for that very thing earlier today.
Of course I’m at +6, but that is no excuse. I will say four Struck and Whites and three AP style guides.
Mike Kay (Team America)
@MikeJ: also too, chairman dean and donna brazile blocked hillary from winning michigan and florida, even though hillary, T-Mac, and harold ickes said they shouldn’t count.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Xx6Q77psrc
/puma C-T.
Mike Kay (Team America)
@kay:
I was indifferent to edwards as he was a non-entity, but what shocked me was how the supposedly principled and idealistic blogosphere decided to give edwards a free pass on his entire rotten voting record (PNTR, Glass-Steagall, the bankruptcy bill, restoring felon voting rights, iraq) because he would give red-meat speeches, cobbled together by joe trippi and his luntz-like focus groups. I completely misjudged them (seriously). I didn’t think high-information voters, so well read, would succumb to transparent laundry lists of emotional buzz words.
fucen tarmal
well according to sylvia plath, every woman adores a fascist so i mean what do they expect us to do, we don’t all have the iron will, and the high moral principles of a douthat.
we are liberal fascists for the nookie. we do it all for the nookie. really when the conservatives compare obama to hitler, its about the nookie. when we want to take their hard inherited money, its for the nookie.
Quiddity
Obama is unlike Hitler or Lenin (or Stalin) in that he isn’t sporting a mustache.
However, if in the future he does, then all bets are off.
CT
@Quiddity:
If Obama grew a sweet ‘stache like Billy Dee Williams, he would be President for life.
Splitting Image
Not entirely 1:1. I thought Kerry was a better choice than Dean in 2004 because yes, he was more electable. When he mortgaged his house for campaign money I figured he was enough of an ambitious rat-bastard to do what it took to win. And he had a reputation for being exactly that. He campaigned horribly based on his record.
Before the campaign started in 2008, I picked Edwards as the most “electable”, but it was obvious right from Iowa that Obama had the resources to win, and a better strategist than Clinton.
sukabi
silly man…. haven’t you figured out that FACTS mean NOTHING to the teabaggers or the GOP… the only thing that matters is the PERCEPTION…. and perception becomes “truth” if you push it far enough.
DPirate
Thalmann and Duesterberg were Pre-Naders!
r€nato
In the future, everyone will be Hitler for 15 minutes.