So Not Hitler: President Obama and the Unreasoning Right-Wing Fear

OKAY, RIGHT-WING TYPES, you’re still confusing thinking Americans and the election for president is just months away. Could you please pick your paranoia and stick with it, at least till November? 

You’ve pretty much run the gamut of all fears. Four years ago, Sarah Palin warned that Obama was going to “pal around with terrorists.” The implication was that we were all going to die in 9/11-like attacks. Glenn Beck predicted next that the president’s enemies would be arrested by the millions and billions and sent to FEMA prison camps. Fox News tried to sell the idea that Obama hated America because back in Chicago he listened to Reverend Jeremiah Wright, pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ. 

When thinking Americans shrugged it all off, Rushbo and other right-wing types did an Exorcist-like 360 swivel and started warning that Barack Obama didn’t just pal around with terrorists. 

He was one. 

Now, you want us to believe Obama is Hitler. You color in that little mustache on his picture and slap it up on your Tea Party posters. On Facebook you put up paintings of Obama in storm trooper garb. 

It’s kind of pitiful. 

It’s lame.

 

Perhaps it’s time for a history lesson. What thinking Americans call “using actual facts.” If you haven’t noticed, there are no gas chambers in America and we don't have any Zyklon-B. Your side pretends Obamacare is the same as mass murder, but you can’t find the ditches filled with corpses. The police aren’t even torturing critics. But perhaps you forget: Obama is the one who opposes waterboarding. 

President Obama doesn’t have political goon squads, either. Oh, sure, you quake in your boots when “union thugs” are mentioned. But you’re just pissy because sometimes we outvote you, and you can’t handle that fact. 

You might be relieved to know that Hitler hated unions, just like you do. In May 1933, shortly after he gained power, he ordered unions dissolved and leaders beaten and carted off to concentration camps. Anti-union? Hitler? Check. Right-wing governors like Scott Walker and John Kasich? Check and double check. 

It’s kind of fun, if you carry the comparisons far enough. By 1930, Hitler was already relying on 100,000 brown-shirted bully boys to depress the vote, sending them to attack opponent’s political rallies and murdering rival politicians. But when it comes to voter suppression, in 2012, your side is the bomb. Good try in Ohio, for example, screwing with voting hours, limiting them in Democratic-leaning counties, expanding them in Republican-leaning areas of the state. Yep. You care about freedom. Sure you do. Come to think of it, liberals, in the main, are prone to go around unarmed. If you want weapons at political rallies...you might have noticed that was kind of a Tea Party thing. 

And remember the thrill your side got when Ted Nugent suggested President Obama should suck on his machine gun? 

Admit it. You thought that was cool.

 

LET'S SEE IF WE CAN KEEP SCORE—and see which side in America most leans in the direction of Hitler. Writing in Mein Kampf, before he came to power, the Nazi leader labeled Jews a separate race and called racial pollution “the original sin of humanity.” (624) And what do you know, in a poll this spring, nearly half of Republican voters in Mississippi said interracial marriage should still be illegal. 

In fact, isn’t religious intolerance a trick often found buried deep in your bag? Don’t a lot of Evangelicals, who flock to your side, say Jews are Christ-killers and doomed to burn in Hell? If Obama were like Hitler he’d order attacks on Pat Robertson’s home and Joel Osteen’s church, as the Nazi leader did on Jews’ homes and synagogues during Kristallnacht (“Night of Broken Glass”) in 1938. 

So: Is Obama like Hitler? Then which side today hates an entire religion? Which side fears all Muslims, including those born in America, with full citizenship rights? Which side burns down a mosque in Tennessee? Which side shoots down Sikhs? Religious intolerance. Yeah... that's a check for your side. 

How about marriage and reproduction? You might be happy to know that Hitler believed marriage was first and foremost a matter of procreation: “And marriage cannot be an end in itself, but must serve the one higher goal, the increase and preservation of the species and the race. This alone is its meaning and its task.” (252) He was against the right of the individual to decide in matters of reproduction: “We must also do away with the conception that the treatment of the body is the affair of every individual.” (254) Oh my: Your side says if a woman is raped the government can force her to have a baby. 

You fear, with unreasoning fear, a “homosexual agenda.” Hitler didn’t like gays either and sent them to concentration camps. Jews wore yellow stars. Gays wore pink triangles. Today, in America, Charles L. Worley, a Christian minister in North Carolina, can vilify Obama after he comes out in support of gay marriage and say what we need to do is build prison camps for all homosexuals. That way, they’ll die out. 

Remind me again, how is Obama like Hitler?

 

THE RIGHT TALKS ABOUT AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM and complains because Obama is slow to get involved in Syria. He’s unwilling to bomb the hell out of Iran. Hitler believed in exceptionalism, too, but his was the German kind. He could talk patriotism with the best, wave the flag, too, only his flag included a swastika. “We, as guardians of the highest humanity on this earth, are bound by the highest obligation,” he once argued. (646) In other words, what Germany did was always right. What America chooses to do, your side says in similar fashion is always right. Again, a check in your column. 

Hitler wanted to ensure that public schools taught love of country first and foremost. He wanted to foster a nationalist spirit and reinforce hate. “Science, too, must be regarded by the folkish state as an instrument for the advancement of national pride. Not only world history but all cultural history must be taught from this standpoint...The curriculum must be systematically built up along these lines so that when the young man leaves his school he is not a half pacifist, democrat, or something else, but a whole German.” 

Now, the Tennessee Tea Party wants slavery taken out of the textbooks. (Makes America look bad.) In Arizona, ethnic studies are banned. And don’t forget inserting Creationism in the science curriculum or teaching the Bible as “literature” in the public schools. Ignore that kid who thinks different in the front seat. Make him study the Bible because that’s what your side believes. 

How about all those illegal immigrants? What’s the existential fear on the right? Here’s how Hitler might put it: “All great cultures of the past perished only because the originally creative race died out from blood poisoning.” (289)  He’s talking Aryan superiority. You’re talking fear of brown-skinned peoples, those speaking Spanish, particularly, and Asians, too. You’re afraid for the Anglo-Saxon race. 

Finally, for people who talk so much about the Founding Fathers, have you noticed that we still have three branches of government? Hitler took away lawmaking power from the Reichstag (Germany’s legislature) almost the moment he assumed office. He drummed up unreasoning fear of communists to ram through restrictive laws. And, hold on, now. Isn’t that a specialty of Michele Bachmann and Allen West, running around, warning about all kinds of “Al Qaeda sympathizers” and “commies” in Congress today? 

Sometimes, it’s hard to see how you folks sleep at night. 

Have you forgotten Republican presidents appointed seven of the nine current members of the U.S. Supreme Court? Can't you see you control the U.S. House of Representatives? Don’t you notice your side is pouring hundreds of millions into the current campaign? You have, in all likelihood, a 50-50 chance of regaining control in the Senate and Obama holds only a slim lead over Mitt Romney in all the election polls. So stop with the scary bedtime stories. 

OR, FOR GOD’S SAKE, double your medications.

 

 *** 

(Sunday morning):  The author stands corrected on one point: It’s five of the members of the U.S. Supreme Court. Save for that error, he hopes right-wingers will feel a little better, reading this and knowing they have so little to fear.  

Or as the comic strip character Pogo once said, and as applies more to them than they might imagine: “We have met the enemy and it is us.”



A Liberal Comes Out of the Closet: Will Mitt and Newt Follow?

Okay, Edwards tuned out to be a slime ball.
I admit.

It's probably not accurate to say I'm a liberal coming out of the closet.  Here, in conservative Cincinnati, I'm more a "flaming liberal" than anything else. I still have my Kerry-Edwards bumper sticker on my Honda Civic, because I want people to know I didn't vote for George W. in 2004.
So:  If I'm liberal, does that make me a bad person?  Many of my friends are conservatives and I still like them. 

I guess I'm confused.

Part of the problem with being a liberal in 2012, is that liberals lost a grip on the discussion when we let far-right types start to define us.  You can't use the "N" word in polite company these dasy; but you can vilify opponents by sneering, "He's a liberal."  Too often, that epithet means, even to people who ought to know better:  unpatriotic, advocating socialism/communism, and big, big fans of more government.  Our foes see us not as honest doubters, but in an evil light, as "union thugs," "libertards," "zombies" and the like.  In the mind of Sarah Palin, I'm afraid, we're not even really Americans. 

Oh yeah, and God is on the conservative side, too.

I've got nothing against God, if He's listening, by the way.  But I'm a liberal in part because of my roots as an American history teacher.  I love the U. S. Constitution as much as any conservative, maybe even more than Michelle Bachmann.  A liberal, defined in the proper sense, I believe, is a person "favoring individual liberty and political and social reform."  Or, as I used to explain to students, a liberal looked at the world, saw problems, and "wanted to make the world better."  You could make a rather tidy argument that the Founding Fathers were "liberals" themselves. (And yet:  conservatives love to claim a lineal descent from Washington, Madison, Jefferson, Franklin and Hamilton.)

Let me stress then, that I am both a liberal and a huge, huge fan of Founding Fathers Gunning Bedford Jr., Richard Dobbs Spaight and Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, too.

In fact, I believe the Bill of Rights, alone, assures the Founding Fathers a glorious place in history.  It's the devil in the details of what those rights mean, that divides us today.

We live in perhaps the freest society in human history and conservatives want to insure that it remains that way.  So, for example, they fear any kind of gun control. They believe our nation is rooted in Judeo-Christian teachings.  In both positions they are likely half right, at least.

So why am I a liberal?  Well, liberals are full of doubts and prone to question accepted social and religious thinking. I know Massachusetts required tax support of an established church long after the U. S. Constitution was approved.  I know that when the Irish began pouring into this country in the 1840s they were seen as a threat to the American way of life, with their funny religious ideas.  I know Mormons were driven out of New York, Ohio, Missouri and Illinois by conservatives who despised their faith, that their founder, Joseph Smith was murdered.  It wasn't liberals--who have honest doubts about religion--who did it, by the way.

I remember, more recently, when conservatives said John F. Kennedy couldn't be president because of his Catholicism and his insidious ties to the pope.  That very thought ought to make Mitt and Newt and Rick Santorum sit bolt upright in their beds at night.  I mean:  are those three boys actually liberals, believing as they do, that any person of any faith can run for president?  Do they just not know what liberal ground they stand on?

Are they liberals, still hiding in the closet?  My god, what's next? 

A Muslim president? 

I'm old enough to remember the U. S. Supreme Court decision in 1965, overturning Connecticut law, rooted in religious thinking, which held that sending birth control information through the mail was the equivalent of sending pornography through the mails.  I remember the Loving decision, too, which overturned laws in several states, banning interracial marriage.  I remember conservatives standing in college doors and vowing that no Negro would ever enroll at the University of Alabama, except maybe over a few conservative dead bodies.  So, I'm a liberal.  I think if Trent Richardson wants to tote the pigskin for the Crimson Tide, well, then, he's entitled.

In other words, liberals have often stood against big government and conservatives have often stood for it.  I know Newt and some of the folks on the conservative end of the spectrum believe gay-rights activism is going to undermine the American way of life.  But I'm a liberal and tempted to call that paranoia.  I'd like to point out that in the Old Testament both sodomy and adultery were equally offenses in God's eyes and adultery was meant to be punished with stoning.

Newt, be thankful, Man on the Moon GOP presidential candidate (and, yes, Perfect Hair John Edwards, too), that liberals triumphed on that issue long ago.

We might also consider Ms. Michele Bachmann, the rightest of the right candidates in this primary season.  I seem to remember that Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony were liberals when they launched the fight for womens' rights in 1848.

In fact, if you believe women should be assertive, and that they can work for a living, and that they don't have to get married, yep, Ann Coulter, you, too, are a flaming liberal.

It's funny, actually, because Representative Bachmann is probably the biggest fan of the Founding Fathers now alive.  Yet, in 1789, even those god-like men could not determine how far liberty truly extended.  Unlike Representative Bachmann, I might point out the Three-Fifth's Compromise, which said five slaves equaled three whites in determining state population for purposes--oh, the irony--of state representation in Congress.  I also note the absence of the word, "women" in the document; conservative thinking at the time having no doubt that, like gay people in conservative thinking today, females were second-class citizens.  

Some people serve heroically.
Others serve in their own fashion.
The blogger in "action."

Actually, you don't have to go that far back to argue that liberals are Americans in good standing.  Liberals, again, are full of doubt--even when it comes down to the matter of "patriotism."  A good liberal might argue that if "patriotism" is always right, then Hitler's followers were right and those flaming liberals, Robert E. Lee and Jeff Davis were traitors and probably flag-burners outright.  That concept ought to make a few heads in conservative South Carolina spin.

I enlisted in the Marines, myself, in 1968 and volunteered to go to Vietnam, twice.  (I wasn't sent, though, and maybe this actually proves conservative thinking that all liberals are dumb). 

In fact, I love America for what it stands for:  freedom for all.  I didn't cry liberal  tears when we were attacked on 9/11, I cried red, white and blue.  And I thought, in 2003, that conservatives idealogues were wrong to drag us into war in Iraq, when Osama bin Laden was hiding farther east. 

I hated to see good American boys, of any religion or political persuasion, die, when I thought our government had made a mistake.  See:  I don't trust big government, either. 

Hell, I remember Watergate.

I'm not saying I was right about everything, of course.  I'm a liberal; and liberals always have those doubts.  But I didn't like the idea that some conservatives blamed all Muslims for the 9/11 attack by 19 followers of that faith, either.  I taught history, you see; and I remember that we locked up 110,000 Japanese-Americans, including 77,000 U. S. citizens, after Pearl Harbor was attacked in 1941.  Call me a "libertard," I guess, but when I hear people say that all Muslims are terrorists, I think it's like saying Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich bear guilt for the Irish Republican Army bombings in Belfast in the 80s.

The way I see it, you don't have to be a conservative to be a very good American.

How Low Can You Go? Kasich, Perry, and the Average Worker

To hear Governor Kasich tell it, public sector workers are grossly overpaid and taxpayers are loaded down with economic chains.  He has to rein in pay and benefits.  Unions are evil and greedy and the cause of our present economic malaise.

On the surface, it's a position that has appeal to conservative voters, but you have to wonder:  "How low do Kasich and his allies really want Ohio workers to go?"

Consider the record of Governor Rick Perry, who touts his success with jobs creation in Texas in recent years, as a sort of model for the future.  On the surface, Mr. Perry has a solid record.  Gross Domestic Production rose 2.6% nationally in 2010.  Texas had a rate of 2.8%. 

Unemployment has been lower in Texas, too:  8.5% vs. 9.1% across the country, according to reports out just today. 

So put on your cowboy boots and buckle up your holster, buckaroo, and head to Texas if you want a good ol' job.  Perry for president!  And Michelle Bachmann for VP.  Bachmann once argued that doing away with the minimum wage would cure unemployment. 

The "good old Medieval days."
When the serfs still knew their place.

So would a return to feudalism. 

But I digress.

As always, the full picture is more complicated than politicians like Kasich ever care to admit.  In 2010 almost 1 in 10 Texas workers (9.5%) worked at or below the federal minimum wage (vs. 6.0% nationally).  So you can GO to Texas and find work.

You just might have to be content with minimum wage.

Even better, in 2009, 26% of the workforce in Perry's state went without health care vs. 17% nationwide.  (See New York Times; 8-16-11)

Maybe that's the plan in Ohio, Wisconsin and New Jersey where fiscal hawks like Kasich rule.  Let's cut costs for taxpayers, follow the Texas model, so to speak.  Let's face it, teachers, if you gave up health care entirely, the burden on taxpayers could be dramatically reduced.  And police?  Really, you and your firemen buddies are grossly overpaid.  With your union bargaining rights gone, you really should be willing to do your part and swallow a 25% cut in pay.

If you don't like it pack up that U-Haul and head for Texas.

In the end, that's the question I'd like to hear asked at the next Republican presidential debate:  How LOW do they want the average American worker to go?

Call me a crazy liberal:  but I'd prefer to hear my politicians promise to fight to improve conditions for low-paid workers in this country, who promise to help pull working Americans up, in Ohio and elsewhere, not tear unionized workers down.