MAYBE THEY COULD PICK ONE…. Some on the right like to compare President Obama to Hilter. Others on the right like to compare Obama to Neville Chamberlain. But as Media Matters noted this morning, the conservative Washington Times managed to present both insulting comparisons at the same time over the weekend.
On the one hand, we have this absurd op-ed, complaining about government, the president “spreading the wealth around,” and the drive towards giving the state “absolute control over our lives. ”
The path we’re embarked upon, in the name of good, is a familiar one. The unspeakable horrors of Nazism, Stalinism and Maoism did not begin in the ’30s and ’40s with the men usually associated with those names. Those horrors were simply the end result of a long evolution of ideas leading to consolidation of power in central government in the name of “social justice.” In Germany, it led to the Enabling Act of 1933: Law to Remedy the Distress of the People and the Nation. After all, who could be against a remedy to relieve distress? Decent but misguided Germans, who would have cringed at the thought of what Nazi Germany would become, succumbed to Hitler’s charisma.
Today’s Americans, enticed, perhaps enchanted, by charismatic speeches, are ceding so much power to Washington, and like yesteryear’s Germans, are building the Trojan horse for a future tyrant.
The same conservative paper, on the same day, on the same page, ran this item complaining about Obama’s remarks in Cairo.
During the 1930s, appeasement was based upon the notion that a majority of Germans were decent people who simply wanted peace and national self-determination. Thus, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain made the fateful decision to give away the Sudetenland, Czechoslovakia’s ethnic German region, to Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime. […]
Mr. Obama is repeating Chamberlain’s tragic mistake – except this time, the Israelis are to play the role of the Czechs, the sacrificial lamb at the altar of appeasement.
In our reality, of course, Obama is neither Hitler nor Chamberlain. Nevertheless, just for the sake of consistency, if conservatives could pick or the other, it’d help make their absurd criticisms less grating.
