Why Do They Love The Nazis?

Let's consider the evidence.

Everybody's favorite Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, was talking to the American Legion and explained that people who disagreed with the president on his handling of the war were suffering from "moral or intellectual confusion," and weren't recognizing the "new type of fascism."

Unfortunately for him, I can recognize fascism. And unlike our friends in the White House, I remember that, first of all, not all Muslims are terrorists. And on top of that, "fascism" requires little things like... well, a government.

But terrorists don't really support the idea of a strong government. So logically, the phrase "islamo-fascism" doesn't make a lot of sense.

On the other hand, a government trying desperately to remove all freedoms from its people, trying to impose its own moral code, trying to suppress all resistance to its rule… well, that, we can certainly understand to be falling in line with the concept of fascism.

But what little fact does this underline?

Well, if you disagree with the Administration, they'll accuse you of the worst thing that they can think of. However, they don't have a lot of imagination. So they keep harkening back to WWII. By carefully avoiding Vietnam (after all, John Kerry fought there) and Korea (uh… what was that about, again?), they get to raise the spectre of an Evil That Spanned The Globe!

Unfortunately, a lot of area has to get covered by this same argument.

First, Bush can't seem to help himself. He jumped all over the Nazi rhetoric, saying that "Bin Laden and his terrorist allies have made their intentions as clear as Lenin and Hitler before them." Which is nice. Ignores the facts of history, but a nice argument. But that's not the only place where we can find Republicans waving the swastika.

Let's not forget the Neverending Struggle Against Science. Al Gore takes the worst of that fight. He gets compared to Hitler because of the movie "An Inconvenient Truth." Glenn Beck (small-time radio guy and habitual liar) tried to say that Al Gore was "just like Hitler" for making this movie. (Yeah. Al Gore and the cattle cars. Right.)

And a guy named Sterling Burnett (who gets his paychecks from Exxon, by the way), compared Al Gore to Joseph Goebbels, just because Al Gore happened to point out that Exxon might have something to do with global warming. Nice bit of logic, there.

I'll just assume that you're starting to see a pattern building up.

So, anybody want to lay odds that we'll be seeing more of these comparisons as we get closer to 2008? Personally, I'm thinking that there will be a spate of fascist/Nazi comparisons for the next two months. Anybody want to take that bet?