Amateur Hour Continues

I think it was Kathy Shaidle who said, “In the future, everyone will be Adolf Hitler for fifteen minutes.” For eight years, Godwin’s Law was SOP for Lefty’s who routinely denounced Bush as Hitler. The argumentum ad Hitlerum is a cherished tool in every Internet Idiot’s bag of trick. And now, not to be outdone, the Right is, of course, turning to this Lefty trick as it seems to have embraced so many other parts of the playbook in its rush to Trotskyize itself.

Part of what has struck me about the “Obama is a Nazi” hysteria is that it seems to me to be squandering an opportunity at actually trying to understand what it going on in order to simply herd public opinion around with loud noises and screaming. To be sure, that has a short-term payoff. Loud noises and screaming were very effective at stampeding us into an unnecessary war of choice in Iraq by convincing a large number of people that we had to go fight it or watch our cities burn in a nuclear inferno. The problem, of course, is that when you govern by fear tactics you decrease the overall ability of your population to participate wisely in the democratic process. You might get short-term political gains, but you get long-term stupid. It results in embarrassing and depressing things like actually having to agree with Barney Frank (something I never thought I’d do and something I hope never to do again):

As Leonard Pitts, Jr. points out:

For the record, then: It was Nazis who shoved sand down a boy’s throat until he died, who tossed candies to Jewish children as they sank to their deaths in a sand pit, who threw babies from a hospital window and competed to see how many of those “little Jews” could be caught on a bayonet, who injected a cement-like fluid into women’s uteruses to see what would happen, who stomped a pregnant woman to death, who once snatched a woman’s baby from her arms and, in the words of an eyewitness, “tore him as one would tear a rag.”

That’s who the Nazis were, ladies and gentlemen — those obscenities plus six million more. They were the triumph of ideology over reason and even over humanity, the demonization of racial, religious and political difference, the objectification of the vulnerable other. And the authors of a mass murder that staggers imagination, still.

This is the little detail that has always kept me from taking serious comparisons of Bush, Limbaugh–and Obama–to Hitler. Righties–like Lefties–who make this facile identification of anybody they dislike simply signal to me that “This is nature’s way of saying ‘Don’t touch’.” I just tune them out.

And I think they are setting themselves up for long-run disaster because, as Uncle Andrew learned in The Magicians’s Nephew, the trouble about making yourself stupider than you really are is that you can often succeed. Obama is not Hitler. The Dems are not Nazis. If you keep banging away on that falsehood, that is time spent not actually fighting the real problem, which is that Obama is a rank amateur and the this Administration continually acts, not like a gang of ruthless butchers, but like the Keystone Kops. Amateurism, combined with egoism, can be quite destructive and should be carefully managed. But the sort of destruction it wreaks is a different kind of destruction than that wrought by ruthless butchers who are well-organized.

If we needed more examples than the Obama Administration has already provided of its amateurish and inept approaches to governance, I think we need look no further than this:

Obama Lies about Abortion Coverage at Staged Event with Fake Faith Groups

Going and lying directly to the people who are most acutely aware of the facts about the Dem fealty to the Sacrament of Abortion, and then calling on a few Lefty Court Prophets to chime in and say, “You can trust Obama!” seems to me to be yet another display of ineptitude in the ongoing debacle of this Administration. It doesn’t exactly savor of Hitler’s March to Absolute Power so much as of the end of an episode of “Police Squad”: