This page contains links to recent blogs by Lincoln Mitchell
Tagged with: Joseph Stalin
Former Arkansas governor, and formerly relevant national political figure, Mike Huckabee is guilty of the latest right wing reductio ad Hitlerumfallacy. The Tea Party and right wing penchant for comparing President Obama to Hitler and Stalin is evidence not of any totalitarian tendencies on the part of Obama. Instead it is evidence that right wing contempt for science is now rivaled by contempt for learning anything about history.
Comparisons to Hitler are too common in our political discussions as assertions that, for example, President Obama's health care policy is comparable to Nazism, are ridiculous. However, in this particular case comparisons are appropriate. Worley's ideas regarding gays and lesbians are not similar to Hitler's -- they are the same as Hitler's. The idea of putting gays and lesbians into concentration camps and killing them is not something out of Worley's distorted imagination, but is something that actually happened during World War II as gays and lesbians were rounded up along with Jews and others and sent to death camps.
The Cold War was the organizing principle of American foreign policy, and had a strong influence on domestic policy as well, for almost half a century. Today, less than two decades after its end, the Cold War is poorly remembered. The equivalence which some have suggested between the threat of Jihadist terror and that represented by the USSR, and the almost ubiquitous comparisons between Saddam Hussein and Stalin from those trying to drum up support for the Iraq war are just some examples of this. These comparisons are not so much wildly inaccurate, Jihadist terror represents a real threat to the U.S., and Hussein was much worse than your garden variety dictator, but they betray an intellectual laziness and failure to understand the true nature, and, for quite a long time, power of the Soviet regime.
Bobby Jindal has "seen enough" and Dan Quayle thinks President Obama needs to "tame the left wing of his party." Perhaps it is time to give the Republican Party some credit for consistency, if not exactly relevancy or accuracy. Dan Quayle, who has gracefully made the transition from boy wonder vice president to elder statesman of his party without pausing along the way to actually accomplish anything, and Bobby Jindal, who seems to have succeeded in combining the politics of Ronald Reagan with the earnestness and credibility of Ronald McDonald, seem to agree that the biggest threat to the country is that President Obama will pass health care reform and lead the country irrevocably down the road to socialism.