Friday, May 20, 2005

Santorum and Hitler



I detest Santorum. He's like the worm that destroys the apples even when they look good on the outside. So I should feel happy that he has finally gone too far and called the Democrats nazis:

What the Democrats are doing is "the equivalent of Adolf Hitler in 1942 saying, 'I'm in Paris. How dare you invade me. How dare you bomb my city? It's mine.' This is no more the rule of the senate than it was the rule of the senate before not to filibuster."

Except of course he hasn't gone too far. Nothing will be too far with this lot. And that he criticized Senator Byrd for using Nazi imagery earlier this spring makes no difference:

On March 1, Sen. Robert Byrd (D-WV) made a reference to Hitler in a speech about the nuclear option. Santorum lashed out at Byrd for his remarks. From the 3/11/05 Charleston Journal:

Byrd roused the ire of many Republicans when he tangentially referred to Adolf Hitler during a speech on March 1 defending cloture and the right to debate.

No, what all this shows is just the harvest from the movement Newt Gingrich started in the early 1990's, when he decided that the political opponents of his ideas should be labeled as the enemy, when he started using war imagery in his political speeches and when the wingnuts started memorizing the best ways to insult Democrats.

For a long time the Gingrich-created wingnuts were the only ones acting like this, but finally something gave on our side, and we started using the same imagery. Probably because acting sane and courteous got you steamrolled in a second. And now both sides are being regarded as equally extreme.

This is not true. The voices on the left which are extreme are indeed on the fringes. The extreme voices on the right are in the very center of power. There really isn't anything one could call a moderate Republican any more, in the sense of true moderation. The moderates are powerless, regarded as fringe elements themselves.

I knew all this was going to happen when I first heard of the wingnut term "culture wars". Once you set off on this path of hatred only one outcome is possible. The one where everybody calls everybody else nazis.