[TigersEye]

Whatever one thinks of Bush’s Iraqi campaign, the president obtained congressional approval to invade and pledged $87 billion to rebuild the country. He freely weathered mass street demonstrations and a hostile global media, successfully defended his Afghan and Iraq reconstructions through a grueling campaign and three presidential debates, and won a national plebiscite on his tenure.

Yeah, but other than that he's EXACTLY like Hitler. /slobbering spittle flecked mantra

[Dallas59]

Those "people" that use those terms could care less about anything else. They are infected with "It's Americas Fault" syndrome. There is never any solution from them...just shot in dark blame.Then they wonder why sKerry lost.

[Tolik]

Victor Davis Hanson:

.....Ignorance and arrogance are a lethal combination. Nowhere do we see that more clearly among writers and performers who pontificate as historians when they know nothing about history.

...Entire continents can play this game. If Europe is awash in anti-Semitism, then one mechanism to either ignore or excuse it is to allege that the United States — the one country that is the most hospitable to Jews — is governed by a Hitler-like killer. Americans, who freed Europe from the Nazis, are supposed to recoil from such slander rather than cry shame on its promulgators, whose grandfathers either capitulated to the Nazis or collaborated — or were Nazis themselves.

If the sick analogy to Hitler is intended to conjure up a mass murderer, then the 20th century’s two greatest killers, Mao and Stalin, who slaughtered or starved somewhere around 80 million between them, are less regularly evoked. Perhaps that omission is because so many of the mass demonstrators, who bore placards of Bush’s portrait defaced with Hitler’s moustache, are overtly leftist and so often excuse extremist violence — whether in present-day Cuba or Zimbabwe — if it is decorated with the rhetoric of radical enforced equality.

....But something has gone terribly wrong with a mainstream Left that tolerates a climate where the next logical slur easily devolves into Hitlerian invective. The problem is not just the usual excesses of pundits and celebrities ......, but also supposedly responsible officials of the opposition such as former Sen. John Glenn, who said of the Bush agenda: “It’s the old Hitler business.”

....Is there a danger to all this? Plenty. The slander not only brings a president down to the level of an evil murderer, but — as worried Jewish leaders have pointed out — elevates the architect of genocide to the level of an American president. Do the ghosts of six million that were incinerated — or, for that matter, the tens of millions who were killed to promote or stop Hitler’s madness — count for so little that they can be so promiscuously induced when one wishes to object to stopping the filibuster of senatorial nominations or to ignore the objection of Europeans in removing the fascistic Saddam Hussein?

There is something profoundly immoral for a latte-sipping, upscale Westerner of the postmodern age flippantly evoking Hitler when we think of the countless souls lost to the historical record who were systematically starved and gassed in the factories of death of the Third Reich.

.....The final irony? The president who is most slandered as Hitler will probably prove to be the most zealous advocate of democratic government abroad, the staunchest friend of beleaguered Israel, and the greatest promoter of global individual freedom in our recent memory. In turn, too many of the Left who used to talk about idealism and morality have so often shown themselves mean-spirited, cynical, and without faith in the spiritual power of democracy.

What an eerie — and depressing — age we live in.

    Victor Davis Hanson Ping ! 

       Let me know if you want in or out

[SJackson]

If you'd like to be on this middle east/political ping list, please FR mail me.

[kb2614]

It's too bad this article will not be read by those who need to read it. Of course it would probably go over there heads.

VDH is excellent once again.

[CaptRon]

Ignorance and arrogance are a lethal combination. Nowhere do we see that more clearly among writers and performers who pontificate as historians when they know nothing about history.

Great line.

[OXENinFLA]

PING...

[Fred Hayek]

The left will remain out of touch. Just recently Airhead Amerika had some commentary regarding Lebanon. The protestors were supposedly just a small minority right wing extremists (and puppets of Bush), while the majority were backing Hezbollah and the Syrians. Airhead went on about all the good things that Hezbollah was doing - clinics, daycare centers, etc (did they get that "information" from Sen Osama Mamma Patty Murray bin Idiot?).

[TChris]

Superb article!

[Paradox]

I haven't read a whole lot of VDH, but I try to. This may be his best yet. It sums up whats wrong with Liberalism today. His conclusion about the depressing times we live in today also rings with my heart. I am dismayed at what has happened to the opposition. I thought it was bad during Reagans term, but this is worse. I thank GOD that its OUR side which owns most of the guns...

[prognostigaator]

.......

"he simply fell under the influence of Moveon.org and thought it was his duty to remove the Bush/Nazi threat that even U.S. senators and presidential candidates had identified and warned about."

[longtermmemmory]

Brownshirts were all homosexuals. The hitler youth were the feeding ground for the homosexuals. The Nazi's wanted to destroy society and remake "god" in the Nazi image.

Seems to me the only group doing that today is the leftists with their feminist moralphobia and their efforts to impose homosexual marriage and lower the age of consent.

[swilhelm73]

One explanation is simply the ignorance of the icons of our popular culture. A Linda Ronstadt, Garrison Keillor, or Harold Pinter knows nothing much of the encompassing evil of Hitler’s regime

I think this is honestly most of the issue. To the leftist mind set, Hitler = evil and powerful, Bush = evil and powerful, so therefore Bush = Hitler.

[Thoro]

Resorting to a Hitler analogy to prove a point is more often than not a sure sign that you've lost the debate.

[firewalk]

.

[M1Tanker]

Wow, when VDH says something, there is just not much more to add.

That said, we must never forget that Hitler was a NATIONAL SOCIALIST. His policies need to be looked at and compared to the DNC/Green platforms. Like the Communist Party USA platform vs the Democrats, the comparisons are disturbingly similar. No wonder Kerry got the support from the World Workers Party and the CPUSA....

Modern leftists and socialists in the world need to be very carefull when calling 'right wingers' (ie, anyone right of Castro, Chavez, or Marx) NAZIs. Like the elitist "journalists", they will find thier beliefs and policies under scrutiny. I know that when the Left's postitions are laid out, it becomes no question who the real National Socialists are....

For the DUers: Hint, it's not Bush or the conservatives... Your glass house is cracking