It's always kinda disingenuous to compare anyone to Hitler. The teapublicans comparing Obama to him, for example, has so absurdly watered that down that analogy that it's become ridiculous. How can a man at once be both a "dictator" and "the worst president since Carter"- one of our all-time nicest presidents? As usual, the republicans are all over the map with mudslinging, but largely just preaching to the choir.
Are their any Hitler-wannabes on the teapublican horizon? Probably several hundred but none that really stand out and grab you by the throat and scream: "SEIG HEIL!" You have to remember though that Hitler wasn't elected to power. The guy just wasn't that popular at first. Germany gave him a position as chancellor pretty much to appease him. He seized power with the Reichstag fire, blaming it on communists and then went about his murderous plans for world domination. While he did campaign on "the Jewish question", he didn't provide his answers until after he seized power. Frankly, running on a platform of murder and working people to death wouldn't get a guy a lot of votes. Germany went along with it, but after the fact. There had been no polls pondering: Should Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, communists and various in sundry other undesirables be wiped from the face of the earth? He tipped his hand but not that much.
Politics is a lot like what they say about jazz.- it's the notes you don't play that make the difference.
When the Tea Party came to be very early in 2009 when Barack Obama took the oath of office and taxes were suddenly discovered to be "too high" and "un=American", people were intrigued by this new party. What did they really have in mind? Taxes aren't pretty but they do pay for the roads, schools and military that we need here in the 21st century, but they tended to be more upset with taxes on rich than with the tax burden on the middle class. They wore tri-cornered hats, misquoted the founding fathers and pretty much preached against taxing the rich and proposed taxing the poor instead. Not so much a founding father's idea as it was the old Monty Python, Dennis Moore sketch. It made a lot of folks wonder whose idea it really was.
Turned out that the teaparty was more astroturf than grass roots as it was funded by the Koch brothers, a couple of billionaires. They took the usual republican notion of being fiscal conservative and injected it with the steroids of huge sums of cash. Suddenly, old people in revolutionary war attire wielding misspelled signs wasn't so humorous. Some of these assholes got elected to the House of Representatives. Yikes!
While I don't see the various tea parties as being Nazi party-like, there are a lot of parallels. They are crazy. They'll accept anyone into their parties that is any degree of crazy, but the crazier the better. It's a mix of extreme Christians, gun nuts, people who hate gubmint, more gun nuts, racists, Ted Nugent, even more gun nuts and (D) all of the above. Probably a few Nazi's too. The original Nazi's were not that exclusive either. Numbers. You got to have numbers.
And you've got to have people to hate. These Kochsuckers hate everybody. But, mostly they hate their fellow Americans who are not white or are white and liberal. That's a lot of Americans to hate! They diversify though. They also hate poor people. They hate them so much they want to make more of them! In the spirit of fiscal conservatism and tax savings, they think it's a brilliant idea to stop paying out welfare and also to end the minimum wage. The thinking is, get off welfare and go to college to learn to get a better job, lazy bastard! Sans wages and welfare, forage for berries in the woods while attending college classes. Oh- and pay more in taxes. I told you they were crazy. I'll add that they are idiots too.
The question is, how dangerous are they? We don't know yet. But, nothing good comes of hate combined with government. They hate "big government" but they desperately want to become part of it. They say they want to make it smaller but, who does that in a nation of 310 million people? You can't run the USofA as mom and pop candy store. They want to cut everything that smacks of socialism (which they almost exclusively confuse with communism) but they want to add to an already bloated military budget. Makes you wonder why. Goodness, think of all the wars we'd have going right now with a McCain or a Romney in the White House. Germany didn't really want war in Europe so soon after the First World War but, they went along with prepping for it and then Poland inexplicably attacked them.... Well, that's the way Germany made it look.
I've said all along that the GOP was smart to concentrate on getting into the senate and governor's mansions and state legislatures across the nation. With all that in your pocket, who needs 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue? Look at the obstruction we just saw with them controlling the House. Now they have the Senate too. Yes, I know that they have had this before and we survived. It wasn't these Kochsuckers though. That's like comparing today's republicans to the Party Of Lincoln, formed to end slavery. Different times, different people. Just because they have Ben Carson doesn't mean they love Chris Rock. There were Jews, Swedes and other's in Hitler's SS. JEWS! Humans are a very unpredictable race.
Indeed. That's why it's hard not to wonder how this all will play out. How much hand-tipping have they done already? They still speak of FEMA work camps and death panels that aren't going to happen, six years into Obama's presidency. They have a penchant for saying things like "Well, you people were going to do that to US, so..." On a somewhat less foreboding note, a common refrain on the internet (regarding Congressional control) is: "You people had your chance- you blew it!" I take that to mean that democrats could have seized totalitarian control of the country but they were too busy feeding poor people.
Loose talk from a bunch of mentally ill posters on the internet, maybe. But, they get all this prodding from people they are putting into power. This can't end well. It will get worse before it gets worser.
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