The Boys who Cried “Hitler”
In the last couple of weeks, the Harris campaign has been touting the support of former Republican Vice-President Dick Cheney.
The irony was not lost on Piers Morgan who asks on his show, Piers Morgan Uncensored, “You’d literally take an endorsement from Adolph Hitler to win power?”
There are real, legitimate reasons Republicans I personally know are not voting for Trump. To them, he’s seemed to have abandoned the pro-life community, which, they worry, may lead him to appoint more moderate or liberal federal judges than he did in his first term.
Others don’t like his economic policy because it’s too protectionist.
Others are worried he will be more isolationist than he was in his first term.
Others point to his seemingly pathological dishonesty and false promises. (Is Hillary locked up yet?)
Some are tired of some of the idiots who support him who don’t seem to believe in or understand the rule of law and/or have run the Republican Party in states like GA into the ground.
Some, are like me, who, in addition to some of the above, have personal grievances against Trump himself as his campaign organization in Georgia tried to remove me as Cobb GOP Chair and he and his family campaigned against me and smeared me with false accusations during my campaign when I ran for State Party Chair. However, despite all of these reason, I can’t find any solid reason to vote for Harris. So I must vote for Trump.
Like Trump, she is pathologically dishonest. She inflates her accomplishments and her resume. Walz embellishes his military record and fumbled when caught in a lie in the VP debate about his visits to China in 1989. Harris bailed out rioters because they were the rioting and burning down businesses of innocent people because they were righteous in their cause. Walz actively encouraged the destruction.
However, Harris on the one year anniversary of Jan 6 called that a date that will stand beside Dec. 7, 1941 and Sept. 11, 2001.
If I have to weigh Trump’s disqualifiers against theirs’, there is, sadly, no other option but to vote for Trump. Maybe that’s why, in the spirit of the old lawyer trope…when the facts are against you, argue the law. When the law is against you, argue the facts. When both are against you, call the other side names. Looks like both are against you and when an election campaign comes down to name calling…you’ve lost. Try not to lose your dignity as a result as well.
In the middle of all of these attempts to label Trump and Republicans as “Nazis”, The Wall Street Journal has noticed that several vulnerable Democrats are running ads on how they have aligned with Hitler…I mean Trump. In their article, “Playing the Führer Card”, The WSJ asks, “Is Sen. Bob Casey a closet fan of Adolf Hitler? How about Wisconsin Sen. Tammy Baldwin? We ask because both Senate Democrats are running ads as part of their re-election campaigns that associate themselves with Donald Trump. And they’re doing this even as fellow Democrats and the press corps are suggesting that Mr. Trump admires Hitler and has similar dictatorial ambitions.”
Democrats now seem stunned that their oft-used trope is falling on deaf ears. But, since the end of WWII, and maybe even before, Democrats have seized on their obsession with the Third Reich to paint anyone to the right of them as “fascists” and every Republican candidate as the second coming of Adolph Hitler.
While in the past, accusations of Republicans being aligned with Nazis didn’t make it into more serious news articles. these options were often chosen for the Letters to the Editor, like the one above from The Wichita Beacon.
It’s not hard to find Reagan allusions to the Nazis, like the one below from Florida Today published on August 23, 1980.
Or this one in the Cambridge Evening News from June 9, 1984:
What once only occupied a small corner of the editorial page, in the day of the 24 hour news cycle, these accusations…this long standing Democratic trope, has become far too common place in the mainstream media. It’s hard to imagine Walter Cronkite or David Brinkley engaging in such alarmist rhetoric, but it has become common place on far to many “news” outlets.
Therein lies the danger to our institutions. How can a nation survive when nearly half the people believe the other half have just elected a Nazi to the White House?
The other danger is one that affects society as a whole. When society embraces a claim that ANY politician is like “Hitler” or a “fascist”, it cheapens what actually happened in WWII, not only those soldier who died fighting Germany and Italy, but those civilians like my great, great uncle and his immediate family, my cousins, whose lives ended in concentration camps. That’s what real, not American political rhetoric, fascism looks like, but it’s hard for people to comprehend it as time and experiences pass away. Suddenly, it just looks like Donald Trump…or Mitt Romney…or George W. Bush…or Ronald Reagan…or Richard Nixon…or even Dick Cheney.
But there is nothing wrong with “Hitler”, just so long as a particular “Hitler” endorses the Democratic ticket.
