Reply #21: While I understand the Orwellian fear of stolen memory...

[newswolf56]

...I nevertheless agree with Lou Dobbs. Indeed -- given that on matters of history, Americans are the most ignorant people on earth -- I would respectfully urge anyone contemplating a "Hitler" analogy to (at the very least) first read William Shirer's Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, probably the very best one-volume source on the subject. And then think long and hard before indulging in this postmodern form of crying "wolf": especially since too many of my fellow Leftists have been shouting "Hitler" ever since the Nixon years.

More to the point, Hitler made absolutely no secret of his murderous schemes and intentions: every bit of it he spelled out in Mein Kampf. The spurious notion that "Hitler wasn't as bad as Hitler when he started" is revisionist history, a deft twisting of fact intended to conceal the ugly reality that the German people who voted the Nazis into power knew exactly what they were doing and reveled in the resultant institutionalization of their hatreds.

Which is not to diminish the reality of the BushCo threat: I believe he is as bad a president as we have ever had, and I believe his contempt for working Americans (including our military folk) is both infinitely malicious and probably without precedent. But a more historically apt analogy is to some of our own (incipiently fascist) political bosses -- especially those who, in servitude to the ever-expanding greed of monopolist overlords, played off one minority against another in the interest of maximizing oppression and exploitation (just as Bush plays off Dominionist/Fundamentalist Christians against women and gays). And fascism does not inevitably a Hitler make. Think not Hitler but George Wallace, Bull Connor or even Robert K. Shelton -- the third name that of the Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan during the Civil Rights Movement years, the aptness of the comparison growing from the fact Bush and his followers are surely as hateful to gays as Shelton and his night-riders were to blacks.