Nazis Everywhere

Congressman Barney Frank had finally had enough of the idiots who call President Obama’s proposed health insurance reform a “Nazi policy”, and verbally excoriated some stupid young woman in a town hall meeting in Dartmouth, MA a few days ago. Video clips of the interchange have been on all the news outlets, and if you haven’t seen it, it’s easy to find on YouTube and worth looking at. Just type Barney Frank into the YouTube search engine and it’s the first clip that comes up.

It’s about time somebody put these ignorant sheep in their place.
The topic came up on Russ Limbo’s radio show when a caller said people like the stupid young woman, and those who are carrying firearms to town hall meetings, were making the Republicans look like fools. El Rushbo quickly “corrected” the caller, giving one of his patented windy exhortations about how it’s really the left that’s behind all this stuff.

Besides, the radio blowhard said in winding down his lecture to the caller, the Nazi death camps didn’t come until way at the end of the war anyway.

Say WHAT?

I know America’s most-listened-to radio host flunked out of college in his first year, but you’d think someone who makes as much money as he does would hire a producer or two who could give him a quick lesson about Nazis, since he likes to talk about them so much these days.

The death camps decidedly did NOT come “way at the end of the war”, as the blowhard said. For the last three years of the war, healthy Jews who had previously been sent to concentration camps as slaves under Hitler’s regime, were sent instead directly to the extermination camps.

Details, details. America’s Anchorman (that’s what he calls himself) should broadcast a correction. Oh, wait, I keep forgetting…it’s not a “news” program.
People like the young woman in the video clip with Congressman Barney Frank and those who would compare our President to Adolph Hitler have either a huge misconception about what National Socialism is, or simply don’t know anything at all about history. It’s probably a bit of both.

Name-calling and inflammatory rhetoric are all part and parcel of American politics. It’s one of the reasons so many people have been completely turned off by politics and politicians. I think it’s one of the reasons so few people actually vote. They’re turned off by all the negativity and high-volume name-calling.
We can disagree, and we can do so noisily. But when the discourse devolves to name-calling and fear-mongering, perhaps a brief time-out is in order.