A GUY IN OHIO GOES THERE

A couple of weeks ago, a guy named Joseph Benning from Lawrence Township, Ohio, got a few words onto the Web site of his local paper, The Ironton Tribune, in response to an editorial entitled "Bus System Vital to Region."

Joseph Benning wrote on Jul 6, 2008 7:27 AM:

...It would be nice if one could get from Ironton to the Amtrak-Greyhound station in Ashland without hailing a cab or car ride.

If there was any chance of this being a realistic and successful enterprise, private companies would step up....

The Tribune has now given him a byline of his own, for an op-ed that's, well, a tad more inflammatory. Watch as he makes the leap from public transportation to Hitler:

I'm throwing the "bogus" flag upon the presidential bid of Marxist-Socialist turned Democrat Senator from Illinois, Barack Hussein Obama.

Somewhere around 75 or so years ago, from out of nowhere a stealth politician arose.

He too sought the nomination for his nation's highest office; refreshingly different from other politicians of the era. This Austrian born wallpaper hanger's background is too much like our Illinois lawyer's. Both reared in single parent households; neither brought much of a resume on the campaign trail. The one hung wallpaper the other hung "present" votes.

...in both cases "change" means free health care for everyone, increased equal rights, a retirement income, guaranteed wages, unemployment benefits, free child care, and more gun control.

... The German people had to "believe." They wanted "change." And through "hope," they only had to "believe" what Adolph Hitler and the Nazis said; without questioning what Hitler and his Marxist-Socialists pals had really designed behind the scenes....

Wow. And yeah, it's all like that -- it doesn't let up for a sentence.

This op-ed is inspiring some hosannas at Free Republic and Lucianne.com:

very insightful post there,,gave words to what has been tickling around in my brain.

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A MUST READ! This is scary stuff and we have to get the word out. Barry Hussain Obama is a Communist and they are saying he is the one that they have been waiting for. Maybe the editors at the New York Magazine did us all a favor. At least they made people start looking into the Obama's backgrounds to see if there is any truth to the "cartoon".

But there are some quibbles:

Except the failed artist, the failed architect, the paperhanger, was a veteran, had received at least one Iron Cross, and was wounded in action. He was not a coward.

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The big difference in my mind is that Hitler loved Germany and wanted Germant Uber Alles while Obama loves something other than the USA and wants the USA to cow to all others.

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I don't see the parallel. Hitler commanded a thug army willing to go into the streets and physically attack his enemies. Will obama sent a brigade of metrosexuals out to hit us over the head with their purses?

Leftists in today's America are cowards.

So Hitler was actually more admirable than Obama.

I'm surprised there hasn't been more of a concerted effort among wingnuts to make this argument -- that Hitler was awful, but he was only a 9 on an awfulness scale of 10. I'm not saying this because I think wingnuts admire Nazism; they really don't seem to (it's European, for one thing, and they all think it's purely socialist -- congratulations, Jonah Goldberg, your work is done!). I'm saying this because they clearly have a desperate need to believe that the contemporary Antichrists they fight every day, from the comfort of their rumpus-room couches and computer chairs, are so unspeakably evil that it's impossible to grasp the totality of the evil.

Recall, for instance, that when the New York Post conducted asked online respondents in 1999 to pick the 25 most evil people of the millennium, Bill Clinton was #2 and Hillary Clinton was #6, both as write-ins. Bill beat Stalin, Pol Pot, and Josef Mengele -- but, darn it, he couldn't knock Hitler out of the #1 slot. Especially now that wingnuts are making common cause with the Clintons and Obama has taken Bill and Hill's place as the source of all evil in the world, you'd think there'd be more effort to tote up Hitler's virtues, so the boilerplate argument would be that, while he was awful, he's no Barack Hussein.

Who knows -- maybe that and not and not fear of violating Godwin's Law is what prevents most right-wing pundits (O'Reilly and Coulter being the notable exceptions) from regularly playing the Nazi card. Maybe they're not afraid that, as an insult, it's too much. Maybe they're afraid that, to their core audience, it's not enough.