You're Hitler! (Long Form)
"There is something spooky about Ron Paul and something even spookier about his acolytes whose devotion pushes them to support him in online polls like cyber-brown shirts."
And that's not even just for starters; it starts before this and goes on and on. I've always liked Roger Simon, and it seems more likely than not that Paul is a nut (is there a Libertarian who isn't? Anyone care for a 17th Amendment debate?)
But this is just blech. It's the way the Clintons would call someone Hitler.
posted by ColumbusGuy @ 9:10 AM
7 Comments:
And how does a brown-shirt vote in a cyberpoll? I can imagine a brown-shirted young tough kid having a distinct style when he shops at Albertson's, or when he phones Rush Limbaugh, or when he asks a girl to a dance. But voting in an online poll is hardly a place where style is evident.
Maybe if you watch the live poll numbers climb: 432 votes... 433 votes... 434... 435... -- did you see the way it jumped from 434 to 435 in a particularly aggressive way? I bet that was a young fascist voting!
A much more serious person might ask why Paul gets such high support online and low support in normal polls. After all, the online world also has a disproportionate love for Battlestar Galactica, pornography, editing Wikipedia articles, watching videos of airhead South Carolina beauty contestants, extreme politics, and anime. Maybe the fact that Paul is a former gynecologist is making him a hit with the porn community? The moral: Don't assume, it makes an ass out of you and Hume.
If nothing else, the Paulites have done us a favor in demonstrating the complete uselessness of non-scientific polling.
Hmm, good thing I'm a Careful Reader, CG, because the first time I skimmed your post my reaction was "wait, the Clintons called someone Hitler in the past? When?" Your usage of "would" is mildly ambiguous, as it's often used for past tense as well as hypotheticals.
I saw Ron Paul's guest spot on The Daily Show and was impressed. He is quite straightforward about his beliefs, his desired policies, and how radically different they would be. He was: not obviously full of shite; not playing on fear of any vague external threat; not appealing to some nationalistic impulse; etc. In short, he was precisely the opposite of my expectation of how Hitler's rhetorical methods would translate to this campaign.
I guess it just goes to show how easy the impulse to Godwin a disliked candidate can be.
Paul is shameful. His line about how neocons, and only neocons, hijacked America isn't just a lie, it's tending toward ugly, nutty paranoia.
Also, what's this about a "vague external threat"? You mean the tens of millions of people out there who have openly devoted their lives to killing Americans and our allies? And have succeeded numerous times? And who are arrested or stopped on a weekly basis, preventing even more death? Is that they vague threat you're referring to?
Can you be a former gynecologist? Or is it like the bar and the mob, once you're in, you're in? (So to speak.)
SWMBCg, etc., except for that last line.
No. By "vague external threats," I was comparing Paul's statements to Hitler's having blamed Germany's problems on the "international Jewry."
By the by, was it uncharitable of me to mentally read your post in the voice of Keifer Sutherland?
I saw Paul on The Daily Show and was impressed, too. That he's a lunatic.
So Paul doesn't play on the fear--or for that matter, take seriously--the external threat, vague or direct, of terrorists. This alone makes him unfit to lead.
Let's not even get into how he implicitly blames us for the terrorism.
No, he's not like Hitler. He's like the nativists and isolationsists who didn't take Hitler seriously (though they did have trouble with Jews).
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