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He begins by detailing the falsehood of the analogy:
In fact, what do Linda Ronstadt, Harold Pinter, Scott Ritter, Ted Rall, and George Soros all have in common? The same thing that unites Fidel Castro, the European street, the Iranians, and North Koreans: an evocation of some aspects of Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Germany to deprecate President Bush in connection with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
At first glance, all this wild rhetoric is preposterous. Hitler hijacked an elected government and turned it into a fascist tyranny. He destroyed European democracy. His minions persecuted Christians, gassed over six million Jews, and created an entire fascistic creed predicated on anti-Semitism and the myth of a superior Aryan race.
Whatever one thinks of Bush’s Iraqi campaign, the president obtained congressional approval to invade and pledged $87 billion to rebuild the country. He freely weathered mass street demonstrations and a hostile global media, successfully defended his Afghan and Iraq reconstructions through a grueling campaign and three presidential debates, and won a national plebiscite on his tenure.
...A Linda Ronstadt, Garrison Keillor, or Harold Pinter knows nothing much of the encompassing evil of Hitler’s regime, its execution of the mentally ill and disabled, the systematic cleansing of the non-Aryans from Europe, or mass executions and starvation of Soviet prisoners. Like Prince Harry parading around in his ridiculous Nazi costume, quarter-educated celebrities who have some talent for song or verse know only that name-dropping “Hitler” or his associates gets them some shock value that their pedestrian rants otherwise would not warrant.
It strikes me that we are less surprised by the very irresponsible behavior of actors who compare Bush to Hitler, because we’re so used to seeing that sort of thing played for laughs on sitcoms. Irresponsibility is funny and is rightfully used in sitcoms, where it belongs. It is endearing when seen in a sitcom character on TV. I wonder if it could be true that some of our popular actors are just emulating the irresponsibility that makes sitcom characters so beloved, when making the wild, outrageous comparison between Bush and Hitler.
Of course, the same irresponsibility which is so lovable when seen in characters on a TV sitcom, is quite dangerous when used in the real world.
Because in the real world (continuing to quote VDH):
Ignorance and arrogance are a lethal combination.
...Is there a danger to all this? Plenty. The slander not only brings a president down to the level of an evil murderer, but — as worried Jewish leaders have pointed out — elevates the architect of genocide to the level of an American president.
VDH cites multiple incidents in which public figures explicitly raised the notion of shooting the President. The actions of these public figures in calling and wishing publicly for the horrendous evil of murder and assassination, can not be considered unrelated to the actions of actual would-be assassins:
...All this venom is not so funny when we now witness a Saudi American young man, Ahmed Omar Abu Ali, currently under indictment for allegedly planning just such a murder. After all, when it becomes a cheap and easy thing to compare a president to a century’s great criminal, then it becomes even cheaper and easier to dream — or plan — to kill him.
VDH observes that such behavior is “not so funny,” which recognizes the defense offered by those making such statements, that they are being wild, outrageous, entertaining, humorous… just like lovably irresponsible sitcom stars. So my conjecture in this post may be correct. VDH is right: it’s not so funny when a popular public figure irresponsibly urges others to carry out political assassination.
At some point a Gore, Byrd, or Soros has a moral responsibility not to employ Nazi analogy, if for no other reason than to prevent unleashing even greater extremism by the unhinged. No doubt Abu Ali’s lawyer one day soon will say that his disturbed client’s “musings” were no different from what he read from Knopf or in the Guardian — or that he simply fell under the influence of Moveon.org and thought it was his duty to remove the Bush/Nazi threat that even U.S. senators and presidential candidates had identified and warned about.
It’s key to put down the Bush-Hitler analogy, not by legislation, but by the pressure of public opinion. The ability to do so is part of the great power of free speech.
