Maine Owl

Hitler symbolism becomes drumbeat of anti-health-reform wingnuttia

There is so much more today on the health reform = Nazism front (see previous post). Listen carefully to the language Limbaugh uses: "Now does this sound like something any conservative president has done or does it sound like something liberals are doing all over this country."

Limbaugh was making some silly comment about a German law requiring the boiling of lobsters. But don't we have Jonah Goldberg's faux construct of "liberal fascism" going on here? This is really a twisted, Alice-in-Wonderland attempt to replace (often though not always unfair) notions that conservatives are fascists and to insert liberals as a target for angry scorn. Goldberg tried this in his preposterous book.

Today Sara, posting at Orcinus, fires a warning shot. With the arrival these swastika-waving mobs--albeit ones angrily trying to reflect their own images onto those of Congressional liberals and President Obama--the guessing game, according to Sara, is over.

America's conservative elites have openly thrown in with the country's legions of discontented far right thugs. They have explicitly deputized them and empowered them to act as their enforcement arm on America's streets, sanctioning the physical harassment and intimidation of workers, liberals, and public officials who won't do their political or economic bidding.

The post warns that these mobs portend a "danger line" beyond which "no country has ever been able to return."

Please read the whole post and comment below what you think of it. I won't speak for Ms. Owl, but I'll tell you that while she agrees with me this is a strong strategy to stop cold health reform, it's just a little hyperbolic to say this means we are on the threshold of fascism.

Maybe. But what if fourteen months from now health reform is dead, the political process is at a standstill, anger is seething from every corner of the electorate, and Obama is scrambling to avoid a replay of 1994 while Republicans pretend to possess the salve with their Contract on America? Where are we then?