[Politics of Fear]

Nazis on the March ... Must be Election Time

I realize there's not a lot to say about an administration that, at precise biennial moments (even-numbered years, September), employs the fear of terrorism to scare a population into voting a particular way. Or even that the fear they peddle isn't of the terrorists themselves, but their domestic political rivals.

I guess all we can do is document it and suggest a revision to Godwin's Law: "As an election approaches, the probability of a comparison by the GOP involving Nazis or Hitler to the Democratic Party approaches one."

So here we go. Bush, yesterday:

"History teaches that underestimating the words of evil and ambitious men is a terrible mistake.... In the 1920s, a failed Austrian painter published a book in which he explained his intention to build an Aryan super-state in Germany and take revenge on Europe and eradicate the Jews. The world ignored Hitler's words, and paid a terrible price. His Nazi regime killed millions in the gas chambers, and set the world aflame in war, before it was finally defeated at a terrible cost in lives. Bin Laden and his terrorist allies have made their intentions as clear as Lenin and Hitler before them. The question is: Will we listen?"

Don Rumsfeld, last week:

"It was a time when a certain amount of cynicism and moral confusion set in among Western democracies. When those who warned about a coming crisis, the rise of fascism and Nazism, they were ridiculed or ignored. Indeed, in the decades before World War II, a great many argued that the fascist threat was exaggerated.... With the growing lethality and the increasing availability of weapons, can we truly afford to believe that somehow, some way, vicious extremists can be appeased?"

Dick Cheney, August 28th:

If I may quote Franklin Roosevelt, the President under who many of you served and fought, in words he used to describe fighting the Nazis: "Modern warfare against treacherous enemies," he said, "is a dirty business. We don't like it -- we didn't want to get in it -- but we are in it and we're going to fight it with everything we've got."

Run, run, the Democrats are coming!