BEN SHAPIRO: OUTRAGEOUS ACCUSATIONS AND RHETORIC FROM THE LEFT
http://townhall.com/Common/PrintPage.aspx?g=cb5c5724-5758-4e79-ac59-a3c31851d904&t=c
Is this Kristallnacht or the Reichstag Fire?
Ben Shapiro
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
One week after the passage of President Obama’s quasi-socialized health care scheme, 54 percent of likely voters support repeal. And according to Frank Rich, each and every one of those voters is a budding Nazi.
“How curious that a mob fond of likening President Obama to Hitler knows so little about history that it doesn’t recognize its own small-scale mimicry of Kristallnacht,” Rich writes. “The weapon of choice for vigilante violence at Congressional offices has been a brick hurled through a window. So far.”
It is Rich, naturally, who knows nothing about history; his ardent support of President Obama blinds him to the slander he has perpetrated on both Americans and Holocaust victims. Kristallnacht was a government-sponsored program of terror and murder in which 91 Jews were murdered, tens of thousands of Jews were thrown into concentration camps, 267 synagogues were razed to the ground, and Jewish businesses through German territories were destroyed and looted. It is despicable to compare one brick through a glass window with an organized campaign of slaughter and violence.
More than that, Kristallnacht was a case of the government persecuting its own citizens. It was not a spontaneous uprising of violent thugs, nor was it a Los Angeles riots-style melee. Kristallnacht was programmed from beginning to end by the Nazi regime. The basic truth is that socialized medicine — an attack on the private sector and on private individuals in the name of the collective — reflects Kristallnacht on a philosophical level far better than a nut hurling one brick through one window at Louise Slaughter’s office.
Rich is simply parroting the Obama administration’s latest meme: tea partiers and anyone else who opposes the Obama program is racist, homophobic, un-American scum of the earth, violent in temperament and simple in mind. Rich, with all the subtlety of a nightstick upside the head, expresses the meme this way: “The conjunction of a black president and a female speaker of the House — topped off by a wise Latina on the Supreme Court and a powerful gay Congressional committee chairman — would sow fears of disenfranchisement among a dwindling and threatened minority in the country no matter what policies were in play.” In other words, if the president were white, the speaker of the House male, Sonia Sotomayor a white male, and Barney Frank a strapping heterosexual, the Obamacare plan would have gone through like clockwork.
Except that in 1993, white male Bill Clinton was president; Tom Foley, a white male, was speaker of the House; Clinton had just appointed a white female, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, to the Supreme Court; and a straight man, Henry Gonzalez, was chairman of the House Banking, Finance and Urban Affairs Committee. The American people rebelled against Clinton’s health care system, and the Clinton administration talked routinely about the threat of violent right-wingers.
Is it just possible that this isn’t Kristallnacht, but another attempt by another Democratic president to avoid culpability for his political positions by playing the victim?
Or — and this is just as probable in a time when an unpopular administration has forced its will on an unwilling American populace — this isn’t Kristallnacht, but a quasi-Reichstag fire scenario in which all dissenters are silenced by an onslaught of media pressure and personal violence? The facts show that it is the left, not the tea partiers, who have engaged in substantial personal violence since President Obama’s election: an Obamacare supporter who bit off the finger of an Obamacare opponent in California; the beating of Kenneth Gladney, a black man who opposed the Obama agenda, by Service Employees International Union thugs; the death threats received on a regular basis by conservative opinion leaders. All of that is driven by the Obama administration, which personally attacks people like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck, and tells its followers to “punch back twice as hard.”
The hysteria over the “violent” right wing is just that — hysteria. The true danger here comes not from the grassroots right, but from the Astroturfed left, which is being orchestrated and trained by the Obama administration and its media minions to attack Americans who still believe in America’s founding principles.
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