alternative hippopotamus

Originally, I wasn’t planning to go to the conference formerly known as Take Back America. Now, I’m thinking of going. I’m interested in studying the question of whether there’s an actual rift among progressives, or whether there’s a microscopic sampling of former Hillary supporters bellowing and squawking that skew the sampling.

If there’s a rift, it would be along these fault lines:

1. Obama is a fundamentally progressive figure who is cautious in moving the country towards a more European model.
2. Obama is the anti-Christ, who cheated in the primaries, and who is indistinguishable policy-wise from Bush 43 or from Hitler.

Now, you may think I’m exaggerating the part about Obama and Hitler. But today, Paul Rosenberg at Open Left is pushing just that line:

But now, Obama thinks the Nazis were right, after all. Movement conservatives have always thought so, of course. But this is the first time that a Democratic President has agreed with them, in flagrant opposition to the rule of law.

So, score one for Rush Limbaugh, Glen Beck and all their wingnuts legions. Obama may not be Hitler, but he agrees completely with Hitler’s underlings, and he thinks that the Nuremberg prosecutors, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman and Winston Churchill were all dead wrong.

If this isn’t evil, it will just have to do ’til the real thing comes along.

Now, I know a few of the people that run the Open Left site, and it pains me to say that over-the-top statements like this are why I don’t become more involved in commenting, writing posts, etc., on Open Left. It’s also painful that people like me need to explain why Obama isn’t a nazi. It makes me wonder whether the blogosphere is a waste of time.

The question here is not whether CIA interrogators tortured prisoners. They did. Nobody wants to defend that. Well, maybe Rush Limbaugh and Jonah Goldberg, but they’re special.

The question is whether a reasonable person would have received an order and deemed it kosher or not. And, I think that most people in that position, particularly given the state of our culture at that time, would probably have gone along with the legitimacy of the Bybee memos. Remember that this is a time and place where we see Kiefer Sutherland do the most outrageous things on 24. Popular culture doesn’t object to the notion of torture for information. It also doesn’t do a good job of distinguishing fantasy from reality, but that’s gruel for another day.

Now, let’s take a second and imagine that we’re nazis. It’s WWII, and we’ve just been given a new mission. Our mission is to round up all of the civilians belonging to particular religious and ethnic groups and put them on a train to nowhere. A fellow soldier has the mission to take the people off of the train, put some of them to work, but mostly lead them to mass execution chambers.

I am arguing that the scale of these two situations is so different that a comparison has no merit. In the first case I can believe that a CIA agent might believe that what he is doing is wrong, but within the boundaries of justice at that time. The soldier in the second case ought to understand that he is committing an atrocity on a planetary scale.

QED: Obama isn’t a nazi.

Next week: why Michelle Obama is not the same as Michelle Malkin.

I think Lambert makes a valid point here. It looks to me that a comment by Dr. Jess Fiedorowicz was omitted from the transcript of Monday’s White House regional forum on healthcare.

What I’d like to understand at this point, is how did this comment come to be omitted. Is this a choice that the live blogger made, or was it an editorial choice made at a higher level? Inquiring minds want to know.

Now, I have a personal involvement with the issue of health care in that I was out of work, and health care was not affordable for me at that time. That we lack a safety net for people who are out of work through no fault of their own is a shameful fact in this time and place. It’s really not the mark of a civilized country.

If anything it’s a statement about class in the year 2009. It’s kind of like the old joke you would hear in Boston. It goes like this: if you are driving in Boston, and you don’t know where you’re going, then you shouldn’t be there. I believe this extracts to the subject of health care like this: If you are sick, and you can’t afford the treatment, then you should belong to a more successful class.

Personally, I’m neutral to the solution, as long as no one has to go through what I did.

That said, there’s another issue. I’m not sure that it’s secondary. When someone edits a public record so that it omits one point of view, then the public can’t possibly be served. It’s what Orwell was trying to warn us about, in 1984. At the level of society, the intellectual function of the society would just as soon certain ideas did not exist. Just as at the level of an individual, certain thoughts, actions, beliefs, are edited in one’s mind. The individual does this so that it can go about life while believing that one is a fundamentally virtuous person, while, at the same time having various malicious thoughts. Likewise, society, and here we’re talking about the political element, will exclude dialogue that it doesn’t like. Society, too, does not like having its contradictions pointed out.