Gibbs: Ad Hitlerum?

Part of the joy in watching liberals in action is viewing how out of touch they are. Given, if they have their sense of reality diluted this much, just how successful can they be? As Obama has proven, not very.

Robert Gibbs was discussing the discourse in the current health care debate and laid this whopper out there – uncontested.

I will continue to say what I’ve said before. You hear in this debate, you hear analogies, you hear references to, you see pictures about and depictions of individuals that are truly stunning, and you hear it all the time. People — imagine five years ago somebody comparing health care reform to 9/11. Imagine just a few years ago had somebody walked around with images of Hitler.

Yeah, imagine that.

Gibbs statement was in response to Michelle Bachman’s anti-health care rally.

Call it ignorance, cognitive dissonance, or plain intellectual dishonesty. I had one professor recently lament the tea party protesters in comparison to those ‘pacifist” anti-war protests, where people played folk music, dressed their dogs up as the devil, and paraded around placards calling for the end of Israel and Bush’s death. ANSWR is a lot of things, but it isn’t pacifist, and that much the group would likely admit. To not know otherwise is beyond willful ignorance.

Moderates and independents may go with the flow, but I hardly think they buy a line like this. It was visible, even on places like CNN and MSNBC, that the anti-war protests had a shrill and anarchic undercurrent. That crowd is quite different from the grandma’s and grandpa’s at the tea party protests – but it isn’t the ‘death to Israel’ crowd that is vilified for expressing themselves.

At worst, the tea parties are just parroting what they’ve learned from the left. I think they are more than that, but essentially what the parties and people like Andrew Breitbart have done is turn the “Rules for Radicals” against the radicals.

But these radicals are unsavory – the wrong radicals – they aren’t the good-natured and proper-thinking college kids spouting bromides they’ve learned in class. That the media attacks those on the right is nothing new, as Jesse Walker put quite eloquently in his article at Reason called The Paranoid Center. The media and the government will equate as many new crimes as possible with the tea party movement as it can.

We’ve heard ample warnings about extremist paranoia in the months since Barack Obama became president, and we’re sure to hear many more throughout his term. But we’ve heard almost nothing about the paranoia of the political center. When mainstream commentators treat a small group of unconnected crimes as a grand, malevolent movement, they unwittingly echo the very conspiracy theories they denounce. Both brands of connect-the-dots fantasy reflect the tellers’ anxieties much more than any order actually emerging in the world.

When such a story is directed at those who oppose the politicians in power, it has an additional effect. The list of dangerous forces that need to be marginalized inevitably expands to include peaceful, legitimate critics.

Is that what Gibbs is up to? Maybe. I think there is some genuine bewilderment on the part of the party in power – there always is when sweeping legislation is formed, the middle class rebukes and the left laments why the majority “votes against their own best interest.” Of course, the big mistake on part of the denizens on the East Coast is to make themselves the purveyor what is exactly “the best interest” to begin with.

Most saw the Hitler signs during the Bush administration. If a few sprout up during a health care protest, at least the person holding it has probably taken a bath.

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