Is it now time to step over the line and begin the Hitler comparisons?
I give you a paragraph of facts from a Joan Walsh column:
The angst of establishment Republicans about Trump is understandable. This weekend alone, Trump tweeted inaccurate and racist statistics on black crime taken from a neo-Nazi Twitter account. He defended the beating of a Black Lives Matter protester at a Birmingham rally by insisting the man “needed to be roughed up.” He’s continued to entertain the notion of a database for Muslims in the United States, as well as the possibility of closing at least some mosques to deal with the threat of ISIS. And he repeated the long-debunked claim that “thousands” of Muslims in New Jersey cheered the terror attacks on 9/11.
Oh, yeah, and the N word.
April 5, 2019 update – Beto O’Rourke went there. He directly compared what Trump is doing with the Nazi regime.
May 2, 2019 update – James Comey has gone further than comparing Trump to Hitler or any other autocrat/dictator, he has gone all Lord of the Rings/Harry Potter on us, describing step by step how Donald Trump “eats your soul” and it ends with “And then you are lost. He has eaten your soul.”
We all are trying to figure out why a public institutional figure like Wm. Barr with a sterling reputation (we thought, until his shenanigans under Bush I were discussed), according to Washington and legal insiders, would say things to a senate committee like if the President feels he is falsely accused, he can end the investigation. I have any number of guys in prison who will step forward, asking for a retrial with that as their defense. I feel I should not have paid so much in taxes so I’ll just remit what I think is proper.
I cannot recall any major institutional figure – not least of all a former director of the FBI – using such language about another public figure, not even malevolent monsters like serial killers; they remain detached. Comey has gone all in, as should we all.
Continuing though on what motivates these Trump sycophants: I believe they are so traumatized by the changes in society that they believe it is their mission to undo those changes. They only way to do so is to capture the courts, where America resolves so many of its problems. Judge Mukasey, a prominent conservative jurist and Attorney-General under Geo. W. Bush, spoke at ASU and I challenged his proffered solution other than the courts, which was to let the culture bring about change. My challenge was to point out my marriage to an African-American at a time when our marriage was illegal in 16 or 18 states; if we had traveled in any of those states and an issue had arisen, such as hospitalization, where next-of-kin became an indicator of status, we would have faced the same problem homosexual couples have pointed out as the reason to marry. How would that have worked, to let the culture decide it was OK for me and my wife to marry over a period of several decades? Wait to get married? Marry someone else in the meantime? His answer was to point out that during the Civil Rights struggle in the South, activists were warned not to pair up cross-racially. ???????? Thus are the most brilliant minds confounded by simple questions.
So should the courts become conservative, we will of course see sops to the Trump base like renewed suppression of voting rights, the undoing of abortion rights, the repression of civil rights, the ignoring of human rights, the imposition of Christian-based religious practices in schools and throughout society, the expulsion of immigrants, the continuation of inhuman or Hitlerian acts at the border against helpless migrants, the destruction of unions, and the undoing of Social Security and Medicare, the real agenda is to do away with regulations and taxation on corporations – period.