Why shouldn’t socialized medicine prompt comparisons to National Socialism?
By Andrew C. McCarthy
It’s
this week’s fashion on the left, and among such fashionably
contemplative moderates as Mort Kondracke, to blast Rush Limbaugh for
comparing Democrats to the Nazis. It’s no surprise that the Obama
hardcores are misrepresenting the sequence and substance of events, but
I would have hoped that Kondracke would at least have noted that Rush’s
comparison — even if Kondracke thought it unwise — was neither
gratuitous nor demagogic.
To recap, the speaker of the House,
Nancy Pelosi, started this episode by comparing American citizens who
oppose Obamacare to the Nazis and asserting that her political
opponents were donning “swastikas.” (Sen. Barbara Boxer simultaneously
ripped Obamacare dissenters for their Brooks Brothers suits — it’s not
altogether clear where on the twill the swastika goes.) Pelosi’s tactic
was the shopworn smear we on the right have dealt with for six decades.
There is no conceivable substantive connection between opposition to
Obamacare and German National Socialism — they are antithetical. By
invoking the Nazis, Pelosi was patently slandering dissenters as racist
thugs.