Heil Obama?

As mentioned in some previous posts, I have corresponded quite frequently with a high school friend I have referred to as "Kyle." And Kyle, as you thousands of loyal readers know, is about as far to the political "right" as anyone I know. He's a "birther" who believes that we should eliminate the minimum wage, sees Obamacare as a "power grab" by the feds, and believes that global warming is more than a myth--it's a conspiracy among liberal scientists to obscure the truth. So it should come as no surprise that a fair number of Kyle's posts to me have included references to Adolph Hitler and Nazi Germany in the same sentence as Barack Obama. The implicit (and sometimes explicit) claim is that Obama and Hitler and the Nazis have something in common.

I have told Kyle repeatedly that this linkage of Obama to Nazism is at once inaccurate, incorrect, inflammatory, and an exercise in demagoguery. Still, he continues to make such claims, including a tu quoque fallacy--i.e., that those "liberals" have called certain Republicans Nazis, which I guess in his mind makes it OK for him as well to return the favor.

Recent developments make the Nazi analogy even more annoying. Mr. Obama has just announced that he is nominating a Jew for the Supreme Court of the United States--gosh, that's a sure sign of another Hitler! Meanwhile, the Minnesota Supreme Court has ruled that our true-blue, all-American governor, Tim Pawlenty, violated the law by deciding on his own to cut various state budgets--something called "unallotment." And indeed, unallotment is the closest thing we have in this nation to a "dictatorship"; what this move involved was for Pawlenty to flat-out ignore what legislation had been passed by elected representatives, and to trim the budgets based on his own whims as a chief executive. So much for democracy.

Anyway, I ended up telling Kyle that I'm done with such rants. I simply won't read anything else he sends along because it is so offensive that it ceases to be civil discourse. Now I haven't heard from Kyle at all in more than a week since I started trashing his messages. And, it's been very liberating--damn, it just feels good to keep toxic waste off of my screen. Until such time as gay people are forced to wear pink triangles and Jews are shipped off to concentration camps, I think that Kyle should stop playing the "Nazi card," which is nothing like a trump card in my deck. It's more like the Joker. Or maybe not even a card at all. It's just stupid.