This may come has something of a shock to that big tub of foaming at the mouth goo otherwise known as Rush Limbaugh, but it’s just a health care plan bubelah, not the invasion of the Sudetenland.
But there was the Mr. Dithers of the lunatic fringe the other day attempting to compare Barack Obama with (oh dear) Adolf Hitler simply because the president of the United States wants to reform the nation’s health care system.
Limbaugh’s ham-handed demagoguery notwithstanding the drive-by bloviator, talk radio’s answer to Crazy Guggenheim, has revealed himself to be a dumber than a sack of Sarah Palins when it comes to having even the remotest understanding of history.
For the average Joe Blow, being more clueless about World War II than an Irish Setter is merely a social embarrassment. Being the host of a national radio program and exposing that sort of illiteracy borders on the terrifying.
It is all too easy – and common – these days to accuse people we might disagree with as Nazis, or in this case comparing the leader of the free world with one of the most evil mass murderers who ever lived.
Disagre with Obama’s health care plan if you will. That’s fine. There’s plenty in the initiative to take issue with. No problem. That’s America. That’s democracy. That’s free speech.
But Obama as Hitler? Please.
It’s a bit scary to ponder this, but didn’t Rush Limbaugh ever take a history class? Did he not have relatives who perhaps fought in World War II? Or did all those drugs really rattle his brain?
The era of the Third Reich and its Axis co-conspirators were ultimately responsible for some 60 million civilian and military personnel deaths. The Holocaust alone claimed some six million lives, including more than one million children.
All Barack Obama wants to is reform health care. He’s not interested in bombing Pearl Harbor, or subjecting London to the blitz, or laying seige to Russia.
The inherent danger, of course, by so blithely injecting Hitler into the health care debate diminishes the horror of World War II. When the murder of six million Jews becomes a punchline in public policy discourse, it trivializes the memories of those who died and the service of the men and women of this nation who fought and sacrificed to end the terror of Nazism.
Limbaugh should spend more time with veterans of WWII and ask them how they feel about having their service reduced to a political one-liner. He should spend time with Holocaust survivors, listen to their stories of what they witnessed and endured and then ask himself if a beef with a president over a single-payer system rises to the level of the Warsaw Ghetto.
My father flew 50 combat missions in World War II and although he passed away more than 30 years ago, I rather doubt – as conservative as he was – he would equate the carnage, the misery, the death of his friends with the on-going health care kerfuffle.
It’s pathetic Limbaugh doesn’t understand that. It’s tragic he so publicly revels in his ignorance.
And yes, that rumbling you just heard were the souls of Arlington rolling over in their graves.
