This post is written for researchers from the year 2044 who are wondering about the following:
[MEGYN] KELLY: We heard a lot of objections when President Bush expanded the powers of the presidency from the left and from the media. They haven’t been raising the same objections now that we have a Democrat in The White House. And you say they do so at their own peril.
[JONATHAN] TURLEY: I’m afraid this is beginning to border on a cult of personality for people on the left. I happen to agree with many of President Obama’s policies, but in our system it is often as important how you do something as what you do.
And I think that many people will look back at this period in history and see nothing but confusion as to why people remained so silent when the president asserted these types of unilateral actions.
…Yeah, it’s because Barack Obama is black, and a lot of liberals don’t want to be called racists for criticizing Barack Obama, because they’ve been very, very busy accusing conservatives of being racists because we criticize Barack Obama*. Basically, this entire thing is a rather nasty self-reinforcing taboo, primarily manifesting inside a sub-demographic of Western society that quite erroneously prides itself as having no taboos at all.
Oh, trust me: you have no idea how annoying that is.
(H/T: Hot Air Headlines)
Moe Lane (crosspost)
*Who is, by the way, practically the reincarnation of Woodrow Wilson. This is a statement that is both deeply ironic, and not meant as a compliment in any way whatsoever.
I beg to differ. Jefferson F. Davis is a far better match for Barack H. Obama. Wilson did not manage to turn WWI into a loss.
Um, Wilson did turn WWI into a loss. We had no dog in that fight, whichever side we picked was going to “win”, but his incompetence gave us WWII, and his idiotic and racist “Ethnic Self Determination” started fires that we are still dealing with.
Obama is the fulfillment of Wilsonian Foreign Policy.
Intervention for Intervention’s sake, and done incompetently at that.
At the end of WWI, the opposing belligerents did not have the will to continue fighting against against US forces.
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The Union absolutely had the will and ability to continue fighting.
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As for Obama, Iraq, and Afghanistan may be diagnostic. That said, bunch of stuff not available in open sources, and maybe the Iranians won’t let working nukes get into the hands of terrorists that soon.
While it’s often said there isn’t any way a reasonable, non-tinfoil hat wearer can make comparisons to Nazis re: Obama/administration/Leftist Democrats, I’m struck by Turley’s words:
“…beginning to border on a cult of personality for people on the left. I happen to agree with many of President Obama’s policies, but in our system it is often as important how you do something as what you do.
And I think that many people will look back at this period in history and see nothing but confusion as to why people remained so silent when the president asserted these types of unilateral actions.”
Wasn’t that what the people of Germany essentially after the war? And we’ve spent the decades since the Holocaust asking the same question, “why people remained so silent when the president asserted these types of unilateral actions.”
There are parallels in the fascist behavior and governance of 1930’s Germany and American government today. Note that I refer to 1930’s Germany, which was when the economic/social/cultural institutions were taken over and programmed to become ultimately Hitler’s Third Reich.
I am amused that nobody is mentioning the most famous cult of personality, and in fact the one that supplies the name for the trope: “Uncle Joe” Stalin. Good heavens, the man was dead for three years before anyone dared to criticize him, and even then it was in a secret session of the Politburo.
I was thinking JFK .. the Left loves them some handsome, well-spoken young uber-geniuses.
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Mew
Gaius Iulius Caesar III
Why can’t the Nazis be compared?
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Is it because they mass murdered along ethnic lines for political gain?
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I can think of other organizations that have done so.
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The cheap thing to do is say X is the NSDAP. It is easy, and takes little work, it may engage the emotions of the audiance, but it tends not to have weight or stickiness.
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Where if one objects to the Nazis because they did Y, and one does not tolerate Y in one’s allies, it has more weight. If the Nazis cannot be forgiven for Y, why should any other organization who did Y be treated any more kindly?
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Conversely, if Z is okay when one does it, then if the Nazis also did Z, doing Z should not be held against the Nazis.
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Careful work that judges one’s own politics under as harsh a standard as one uses for the Nazis, has some authority, and may stick.
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If one has put in that much effort, one probably knows of other models of political organizations whose choices would make them enemies if they were viable in the here and now.
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Be careful of anyone who promises far too much.
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Do not put your faith in human princes.
Ironic, not at all a compliment, and too horrifyingly true.