RUSH: Are there any hate groups on the left? There are, right? Are they ever the subject of network news reports? Has Brian ‘The Repeater’ Ross ever gone out there and done a report on left-wing hate groups? No! In fact, when we hear about left-wing hate groups and their work, we’re supposed to marvel at the art. It may be offensive but we’re supposed to marvel at the art. Southern Poverty Law Center, do you know how much these people are worth? It’s $220 million they’re worth. They got $33 million in donations in I think 2007, I don’t have the year in front of me, but the Southern POVERTY Law Center: $220 million according to their 501(c)(3).
Last thing I’m going to say about this, it’s finally posted at National Review Online by Andy McCarthy: ‘Nazis for Me, but Not for Thee — 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,’ and I want to add one more time here, because they’ve got this report on ABC that from the Southern Poverty Law Center that I and my posting of that swastika-like Obama logo on my website somehow is ginning up hatred for Obama.
It seems it would be ginning up hated for me, but the point is I’m not the guy that surrounds myself with Jew haters. There’s no bigger supporter of Israel than I. Not Obama. Me! The anti-Semites, the people that hate Jews, they’re not part of my circle. They’re not part of my life. It was our president, Barack Obama, who surrounded himself with such people. I never hear word one from Brian Ross at ABC or the Southern Poverty Law Center about Khalidi or Jeremiah Wright or Bill Ayers or any of the rest of them. It’s not I who urge dealings with Iran at the expense of our ally, Israel. So, Mr. Ross, you and the Southern Poverty Law Center are trying to tie us on the right to Nazis when you’ve got a man in the White House who has surrounded himself with anti-Israeli people and anti-Jew people?
You begin to rethink this, Mr. Ross, and be very careful when you start allowing propagandists to throw around accusations. Now, back to McCarthy. ‘Rush responded, and the response did not smear Democrats. He repeatedly and explicitly qualified that no one was saying Obama was Hitler, that Pelosi was Goebbels, or that the Democrats were engaged in the genocidal barbarity of the Third Reich. The comparison he drew was a substantive one: between the Democrats’ proposal for socialized medicine and the German installation of socialized medicine beginning with Bismarck and reaching its shocking apotheosis with Hitler’s National Socialism. (A transcript of what he actually contended is here, and…)’ and it’s linked and so forth and so on.
‘Whether you agree with that or not (I happen to think it’s undeniable), Rush was also making a larger point that is not only fair argument but essential argument. There is a trajectory of socialism, regardless of the good intentions of many socialists. As he framed it, you take things such as health care, things that are traditionally understood as within the ambit of individual liberty and free choice; you move such things into the ambit of state responsibility as the welfare state emerges and grows, on the theory that it is government’s responsibility to provide for everyone’s needs (by redistributing resources); as more things are moved from private to public control, the state by definition becomes totalitarian; and, inexorably, the totalitarian state gets bad leaders and the society comes to reflect the policy choices of those leaders.
‘Now, we can argue until the end of time about whether that trajectory really exists and whether it is inevitable. But however you come out, it is an argument very much worth having. It goes to what kind of society we are going to be, to what the proper relationship between the citizen and the state is. Nazi Germany is a useful historical example of socialism run amok. The genocide and terrorism ultimately practiced by the Nazis were horrible — that goes without saying. But National Socialism went on for a dozen years, it was the last stage in a progressive nationalization of German society, and there was a lot more to it than genocide and terrorism. It cannot be that because there was genocide and terrorism, the socialist aspects of National Socialism are outside the lines of acceptable political discourse.
‘Indeed, if that were the case, Jonah Goldberg’s book, Liberal Fascism, one of the most important political books of the last quarter century, could not have been written — and given it’s menace popularity, it doesn’t look like Americans are as convinced as Mort Kondracke seems to be that these comparisons are verboten.’ Now, this is where it gets really interesting, here, folks. Stick with me. ‘Let’s put aside the left’s propensity to slander conservatives with comparisons to Adolf Hitler, who was patently a man of the left. Earlier this year, one New York Times writer seemed to find comparisons to National Socialism quite worthy when — at least in the telling — those comparisons worked in the left’s favor.
‘While Americans were hotly debating the merits of the Obama ‘stimulus’ in April, the Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto called attention to a very interesting economic analysis offered by David Leonhardt’ of the New York Times. ‘The segment Taranto highlighted is worth rehashing: ‘In the summer of 1933, just as they will do on Thursday, heads of government and their finance ministers met in London to talk about a global economic crisis. They accomplished little and went home to battle the crisis in their own ways. More than any other country, Germany — Nazi Germany — then set out on a serious stimulus program. The government built up the military, expanded the autobahn, put up stadiums for the 1936 Berlin Olympics and built monuments to the Nazi Party across Munich and Berlin.
‘The economic benefits of this vast works program [in 1933 Germany] never flowed to most workers, because fascism doesn’t look kindly on collective bargaining. But Germany did escape the Great Depression faster than other countries. Corporate profits boomed, and unemployment sank (and not because of slave labor, which didn’t become widespread until later).’ They’re praising what the Nazis did in April in 1933 in the New York Times! As a justification for Obama’s stimulus, they are praising Germany’s stimulus in the New York Times by citing 1933 Germany. McCarthy’s point here is that: When the left wants to, it will cite what they think are positive aspects of Nazism, National Socialism.
‘Harold James, an economic historian, says that the young liberal economists studying under John Maynard Keynes in the 1930s began to debate whether Hitler had solved unemployment.’ Young liberal economists debated whether Hitler had solved unemployment! What the hell’s happening today? Young and old, liberal journalists and economists are telling us the recession is over, that the recovery is on its way. I did not know this, by the way. I had missed this story in the New York Times in April. I didn’t know this until I read Andy’s piece this morning. David Leonhardt, New York Times, ‘In the summer of 1933,’ just as they will on Thursday, ‘heads of government … met in London … More than any other country, Germany — Nazi Germany — then set out on a serious stimulus program,’ and yet Pelosi and Durbin and Obama’s henchmen are running around calling all of us Nazis.
When the New York Times ran a story praising Obama’s stimulus by comparing it to Hitler’s.
‘After all due qualifiers about how terribly uncomfortable he felt about invoking lessons from the Nazis,’ the story goes on and the author of the New York Times basically says I don’t like doing this. I don’t like doing this, he ‘somehow summoned the inner fortitude to make the obvious explicit: ‘Here in the United States, many people are understandably wondering whether the $800 billion stimulus program will make much of a difference. They want to know: Does stimulus work? Fortunately, this is one economic question that’s been answered pretty clearly in the last century. Yes, stimulus works. It worked in Germany.”
Now, ladies and gentlemen, we’re going to link to Andy’s story at National Review Online, and we’re going to put this on the free side so that you can all see this throughout the weekend and spread it to as many people as you choose to. The New York Times, in support of Obama’s stimulus plan, cites the success of the stimulus plan instituted by the Nazis in Germany in 1933. ‘Yes, stimulus works.’ As James Taranto observed: ‘[W]hatever you may think of the merits of Leonhardt’s argument, it was appropriate for him to make it: The wisdom vel non of policies adopted during over a decade of Nazi socialism cannot be off the table simply because, in the end, the Nazis were monsters.
‘We may find the seeds of their monstrousness in those policies, or we may not. But the thought that we should not talk about them is absurd. Notably, Leonhardt’s piece ran without any teeth-gnashing from Mort Kondracke and our other Beltway chaperones. National Socialism is banned from the right’s case against socialism, but is somehow acceptable when leftists use it as a smear or when the left’s nuanced geniuses, after their very thoughtful consideration, decide its invocation is suitable for mature audiences? I don’t think so.’ That’s ‘Nazis for Me, but Not for Thee.’ This is just incredible. The New York Times, so support back home’s stimulus cites the success of the Nazi National Socialist stimulus in Germany. ‘Yes, Stimulus Works.’