The National Review's Nazi Self-Parody
As Georgia Congressman Paul Broun learned last week, politicians and pundits of all stripes should resist the temptation to compare their opponents to Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. Apparently, the staunch conservatives at the National Review didn't get the memo. Facing both conservative calamity at the polls and defections in its own ranks, the Review's Deroy Murdock suggested that a 1930's Nazi-style purge is just what the doctor ordered for the Republican Party.
As the New York Times detailed Monday, the National Review in the wake of the Republican wipe-out is, like the party it parrots, in a state of crisis. Sarah Palin critics Kathleen Parker, Christopher Buckley and now David Frum have been forced from its pages. (Given that Palin induced editor Rich Lowry to sit "up a little straighter" and see "starbursts through the screen and ricocheting around the living rooms of America," the Review's harsh reaction to their apostasy is unsurprising.)
Enter contributing editor and Hoover Institution fellow Murdock. Fresh off the Review's latest fundraising cruise (the "Hate Boat?"), Murdock announced it is the season for recriminations. His solution for the beaten, battered and moribund GOP?
Now, what about those whom Obama and his supporters vanquished? What the Republican party badly needs is a Night of the Long Knives.
While no doubt tongue-in-cheek, Murdock's choice of metaphor is an unfortunate one for an arch conservative party now reduced to a rump of rabid supporters backing a draconian social agenda.
The Night of the Long Knives, after all, was the brutal 1934 purge in which Adolf Hitler consolidated his power in the Nazi party and Germany. As Encarta summarized it:
Night of the Long Knives [was the] sudden bloody purge within Germany's Nazi Party on June 30-July 1, 1934. It was carried out by Chancellor Adolf Hitler, Interior Minister Hermann Goring, and Heinrich Himmler, the leader of the SS or Schutzstaffel (German for "Security Squadron"), the elite military force of the Nazi Party. The principal victims of the "Night of the Long Knive" were Ernst Rohm and his chief lieutenants within the Sturmabteilung (the Storm Troops, also known as the SA). But many others were included, notably men who had opposed Hitler from 1931 to 1934. Among these were Hitler's main critics within the Nazi Party, Gregor Strasser and General Kurt von Schleicher, the former chancellor. The "Night of the Long Knives" was the name given to the operation by the Nazis themselves; the expression refers to acts of vengeance.
For his part, Murdock in "Restoring Reaganism" provides a lengthy who's who among the Republican brain trust as "the guilty" who should be "cast into the nearest volcano." They are all there - McConnell, Boehner, Blunt, Frist, Hastert, Delay, Stevens, Gingrich and even Karl Rove. Above all, Murdock blames George W. Bush, "the GOP's Jimmy Carter" (if not its Ernst Rohm) as the man who "surrendered the White House to the opposition." (Only a year ago, Murdock lauded the waterboarding of terror detainees by President Bush's administration, declaring, "Waterboarding is something of which every American should be proud.")
As for the ideologues who backed the GOP's now failed leaders, the knives are out. It's no wonder Deroy Murdock's former National Review colleague David Frum is "frightened."
UPDATE: Meanwhile, right-wing radio hate jockey Michael Savage will feature a former member of the Hitler Youth to discuss "the election of Barack Hussein Obama as reminiscent of the way the Nazi regime came to power."
why is dodds corollary (to godwin's law) not being invoked?
"When debating a particular subject, if a comparison or implied connection is drawn between the opponent's argument and Hitler and the Nazi Party, the maker of that statement is automatically discredited and the debate is automatically lost by the person or group who referenced the connection to Hitler or the Nazis."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin%27s_Law#Dodds_Corollary