Oddly enough, the first week of the new "civility" era wrapping up about as you would expect

Ah, the good ol' days...



Late last night on the floor of the House, Steve Cohen (D-TN) compared Republican opponents of ObamaCare to... you guessed it... Nazis!

Seeing as how this came less than a week after the President's make-nice speech at the Tucson memorial/pep rally, this has to set some sort of Godwin's Law record.

In an extraordinary outburst on the House floor, Rep. Steve Cohen (D-TN) invoked the Holocaust to attack Republicans on health care and compared rhetoric on the issue to the work of infamous Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels.

“They say it's a government takeover of health care, a big lie just like Goebbels," Cohen said. "You say it enough, you repeat the lie, you repeat the lie, and eventually, people believe it. Like blood libel. That's the same kind of thing. And Congressman Cohen didn’t stop there.

“The Germans said enough about the Jews and people believed it--believed it and you have the Holocaust. We heard on this floor, government takeover of health care. Politifact said the biggest lie of 2010 was a government takeover of health care because there is no government takeover," Cohen said.

We're actually breathing a sigh of relief as we weren't quite sure how it was we were going to manage all the civility and magnanimity that had been flowing our way of late. The Congressman from Tennessee has rendered our concerns moot.



And in other "new civility" news today:

A group of Washington, D.C. protesters upset about the possibility of a Walmart store coming to their area is hoping to send the potential developer of the proposed store a message. So much so that they‘re planning to march to and protest at the developer’s personal residence. The group has even gone as far as to circulate the man’s home address.

The group is called Wal-Mart Free D.C. and describes itself as “a group of DC residents who have come together to say NO to Wal-Mart.” In order to make its point, a flyer on the group‘s website say it’s organizing a march to harass the potential developer — Dick Knapp of Foulger-Pratt Development (the company has yet to sign a contract with Walmar)t. The flyer sets the march for Thursday at 7:30 p.m. and includes Knapp’s address.

But the address may not be the flyer’s only controversial element. Ironically, it also contains a target symbol — a similar picture to the one seen on a district map created by Sarah Palin and that’s sparked outrage from the left in the wake of the shootings in Tucson. And what‘s worrying is that the group’s symbol is connected to specific event at a private residence.

Any idea what this "protest" might look like? We got a sneak preview last May when a mob of SEIU thugs terrorized the home of a banking executive in suburban Maryland.

Nazi references, targeting, union goonery... ahhhh... it's just good to know that this end-of-business-as-usual and new era cooperation and bipartisanship promised to us by our President is truly back.

Was it really that bad?

What do Joe Paterno, Josh Groban, USC and the University of Texas all have in common?

They combined forces to produce what the Wall St. Journal is calling one of the worst college football seasons ever.

If there's one thing that sets apart the 2010 college-football season, it's how humiliating it has been for so many of the nation's proudest programs.

We're not just talking about an off year, like the one Penn State had. That happens. We're talking about several of the sport's biggest names enduring preposterous frustrations and indignities all in the same season.

Michigan's coach spoke emotionally at a team banquet about a Josh Groban song. Tennessee's coach made a lengthy analogy comparing his overwhelmed players to the Germans during World War II. Florida, a preseason top-five team, had its worst season in years. Then its coach quit. The same week that an ex-Gator won the Heisman Trophy. For a conference rival.

Every college-football season features a couple of bumbling behemoths, but this year is extreme. Six of the sport's top-10 teams all-time in winning percentage—Michigan, Notre Dame, Texas, Tennessee, Southern California and Penn State—aren't ranked in the Associated Press top-25 poll. Never have all six of those teams failed to appear in a season's final AP poll.

Apparently, the misery is causing fans to lose interest (or shield their eyes). TV ratings at both ABC and NBC were down over 10% this season for college-football telecasts. CBS fell too, though less significantly (4.5%).

Here's Derek Dooley, head coach of the Tennessee Volunteers comparing himself to.... Rommel?






Which school had the roughest go of it this past year? The Journal has the goods, here.

The "No Labels" crowd would also like to have a word

Awwww... Gibbsy doesn't appreciate Olby's uncivil tone.

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs advised the liberal commenter Keith Olbermann on Monday to refrain from using comparisons to Nazi Germany after the MSNBC host likened President Obama’s deal on tax cuts to Nazi appeasement.

“Whenever you compare anything to what the Nazis did, if you ever get to that point in your speech, stop, because nothing does, and hopefully, God willing, nothing ever will,” Gibbs told reporters.

Besides being uncivil, it was downright bizarre. Here's Olby from last week:

“I will confess I won’t fight if anyone wants to draw a comparison between what you’ve done with our domestic policies of our day to what Neville Chamberlain did with the domestic policies of his,” says Olbermann.

The reference is to Neville Chamberlain who, as Prime Minister of Great Britain, infamously cut a deal with Hitler (that Hitler subsequently broke to the surprise of nobody except Chamberlain) and proclaimed “peace in our time.”

So it was Neville Chamberlain's tax policies that led to the German invasion of Poland?

After all these years...



Exit question: How far apart on the incivility meter are hostage-takers and Nazis?

Because "National Left-wing Hate Movement" just doesn’t have the same ring to it.

It's a small sign igniting a big debate. An official state of Colorado Adopt-a-Highway placard announcing that a one-mile long stretch of US Highway 85 is sponsored not by the Boy Scouts or the Lions Club, but by the Nazi Party of Colorado.

And to think that some people would get these guys confused with a bunch of stinky, bearded hippies from Boulder.


P.S.

When the Nazi's first applied for the stretch of highway just south of Bromley lane in Brighton, the Colorado Department of Transportation called to say thanks, but no thanks.

But the law, it turns out, was on the Nazi's side.

"Courts around the country have allowed white supremacists to sponsor highway signs," says Anti-Defamation League Director Bruce DeBoskey. So although the Anti-Defamation League couldn't be more opposed to the Nazi movement, it advised the state to put the application through.

"To have our freedom we have to have all kinds of speech, and this is a case where hate speech is protected," DeBoskey said. "This organization stands for hate. It's a white supremacist group. It is a neo-Nazi group."

No one ever said the defense of free speech was going to be a clean, tidy or an enviable task, so props to the ADL for standing on principle.

One suggestion that might help things

We are not only more divided than ever on politics, faith and morality, but along the lines of class and ethnicity. Those who opposed Sonia Sotomayor for the Supreme Court and stood by Sgt. Crowley in the face-off with Harvard's Henry Louis Gates were called racists. But this time they did not back down. They threw the same vile word right back in the face of their accusers, and Barack Obama.

Consider but a few issues on which Americans have lately been bitterly divided: school prayer, the Ten Commandments, evolution, the death penalty, abortion, homosexuality, assisted suicide, affirmative action, busing, the Confederate battle flag, the Duke rape case, Terri Schiavo, Iraq, amnesty, torture.

Now it is death panels, global warming, "birthers" and socialism. If a married couple disagreed as broadly and deeply as Americans do on such basic issues, they would have divorced and gone their separate ways long ago. What is it that still holds us together?

Pat Buchanan finishes up his column with “Is America, too, breaking up?”


We spent the day at work yesterday amongst our co-workers and guess what we didn’t talk about? Healthcare reform. We went to lunch with a couple of friends. Guess what it is that we didn’t discuss? Cap and trade. After work, we grabbed some drinks with some other friends and guess which topic we did not get around to? Van Jones. And over the weekend, take a wild guess at what it is we won’t be discussing as we are watching USC take on Ohio St. and the Eagles vs. the Giants? Townhall meetings.

Beltway political pundits continually overestimate the influence of politics, or the effects of politics on the 99% of the rest of us Americans outside the NY-DC axis. And even for those of us as ourselves who keep up on this stuff with great relish, there is a natural tendency to compartmentalize and sublimate all our political passions when we are out and about living life away from the conduit to chaos that tends to be the internet and cable TV. We’d like to think it’s called having a life.

We think if you talk to folks our parents age who witnessed the 60s as adults raising their children, they would tell you what we are experiencing now had nothing on the late 60s when there was indeed a palpable sense that with political assassinations, urban rioting, violent political party conventions and massive anti-war demonstrations, the wheels were coming off.

So we hate to disappoint Pat Buchanan but we’re not really feeling the angst. However, not being ones to completely deny the validity of Buchanan’s concerns, how about a self-imposed gag order for all Americans and we’d like to throw out the first pitch: “Nazis”

Yeah, No “Nazis”. We kind of like the sound of that. Join us won’t you?

Looking for some leadership

“New Rule: Just because a country elects a smart president doesn't make it a smart country. A few weeks ago I was asked by Wolf Blitzer if I thought Sarah Palin could get elected president, and I said I hope not, but I wouldn't put anything past this stupid country.”

- Bill Maher

Blogosphere Right is in full throat over the op-ed piece today by Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer in which they call the disruptions of the townhall meetings “un-American” or more precisely, “Drowning out opposing views is simply un-American”. We think our side is guilty of some broad-brushing as in reading the article, they did not expressly say that the protesters themselves were being un-American which brings us to the larger point of what Pelosi/Hoyer did say.

Now, whether or not this disruptive behavior is “un-American” is unclear to us but it is entirely beside the point. The sin Pelosi and Hoyer committed is symptomatic of what we have seen and heard recently from our nationally elected leaders and it is an ability to turn completely tone-deaf when trying to communicate the simplest of principles.

Rather than saying the arrest of Prof. Gates by Sgt. Crowder was being dealt with at the local level and there were not enough facts available to make a judgement call either way, the President barged head-long into a two-week controversy by saying the police acted “stupidly”. That was simply a ridiculous statement for a President to make.

And if Pelosi and Hoyer had said the disruptions were “not constructive”, “rude”, “uncivil”, then everything would’ve been peachy. But, no. These two idiots, with pen in hand and not being asked about it off-the-cuff at a presser, play the “un-American” card and thus alienate further a large section of the population who, even if they hadn’t attended a townhall protest, sympathise with the concerns of those who did.

Honestly, what are these people thinking?

B-Daddy and I were talking over the weekend about how discouraging the discourse regarding the healthcare debate has become. Not at the townhalls but at the national level. Instead of calling for civility and calm in light of these increasingly contentious townhall meetings where union thugs think nothing of kicking the crap out of someone because he was handing out “Don’t tread on me” stickers, our national leaders fan the flames of violence by likening the protesters to Nazis and calling their actions “un-American”. It pisses off one side and grants license to the other by legitimizing in their minds, violence upon others. See… were beating up Nazis.

And when the President has the opportunity to establish the baseline for discourse, what does he do? He tells people to get out of his way and sets up a snitch site.

More than anything else, though, this complete inability to communicate on a rational level with the American public is informed by the condescension contained in that quote by Bill Maher above.

We know who we are and we know who you are and you are simply not smart enough, America to be trusted on your own with anything as important as health care.

Too taboo a subject, perhaps?

Kathy Phuc Nguyen, a demonstration organizer and spokeswoman for the human rights group Thanh Nien Co Vang, drew cheers when, speaking through a bullhorn, she said, "Surely, one would not display a photograph of a young Jewish person wearing a Nazi symbol and standing next to a bust of Hitler in a heavily populated community of Holocaust survivors."

So it goes up in Orange County where large protests from the Vietnamese community and a defacement with red paint of one of the works, forced the shut-down of an exhibit sponsored by the Vietnamese American Arts and Letters Assn. which they claim was intended to launch a discussion about freedom of expression in the Vietnamese community.

Now, here is where you get our obligatory preachiness about respecting others’ property and opinions and and where we also denounce vandalism……….

…. There. Glad we could get that off our chest.

Now despite the unfortunate actions of a few knuckleheads, we couldn’t help but feel some pride over the words and actions of many of these protesters. These people lived through the horrors of communism (or the coercion to live through the horrors of communism) – they should know.

There are a slew of Nazi/Holocaust movies out right now and that’s all to the good. Evil is evil and it should be forever documented, dramatized and memorialized as such. We’ve always wondered, however, why it is that “communism” has never received the same treatment from Hollywood or the arts and letters as its step-brother, National Socialism.

The reasons are many - we know this - but at the end of the day it boils down to practicality.

Making a two hour movie that focuses on a corrupt ideology and which is essentially contained to one geographic region, a dozen or so years and one central figure is difficult enough for Steven Spielberg.

Now try a movie that focuses on a corrupt ideology but has literally spanned the globe over the course of centuries now and which has been perpetrated by scores of influential regional and global figures alike and which has, ultimately, claimed the lives of 50, 60, 70(?) million people.

Yep. No wonder Hollywood has never attempted to crack that nut. Completely out of their league… and mood.

Oh, for cryin' out loud...another Nazi reference?

(cue breathless voice)

The theory is almost too perfect to be true. Barack Obama, the son of politically progressive parents, was born Aug. 4, 1961—almost nine months to the day after John F. Kennedy was elected to the White House. Is it possible Obama was conceived on that historic night?

And if so, could history repeat itself? In the hours and days since Obama's victory, many of his exhilarated supporters have been, shall we say, in the mood for love. And though it's too soon to know for sure, experts aren't ruling out the possibility of an Obama baby boom.

More silly and banal journalism from People, er, Newsweek here.

Would we be so impolite to add that there were similar shag-a-thons that led to a baby boom in the wake of Hitler’s bombing of London during WWII? Apparently, we would.

Commies.... I Hate Commies.

We haven’t yet been able to see the 4th installment of the Indiana Jones series yet but it appears the movie has been an annoyance to some folks we haven’t heard from in a while. “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” has really got under the skin of some old Russian Communist Party hacks who have condemned the film.

"What galls is how together with America we defeated Hitler, and how we sympathized when Bin Laden hit them. But they go ahead and scare kids with Communists. These people have no shame," said Viktor Perov, a Communist Party member in Russia's second city of St. Petersburg.

Harrison Ford and Cate Blanchett (are) second-rate actors, serving as the running dogs of the CIA. We need to deprive these people of the right of entering the country," said another party member, Andrei Gindos

Heavens, No!!!

Our movie-goers are teenagers who are completely unaware of what happened in 1957," St Peterburg Communist Party chief Sergei Malinkovich told Reuters
"They will go to the cinema and will be sure that in 1957 we made trouble for the United States and almost started a nuclear war."

True enough… that trouble came 5 years later.

(Full story here. Thanks to ‘Dawg for passing it along).

That these criticisms are of a fictional movie and come from a collective lot that should’ve been hung, drawn and quartered for their treatment of their own people… we’re not quite sure what to make of all of it. We thought everything was settled and we could look back on this with some humor, fun and nostalgia by which all the previous Indy movies were informed... We won – they lost – its cool. But if they want to revisit the Cold War all over again, fine by us. We’ll don our t-shirt, march down to the cinema this Memorial Day weekend and kick their asses one more time (cinematically speaking, of course).

Hope everyone is having a great weekend, thus far. Stay warm.

Sexy?

You may think we sit around all day and wait for gems like this to fall into our lap. Normally you’d be wrong but since we were out for a few days we can take no credit for doing any actual homework as this has been very big news in the sporting world… at least in the European Formula One racing sporting world manner of speaking.

It seems that FIA (Formual One’s governing body) HMFIC, Max Mosley is in a bit of hot water for what a British tabloid alleges as him having sex with multiple prostitutes (sometimes referred to as an “orgy”). Probably no biggie given the European sensibility regarding private affairs but the tabloid claims this particular romp to have involved “Nazi role-playing”. Woops. Story here.

Several F-1 teams have asked Mosley to stand down from his position of President. Mosley, for his part, has termed the tabs actions an “illegal invasion of privacy” but has not come out denying the event took place as described.

We're kinda with Max on this one if for no other reason than to shamelessly exploit his misfortune for the sole purpose of recalling the wisdom of P.J. O’Rourke regarding carnal pursuits and political affiliation. O’Rourke in the introduction of his masterpiece, "Give War A Chance", slices open the liberal mindset and motivation with surgical-like precision. At the very end of the intro, though, he realizes his politics leave him open to certain unsavory accusations for which O’Rourke, of course, finds the silver lining and reminds us to, perhaps, quit our own bellyaching over this matter:

“…you may be wondering-don’t I sometimes get called a Nazi? Yes, name-calling, in which conservatives such as myself are so loath to indulge, is a favorite tactic of the liberals. I have often been called a Nazi, and, although it is unfair, I don’t let it bother me. I don’t let it bother me for one simple reason. No one has ever had a fantasy about being tied to a bed and sexually ravished by someone dressed as a liberal.”

Me Thinks Ye Doth Protesteth Too Much

Last week we posted a piece here where we used the term “hard-working, family-oriented” 4 separate times to parody the insistence of the pro-illegal alien crowd that us racists and nativists were unfairly targeting these people as law-breakers.

After reading this article on extreme right-wing hate groups in Israel, it appears our efforts to parody based on quantity of repetitive terms has fallen way, way short.

In an article much shorter than our post, the author feels compelled to beat you over the head using the term “extreme right-wingers”, “right-wing activists” or similar no less than 5 times (including the title of the article). And the term “right-wing activist” should be the first clue that the author is operating with an agenda as everyone knows that “right-wing activist” is the very illustration of an oxymoron.

And what evidence is presented other than having to accept the author’s good word that these people are indeed “right wing”? Do they favor free-markets and supply-side economics? Are they firm supporters of property rights and the rule of law? Are they against judicial activism and moral relativism?

As written about here, you as the reader are never presented with any information provided by answering the questions above that would help you come to an independent assessment as to whether these folks are indeed right-wing or more apt to be, as we have found, left-wingers.