Senate Environment and Public Works Committee Chairman [tag]James Inhofe[/tag] (R-Okla.) has been on quite a roll lately. Just in the past few weeks, he’s been caught using taxpayer money to try and smear [tag]Al Gore[/tag], followed by an on-air tirade in which Inhofe said Gore was “full of crap” and global warming “is a hoax.”
Yesterday, the unhinged senator ratcheted things up a bit.
In an interview with Tulsa World, Inhofe compared people who believed global warming was a problem to [tag]Nazis[/tag]:
In an interview, he heaped criticism on what he saw as the strategy used by those on the other side of the debate and offered a historical comparison.
“It kind of reminds … I could use the [tag]Third Reich[/tag], the big lie,” Inhofe said.
Now, Inhofe is clearly not well. He’s been an embarrassment to himself for quite a while, so the idea that he’d equate scientists who are warning of an environmental catastrophe with Nazis is, alas, not exactly surprising.
Regardless, every time something like this comes up, I think about something John Hinderaker said last year: “I, personally, would like to see a moratorium on all references to Hitler, the Third Reich, Nazism and the Holocaust in the context of domestic political debate. Such a rule would have no perceptible effect on conservative discourse, but it would render the left virtually mute.”
Hinderaker had things exactly backwards.
Indeed, just on the issue of global warming, the right seems to have embraced Nazi comparisons with great enthusiasm. A few weeks ago, one climate-change skeptic compared Gore to Hitler, saying, “Gore believed in global warming almost as much as [tag]Hitler[/tag] believed there was something wrong with the Jews.” A week before that, Sterling Burnett – a senior fellow at the Exxon-backed National Center for Policy Analysis – compared Gore to Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels.
In fact, at times it seems the right has no other comparisons at all. Grover Norquist says the estate tax is the moral equivalent of the Nazi Holocaust; Bob Novak compares Dem tactics on judicial nominees to Nazi concentration camps; Bill O’Reilly describes information from Media Matters to “Joseph Goebbels Nazi stuff.”
To be sure, there’s a significant difference between historical comparisons and moral comparisons. When someone relates genocide in Darfur to genocide during World War II, it’s a historical comparison. When someone says Al Gore’s work on climate change is following in the footsteps of the Nazis’ propaganda campaigns, it’s more than just drawing upon a well-known period in world history; it’s a misguided moral condemnation.
There’s a reason Godwin’s law was coined — and there’s a reason conservatives keep tripping over it.