{"id":8021,"date":"2006-07-25T10:10:50","date_gmt":"2006-07-25T14:10:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/8021.html"},"modified":"2006-07-25T10:10:50","modified_gmt":"2006-07-25T14:10:50","slug":"inhofes-third-reich-analogy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/inhofes-third-reich-analogy\/","title":{"rendered":"Inhofe’s ‘Third Reich’ analogy"},"content":{"rendered":"

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<\/a> to try and smear [tag]Al Gore[\/tag], followed by an on-air tirade in which Inhofe said Gore was “full of crap<\/a>” and global warming “is a hoax.”<\/p>\n

Yesterday, the unhinged senator ratcheted things up a bit<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In an interview with Tulsa World, Inhofe compared people who believed global warming was a problem to [tag]Nazis[\/tag]:<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

“It kind of reminds … I could use the [tag]Third Reich[\/tag], the big lie,” Inhofe said.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Regardless, every time something like this comes up, I think about something John Hinderaker said<\/a> 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.”<\/p>\n

Hinderaker had things exactly backwards.
\n
\nIndeed, 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<\/a>, 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 \u2013 a senior fellow at the Exxon-backed National Center for Policy Analysis \u2013 compared Gore to Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In fact, at times it seems the right has no other comparisons at all. Grover Norquist<\/a> says the estate tax is the moral equivalent of the Nazi Holocaust; Bob Novak<\/a> compares Dem tactics on judicial nominees to Nazi concentration camps; Bill O’Reilly<\/a> describes information from Media Matters to “Joseph Goebbels Nazi stuff.”<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

There’s a reason Godwin’s law<\/a> was coined — and there’s a reason conservatives keep tripping over it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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.” […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8021","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8021","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8021"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8021\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8021"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8021"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8021"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}