Steve Cohen on GOP/Nazi analogy: All I meant is that Republicans are liars like Goebbels

Hot Air ^ | 1/19/11 | Allahpundit

[laotzu]

Of course he’s not sorry. As Ed noted this morning, not only has Cohen proved himself fully capable of vicious demagoguery before, but the last time he stooped this low he tossed in a little joke about McCain looking like a Vietcong POW again when he stood next to Palin. That’s the mentality you’re dealing with here — exhibit 8,579 in what a sleazy fraud the left’s ostentatious handwringing over “civility” is.

“I wasn’t trying to say, never would say, haven’t said and wouldn’t say that the Republicans are akin to the party that he [Goebbels] was a part of, but they [Republicans] did lie and they’ve said the lie over and over again,” Cohen said.

“The fact is that the government takeover of health care is a lie,” he said.

“I don’t think I was comparing the Republicans to Goebbels. I was saying that lies are lies and Goebbels was the great perpetrator of lies and that’s a danger, and if you look at Goebbels you can see the lie that he told about Jews which he constantly did, became considered fact in Germany that the Jews were evil, and people got involved and didn’t stand up.”…

“I think civility is not lying, and if you can’t come up and say that somebody is lying when they’re lying, then the lie becomes the truth. That’s not uncivil to say somebody lied,” he said.

But, after several questions about the appropriateness of evoking a Nazi to make that point, Cohen did say that “there are no Nazis in Congress, there are some liars, but no Nazis.”

Just so we’re clear: Lying is uncivil, but reaching for and belaboring a comparison between your opponents and the Nazi propaganda minister who drummed up support for the Final Solution is just speaking “truth to power” or whatever the progressive catchphrase of the moment might be. As for his underlying point about O-Care being a government takeover of health care, true enough — there’ll be a lottttt more government interference in the marketplace now, as even the law’s proponents concede, but the full takeover will have to wait until costs start going up and insurers start imploding and the left starts pushing for the public option and inevitably single-payer to “fix the problem.” In fact, below you’ll find Rachel Maddow nudging Pelosi just last night about ObamaCare being something to “build on” if it survives the GOP’s repeal endeavors. It’s intended to bring about a government takeover of health care down the road, but we’re not quite all the way there yet ergo the Republicans are guilty of a Big Lie worthy of Josef Goebbels. Good work, Steve.

Speaking of big lies, watch out for Nancy asserting here that if the Democrats hadn’t passed ObamaCare they might have lost even more seats in November. That’s the left’s old “effectiveness” argument in action — that if Obama and Pelosi took up health-care reform and then abandoned it without passing it a la Clinton, the base would have been so dispirited that no one would have turned out to vote. Could be, but note the false choice posed there in what to do once they had started work on the bill. A radical alternative not considered: Obama could have declared early on that they shouldn’t start work on the bill at all, that health-care reform should wait until the economic recovery had begun in earnest and the deficit was under control. That would have won him and Pelosi a ton of goodwill from independents by proving that their priorities were in line with voters’. Instead the Democrats went the way they did, and Pelosi, at least, will apparently never forgive the electorate for the result.

[PaleoBob]

That end of Tennessee is a real mess...

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Judging from the quality of its congresscritter, not surprising.