Posted on 04/09/2019 1:16:35 PM PDT by Altura Ct.
During an Iowa town hall last week, "Beto" O'Rourke, who had pledged to raise the level of national discourse, depicted President Donald Trump's rhetoric as right out of Nazi Germany.
Trump "describes immigrants as 'rapists' and 'criminals'" and as "'animals' and 'an infestation,'" said Beto.
"Now, I might expect someone to describe another human being as 'an infestation' in the Third Reich. I would not expect it in the United States of America." The crowd lustily cheered the analogy.
By week's end, Beto's Third Reich comparison had been matched in nastiness by Bernie Sanders' description of the president to the cheering activists of Al Sharpton's National Action Network:
"It gives me no pleasure to say this but today we have a president who is a racist, sexist, a homophobe, a xenophobe and a religious bigot."
Sanders managed to appeal to almost all elements of the Democrats' coalition by accusing Trump of hating blacks, women, gays, foreigners and Muslims.
Sanders' outline of Trump calls to mind Hillary Clinton's now-famous attack on the white working-class folks who would give Trump his victory:
"(Y)ou could put half of Trump's supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables ... racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic -- you name it ... he has lifted them up."
Where Hillary's slander of the Donald's MAGA constituents as a thoroughly rotten crowd of Americans came two months before the 2016 election, Bernie's assault on Trump's character comes fully 20 months before the 2020 election.
If this is the level of discourse from Beto and Bernie, two of the leading candidates for the nomination, two years from Election Day, 2020 looks to be one of the ugliest campaigns in American history.
And what does it say about democracy if this is the character of politics at the highest level in the world's leading democracy?
When such language is deployed without admonition from the major media, what does that say about the sincerity of the media's calls to unite and heal the country?
And if Democratic leaders are openly massaging the hatreds of the party base with such slanders, what does it tell us about those leaders?
If they believe such charges -- "It is the truth and we need to confront that," said Sanders -- why do Democrats not impeach and remove such a ogre? Why has Nancy Pelosi ruled that out?
At the end of a week where he withdrew his nominee to head Immigration and Customs Enforcement and saw the departure of his Secretary of Homeland Security, Trump, referring to the 175,000 migrants apprehended crossing the U.S. border in February and March, protested repeatedly, "Our country is full."
Echoes of Hitler's Germany, said The Washington Post:
Adolf Hitler promised 'living space' for Germans as the basis of an expansionist project, which historians said distinguishes the Third Reich from today's xenophobic governments. Still, experts found parallels.
"'The echoes do indeed remind one of the Nazi period, unfortunately,' John Connelly, a historian of modern Europe at the University of California at Berkeley, said in an interview with The Washington Post.
"'The exact phrasing may be different, but the spirit is very similar. The concern about an ethnic, national people not having proper space -- this is something you could definitely describe as parallel to the 1930s.'
"The president's words became even more freighted when he repeated them on Saturday before the Republican Jewish coalition in Las Vegas, saying, 'Our country is full, can't come. I'm sorry.'"
Trump's actions and words last week do seem to portend tougher action on illegal immigration, but one need not look to Nazi Germany for precedents. They may be found in our own history.
The 1924 immigration act restricted legal immigration into the U.S. and imposed ethnic quotas. That was American, not Nazi, law and was enforced by Presidents Coolidge, Hoover, FDR, Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy.
Eisenhower, who led the Allies to victory over Germany, sent Gen. Joseph Swing to the U.S. border to remove a million people who had entered Texas illegally from Mexico, which the general proceeded to do.
Ike had crushed fascism and understood that securing the homeland against illegal mass migration is fascism only in the minds of those who have forgotten, if ever they knew, what a country is.
From his words and actions, Trump clearly senses that this may be the existential issue of his presidency: Can he secure the border against what seems to be an unstoppable invasion from the global south?
Nor is this only an American issue. In the capitals of Europe -- Budapest, Berlin, Paris, Rome, London, Madrid -- the gnawing fear is not of Vladimir Putin leading a mighty Russian army back to the Elbe to recreate Stalin's empire, but of the African and Muslim hundreds of millions looking hungrily north to the pleasant lands of the former mother countries.
Dems new mantra: “Make America HATE Again”
I cannot see the level of discourse getting more refined and courteous, as the election season begins in earnest.
But then, maybe elections are not supposed to be about courtesy. Not even about honesty.
Who is the emptiest airhead, “Beto” or AOC. Close call.
Such as: he ate dirt when told to do so. She was a dingbat bartender who thinks trains can run across the oceans.
Elections are non-violent (for the most part!) civil wars and always have been!
Changing the sovereign is the trickiest part of government. Rome for example even their eastern flavor never adequately solved it.
But they preposterously set up anti-Trump rallies to keep conservatives such as Ben Shapiro, Milo or Ann Coulter from speaking on college campuses in public. Two had more than one burning car. All three had vicious profane diatribes by out of control speakers denouncing the conservatives. All had broken windows and vandalized common areas of the campuses. Chanting, spite filled red faced leftists ran the rallies under the banner: No Room For Hate. No Fascist Speakers Welcome Here.
I cant stand these people coming here to my beloved Iowa and accusing my beloved Republican Party of such things, its a Blood Libel that drips from Orourkes’ fangs but wont take root in Free Iowas’ Northern Soil, his lies become his own toxic poison that will kill his candidacy.
Go back to Texas in shame Orourke, Iowa dont want you.
All Democrats’ ‘New’ Ideas Are Just Repackaged Failures Baby Boomers Like
The Democratic Party, or at least its 2020 presidential candidates and new stars, are allegedly lurching significantly leftward. Sen. Bernie Sanders’ platform seems to be a center of gravity, even a bit of a throwback for relying mostly on class warfare instead of identity politics. Some see Joe Biden as the avatar of old Democratic ideas.
This may be the Democrats’ dirty little secret: most of the big, “new,” “progressive” ideas are really decades old. Most of these ideas have been flogged by the lefties who grew up among the New Left of the 1960s and ’70s, eventually dominating the party establishment while settling for neoliberalism when mugged by political reality.
Bernie just Recycles Old Ideas
Take Bernie’s signature proposal of Medicare for All, please. Single-payer health care has been Democrats’ holy grail since the days of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry Truman. After Lyndon Baines Johnson got Medicare through Congress, Democrats immediately started talking up a national insurance program, which is mentioned several times in the party’s 1972 platform.
...
We are in the Post-Regressivist Period, a pre-pubescent Nazi Regime is the New Democrat Party.
Any party that can thrive only by creating balkanized groups has to inevitably turn out like this. With them, it is always “us against them,” never “we the People” and the “melting pot” with common shared ideals.
...That most of the left’s platform is not new does not mean the ideas are not radical. To the contrary, while “radical” generally means drastic change from the status quo, the word also means “constituting or growing from a root.” The Democrats’ roots have always been in far-left ideologies. The only thing “new” about progressives’ ideas now is that there is a younger generation or two, many of whom are too poorly educated to understand they are being sold a very old boomers’ bill of goods.
Fascism, Communism, Socialism old ideas that have long been the “dream” of the left and are being packaged under ‘new’ titles but have been around since FDR. Unfortunately, the youth of today are ignorant of this.
Every ‘rat running so far is pathetic, but O’Dork and Fartacus have to be the dimmest bulbs of the lot.
True, but the eastern version of the empire lasted 1000 years longer than the western version.
agree!
That was slightly comical since the U.S. Census Bureau categorizes immigrants from North Africa and the Middle East as “white.”
Re: True, but the eastern version of the Roman Empire lasted 1000 years longer than the western version.
True, but possibly because there was a lot more worth stealing in the West.
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