Lately, everywhere I turn, political debate in this country has been taken over by talk of "Nazis." Everyone is doing it.
Glenn Beck does it.
Bill O'Reilly does it.
Keith Olbmermann does it.
And now DailyKos diarists are doing it.
When oppositional politics arrives at the point where debate has been debased to the point where volleys of Nazi comparisons hurled back and forth passes for reasonable discourse--then the debate is dead.
For goodness sakes! This has to stop right now. And since neither FOX News nor MSNBC are going to stop it, we have to step up and relaunch a meaningful political debate.
It makes no difference who does it--whether it's well-intentioned DailyKos diarists or ego maniacal FOX anchors who invoke the Nazis. It is a sign of laziness--a decision to throw blood in the water to get the crowd murmuring than doing the hard work of framing and advancing political arguments.
It should come as no surprise that most FOX News anchors, nowadays, regularly compare the Obama administration to the Nazis for this very reason.
Glenn Beck, for example, cares less for the quality of political debate in this country than he cares for equal rights. He is an entertaining masquerading as a political journalist. If cutting off the heads of kittens on live television bumped him up in the ratings, he would do it every night.
As it happens, what appears to increase Beck's ratings is making wild-eyed predictions about the Obama administration turning in the Nazi Party 2.0, rounding up all free citizens at home and abroad, and then transforming the world into a permanently cloudy post apocalyptic nightmare that makes 1984, The Matrix, and The Terminator all look like a sunny day in Key West.
Now, I wish I could stop there and damn the right-wing media for playing the Nazi card to get attention--call it a 'right-wing' problem and leave it at that. Unfortunately, the problem does not end there.
Almost from the first days of the Bush administration, a small but vocal group on the left started comparing the right-wing media and administration to the Nazis. With small broadcast venues at their disposal, most of these comparisons were grounded in Google searches and used infamous Nazi quotes as ominous warnings that the end of democracy was neigh under the Bush administration. These comparisons always garnered huge attention, albeit with relatively small audiences. Comparing Bush to Hitler even became a popular protest sign, popping up all over the world.
It was just a matter of time before this tactic bumped up from the internet to bigger broadcast venues.
Soon enough, Keith Olbermann started making the comparison in his "special comments," discovering along the way that, yes indeed, comparing the sitting President to the Nazis gets listeners fired up (who'd've thunk it?).
Now, with the emergence of the so-called "torture photos," respectable voices in the netroots are using this same tactic. And yes, it is gaining a big response also.
But let me ask you this: is the purpose of political debate just to get people riled up? Is the point just to throw blood in the water and get people reaching for their pitchforks and torches?
Sarah Palin thinks so. I don't.
The point is to get things done. The point is to get done what needs to be done so that the lives of those we care about, and even those we do not care about, make progress--sometimes slow, sometimes fast, but progress nonetheless.
People who cannot afford to buy milk, pay for medicine, stay in their homes--politics is supposed to help them escape from lives of fear.
And, yes: people suffering in prisons, from war, from brutal policies enacted by those corrupt and immoral leaders who came before--politics is supposed to help find a way to end their suffering.
Calling people Nazis does not make any of that happen.
No matter how much of an ass Dick Cheney was/is, that does not make him, de facto, a Nazi--nor does it mean that comparing him or other Republicans to Nazis does anything but push the noise level in political debate ten clicks past shrill.
It's a waste of time when Bill O'Reilly does it.
It's a waste of time when Glenn Beck does it.
It's a waste of time when Keith Olbermann does it.
And it's a waste of time when diarists on this site do it.
Beyond the mere distraction, repeatedly comparing the opposition to Nazis is flat out wrong.
There is brutality, corruption, anti-Democratic policy, and outright barbaric behavior in every phase of every national project to ever show its head on the face of this earth. The Nazis did not invent, nor did they maintain a patent on, being brutal, violent, douchebags.
Dick Cheney advocated torture. The closest comparison is not the Nazis. It is the Japanese military during World War II.
Even closer than that, there is a torture scene in the recent award-winning film Slumdog Millionaire.
Why not compare Cheney to the Japanese generals? Why not compare Cheney to the Mumbai police? Because to do so would be more accurate, but make less of a splash.
To make a strong case for why the Bush policies in the first decade of the 21st Century were bad for America, they should have been compared more regularly to the union busting, violent behavior of the trust-enabling Republican politics in the first few decades of the 20th Century. Instead of wasting time talking about Nazis, we should spend more time making connections for the public back to the time when a vast majority of people in this country worked hard and played by the rules only to end their lives in debt, fear, poor health, and a deep, debilitating shame.
Showing the country why the Bush policies represented a return to that shameful period before we as a nation came together to do away with the cloud of fear that destroyed our citizens lives--that is how we should have spent more of our energy during the the 8 years in which Dick Cheney was at the helm.
But here we are, and we are faced once again with a choice: Do we hop on the "Nazi!" bandwagon provided to us by the big bandwidth media? Or do we take our role seriously as stewards of democratic debate in this democracy?
For me the choice is clear.
My point, in closing, is not to judge this or that DailyKos diarist for what they have or are considering writing about torture, Dick Cheney and the Nazis. I understand and respect the impulse to find these connections, and while my critique may be strong, my respect for the members of this community is unwavering.
My point is simply to remind people why we all come here in the first place: because the mainstream media in this country failed, and continues to fail, to live up to its responsibility as custodians of political debate. And so we stepped in to make it right.
And so remember: The next time any of us considers standing up in a diary and shouting "Nazi!" ask this simple question: Will it help the people we care about helping? If the answer is "Not really," then sit back and find something new--something more useful--to shout.