It probably says something bad about me that I find this so deeply amusing, but I really can’t believe that MSNBC is now actively promoting Patty Patty Buke Buke’s latest Hitler apologist magnum opus (via).
I used to think that the one thing nearly all Americans could agree on was that Hitler was bad. Little did I know.
beltane
It is amazing how the American right was able to turn Hitler into just another dead white guy like Louis IV or Cardinal Wolsey.
Tonal Crow
Shorter GOP: 1. Hitler isn’t bad, just misunderstood. 2. Obama is HITLER!
GregB
Well, history has shown that the biggest fascist of the 20th century was Franklin Roosevelt.
Love and kisses,
-Jonah Goldberg
David
I have to believe that he’s just trying to bring a few Hitler fans out of the woodwork because the alternative is truly depressing.
Lavocat
Hitler was bad? Who knew? I always knew he was Evil Incarnate, but bad? Hmm.
No, no: “bad” is reserved for Evil Incarnate wannabes, like Darth Cheney, or out and out incompetents, like Dubya.
And, I think, Hitler himself would be insulted by merely being called “bad”.
The Moar You Know
This country has gone fucking insane.
ricky
Wait, wasn’t I just applauding Jonah Goldberg for his firm opposition to all things Nazi?
Zifnab
Pat Buchanan just wants to remind us that Hitler was bad, but the liberals were worse.
Evinfuilt
After that I don’t think anyone can Godwin or Poe anymore, Buchanan is unmockable.
General Winfield Stuck
You awl just leave Hitler alone. Them meddling Euro-Panywaist Peons wouldn’t and look what happened.
Brendan
DougJ – If asked, MSNBC will claim they’re just polishing their non-liberal street cred.
The Grand Panjandrum
This reminds of the guy who wouldn’t beat his wife if she would just shut up. It really isn’t his fault. He was antagonized and just lost his temper. Poor misunderstood fellow he was.
Zifnab
@Brendan: They can stop polishing. It’s very, very shiny.
PeakVT
Does this mean the effort to relabel Hitler as a soc-ialist has failed?
Shinobi
I just got that song out of my head, thanks a LOT. Stupid Hitler and his catchy song.
ricky
I believe Pat is saying it is unfortunate that Britain did not realize stopping Hitler cost it the Empire, which was, above all else, the most important asset to civilization. Given the jobs we are now losing to India, who is to argue?
Morbo
@Tonal Crow: 3. Obama is Neville Chamberlain (oh by the way, Neville Chamberlain was worse than Hitler)!
Trinity
omg. this is completely insane.
REN
Proof that the undereducated can be sold any idea no matter how ridiculous. Or at the very least that the attempt will be made to see what will stick.
freelancer
@REN:
Is it shameful that I’m like a pop-culture Rain Man, and I’ve seen every one of Mel Brooks’ movies except for the Producers?
tripletee
If you look at it objectively, Hitler wasn’t nearly as bad as Obama, the head of a super-secret Kenyan Commie paramilitary that’s herding dissenters into FEMA concentration camps and euthanizing defenseless seniors.
Also, I bet Eva Braun never wore shorts to the Grand Canyon. Nuff said.
Demo Woman
Nothing can get you fired at MSM these days as long as it is the current administration that you are dissing. In the old days, I can actually remember some talented individuals let go, i.e Ashley Banfield.
Shawn in ShowMe
Fixed.
Mnemosyne
@Shinobi:
You mean this song?
From the days when Mel Brooks was funny …
Stefan
If you look at it objectively, Hitler wasn’t nearly as bad as Obama, the head of a super-secret Kenyan Commie paramilitary that’s herding dissenters into FEMA concentration camps and euthanizing defenseless seniors.
And say what you will about the tenets of National Socialism, dude, at least it’s an ethos……
Tsulagi
Someone wasn’t home schooled. The Democrats are always worse. There isn’t a ceiling. If you listen to Palin’s word-salad speeches backwards, that’s what she’s saying. She’s a natural code talker.
Mnemosyne
@Mnemosyne:
Sorry, the video was all out of sync on that one. This one’s better.
The Moar You Know
It’s at times like this that I wonder if I really turned down that guy who offered me a jimson weed joint in high school, or if I just think I turned him down, but really took a hit, and the last twenty-five years have been nothing but one long hallucination. The idea makes more sense than a lot of other explanations.
Shinobi
@Mnemosyne: No I was obviously referring to the OTHER song entitled Springtime for Hitler.
J. Michael Neal
When did you stop invading Poland?
licensed to kill time
@Demo Woman:
I googled what she got fired for – criticizing Fox News (sic) and cable news operators who “wrap themselves in the flag to appeal to a target demographic” – that upset the NBC management, who rebuked her and let her go the next year. Can’t be dissin’ the news business. The Prez? No problemo!
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
I think I understand what is going on here. The election of a black man to the WH ripped a hole in the fabric of space time and sent the GOP reeling backwards through time. In succession they’ve gone thru 1980s Reaganite anti-stimulus arguments against the stimulus, then John Bircher-ite ranting of the early 1960s, and now the isolationist America-First sentiments of the 1930s. Next up we will hear screaming about Spanish perfidy in Cuba and the Phillipines, followed by the urgent need to develop the railroads, and finally the goodness of Abraham Lincoln. After that, who knows what will happen – maybe the Wingularity is actually a wormhole into which the party will be sucked as it regresses all the way back to its date of orgin, and from which they will emerge into another universe.
jibeaux
@Stefan:
You know, I said that here once and no one knew what I was talking about. Dude.
I think it’s just media sensationalism and going with what sells. People will click on “Hitler” links the same way they will watch a video of a town hall meeting on health care reform IF it features someone shouting or disrupting, or giving or receiving a smackdown. It’s the biggest media bias of all, that towards the extreme and the stupid and the sensational. The morning after Ted Kennedy’s death, yahoo news was giving me details about Chris Brown’s sentencing hearing or some such pointless crap. That may seem unrelated to Hitler Headlines, but they’re both in the “eyeball” category. We are not a serious people.
R-Jud
@jibeaux:
…endless documentaries about Hitler on the
HitleryHistory Channel. Also.CapMidnight
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
There is a theory which states that if ever anybody discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.
Douglas Adams
tripletee
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
Win.
MikeJ
@jibeaux: These men are nihilists. There’s nothing to be afraid of.
They Live By Night
In other news, Jonah Goldberg is writing book explaining how Pat Buchanan is actually a liberal.
Dan
It’s gone now. Someone must have read it.
Comrade E.B. Misfit
That MSNBC web page has “expired” in less than two days.
I gather that fact that they were giving space to a Nazi apologist didn’t win them many friends.
mai naem
ARrrrrrghhhh. Ron Chrisitie is making my head hurt. Dubbya asked kids to give a dollar to the scary muslim men in Afghanistan is a good thing. Obama being a scary muslim Kenyan man asking for volunteerism is a bad thing. Also.
barkleyg
“I used to think that the one thing nearly all Americans could agree on was that Hitler was bad. Little did I know.”
Hitler apologists and TORTURE: I could never have predicted in 2000 that we would be discussing either of these subjects, much less that both are, and have been, done by Americans!
jibeaux
@MikeJ:
I would keep this up with you, but it’s gettin’ near Shabbos.
Llelldorin
Let me make sure I’m following this:
(1) Liberals are fascists. [Goldberg’s Theorem]
(2) Nazis weren’t liberal.
(3) Therefore, Nazis weren’t fascists.
Corollary: The Italian fascists weren’t fascists either.
It’s over, and Humpty Dumpty has won.
Polish the Guillotines
These are the arcane cultural references that make me Balloon-Juice second to none.
Bravo.
Oh, and Hitler? Not a nice fellow.
jibeaux
Because mocking Sarah Palin never goes out of style, I’m going to head home for the day with this bit I just read from T Bogg, which so far is the best thing all week. In response to Levi claiming she prefers his baby to her own and says she doesn’t want “the retarded baby”. Pretend I have learned how to blockquote starting *here*
Now I’ll be the first to admit that Sarah Palin is a dim-witted opportunistic grifter who would climb over the still-warm bodies of her own children to grasp the golden ring of fame and fortune, a Lonesome Rhodes of the Icepack peddling bullshit homilies to the uneducated bitter clingers with attention spans slightly shorter than the time it takes to recite the pledge of allegiance, a quitter, a liar, a fraud, an emotionally stunted woman-child who thinks she can dazzle the big city folk with her small town beauty queen runner-up status… but I don’t think that she’s ever called Trig, even in jest, “the retarded baby”.
So there.
She can thank me later.
*end* pretending that I have learned how to blockquote.
Pangloss
But don’t you see, if the Liberals DON’T like Hitler, the Right Wing nuts are FORCED to defend him….
srv
This is all so 9/10. Here’s VD Hanson & Hitch defending the ww2 against Patty:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XDkG9fY5pZQ
chopper
i love the line about how “50 million christians and jews perished” through the war.
i dunno if its the subtle minimization of the holocaust (wow, 6 million jews out of 50 million? the christians are the guys who really suffered!) or the not-so-subtle ignoring of the russian casualties, or what. its buchanan, so its gonna be both.
Tonal Crow
@Pangloss:
And that, my friends, is because the TEACHERS’ UNIONS are TERRORISTS. http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2004-02-23-paige-remarks_x.htm
wasabi gasp
Next up: Hangin’ Around With Saddam
benjoya
cable’s been out all week. lucky me.
Joshua Norton
The only think Butt-Cannon needs is a shaved head and prison tattoos to really pull it all together.
Next week: Pat chats up Ted Bundy.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@chopper:
Not to mention (as I pointed out yesterday) that 20 million (give or take a few) of those casualties out of that total were in Asia, in a war which started in China in 1937, so I’m guessing that Pat’s estimate is more than a little bit off. Of course that is hardly the only thing ‘a little bit off’ about Pat, so it’s this is a minor nitpick really.
So just out of curiousity, how much nuttier does it have to get on this side of the pond before EU countries decide to stop issuing travel visas to US citizens?
Calouste
I wonder if Buchanan also thinks that bin Laden and the Taliban were just good ole boys with no plans to install a world Caliphate, who would just leave America alone if they only withdrew all their troops and support from the Middle East and adopted Sharia law. I mean, Afghanistan didn’t even border America or American occupied territories in 2001, how would they ever want to attack America?
Zifnab
@chopper: Yeah, his deep hatred for the Soviets isn’t really masked in that piece in the least. I like how he calls Joseph Stalin “history’s greatest terrorist”. Hitler, though – him we’ll give a pass.
chopper
@Joshua Norton:
heh. i prefer “pat bu-cannot-win”
gnomedad
Hitler wasn’t Hitler, Obama is Hitler!
Pangloss
This guy has been defending Nixon and Agnew and G. Gordon Liddy for 38 years. I guess he needed a new, stronger buzz.
tripletee
@jibeaux:
You obviously know how to bold; just replace the ‘b’ or ‘strong’ inside the tags with ‘blockquote’. Even Sarah Palin could do it.
freelancer
@Calouste:
Hitler wasn’t BROWN.
Crashman06
I don’t want to go back to the site to get a direct quote because this article bothered me so much, but, at the end, Buchanan says something like World War II left a legacy that may still yet cause the death of western civilization…
What the hell is that supposed to mean?!
MikeJ
@tripletee: That works unless you have more than one paragraph. WordPress insists on fucking it up in that case.
Calouste
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
And, as I think, I pointed out in a reply, those 20 million were Asians. Non-white, non-Judeo-Christians, non-entities in the eyes of Buchanan. Or as he would say it, “untermenschen”.
tripletee
@MikeJ:
It used to work for multiple paragraphs if you manually added the p tags; let’s see:
tripletee
Huzzah.
Danton
I just tried to read the Buchanan thingie. Either the link isn’t working or a reasonably intelligent MSNBC employee decided it was time to make the story “expire.”
Calouste
@Crashman06:
The article has been pulled from msnbc anyway, although I assume Buchanan still displays it prominently on his own site.
arguingwithsignposts
@Joshua Norton:
American History X Part II: The Hitlering?
arguingwithsignposts
The really creepy thing about Buchanan is that he is apparently one of the “party boys” of Washington. He used to hang out with Hunter S. Thompson, ferchrissake, and he’s chummy with just about every political journo in washington.
The fact that these people would hang around with someone who is so obviously a racist, nazi sympathizing xenophobe is disgusting. I think even Maddow figured that out after his last outburst.
gnomedad
@Danton:
Heh-heh. Down the
memoryexpiration hole.tripletee
@Crashman06:
You just have to look at it from Pat’s point of view. If people had just left Hitler alone, he could have expanded his empire world-wide while his scientists perfected head-in-a-jar tech to allow him to rule long past his normal lifespan.
Thus, today we would all be living under a glorious American Reichstag instead of suffering under the cruel yoke of a black dude trying to give deadbeats free healthcare.
Keith
It’s going to be interesting once the Anti-Defamation League gets wind of this one.
PTirebiter
@freelancer
It’ not shameful, but you can’t really understand musical backed derivatives until you’ve seen The Producers.
SenyorDave
It’s going to be interesting once the Anti-Defamation League gets wind of this one.
Bet they don’t even go there
gsp
the fact that msnbc has pulled it shows the media is liberal. time to get o’really!? and the gang to start boycotting msnbc.
gsp
the fact that msnbc has pulled it shows the media is liberal. time to get o’really!? and the gang to start boycotting msnbc.
MikeJ
They have a whole page dedicated to him already.
http://www.adl.org/special_reports/buchanan_own_words/print.asp
Calouste
@gnomedad:
The memory hole is pretty shallow on the intertubes.
REN
I wonder how many Jewish-American Republicans Pat has managed to convince.
General Winfield Stuck
OT
It’s a jungle out there. This is how minor revolutions start peoples. The wingnut and his finger are resting comfortably as the Mighty Wurlitzer cranks out fingergate. Libtard Brutes.
General Winfield Stuck
Fingergate linky
linda
#52 … I’m out both cable n net. And reduced to a blkberry.
Major suck.
RobNYNY1957
It’s not an unprecedent thought. General Heinz Guderian, in his postwar memoirs, stated that Hitler had made a perfectly reasonable request for Poland to give up its second largest city and only seaport, and by refusing to do so, Poland “chose war.” So you see, perfectly understandable. He also goes so far as to say that Hitler’s attitude towards Jews was “excessive.” A kindred spirit for Pat, except for actually serving in the military.
Buchanan argues that the reconstruction of the purely defensive Siegfried Line and the small number of operational submaries at the start of the war show conclusively that Hitler didn’t want war. Surely the vast buildup, starting in the early to mid-1930’s, of air and ground forces, in addition to the plans for for hundreds more submarines, shows something to the contrary. In any case, building the Siegfried Line does not show that Hitler didn’t want war, it shows that he wanted to be able to concentrate his attach in the west according to the Schlieffen Plan. And not having enough submarines doesn’t show Hitler didn’t want war, it just shows that Hitler started the war against Admiral Raeder’s advice to wait until they had more submarines — a matter of timing, not intent. The submarines were designed in the 1930’s to a great extent specifically to blocade England, and would have been of comparatively little significance in a war solely against the Soviet Union.
And what about the German-Soviet Non-Agression Pact, signed before the invasion of Poland? What purpose did that serve but to give Hitler a window of time to invade Western Europe before turning back to his original object of obtaining Lebensraum in the East?
Mike G
A couple weeks ago it was Asian Christian mail-order brides, then Ann Coulter’s hideous hag visage. Now I’m getting Goth dating banner ads. Go figure.
Makewi
I think the current plan to remove the fingers of the anti reform crowd isn’t going to pay the dividends you guys are expecting it will. Come and see the violence inherent in the system.
PartyLikeIts1990
Hitler didn’t want war, any more than Glenn Beck wanted to be caught when Glenn Beck raped and murdered a young girl in 1990.
What? He hasn’t denied it. Come on Mr. Beck, clear your name and give us some evidence that you didn’t rape and murder a young girl back in 1990.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@They Live By Night:
You think he is kidding…. when confronted with Buchanan speak, the wingnuts typically deny that he is a Republican.
freelancer
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony:
The evidence is right there for all to see. He’s on MSNBC for crying out loud!
jibeaux
@tripletee:
I bold by putting an asterisk in front and one at the end. Every single time I try to use tags = fail. It generally blockquotes past where I’m trying to end blockquote. Let’s try again.
jibeaux
Okay, there’s a box in my blockquote. Round two.
jibeaux
I give up.
jibeaux
Success!
tc125231
Welcome to the Monkey House. Lots of noise, and feces everywhere.
That’s the world that wing nuts like best.
Chad N Freude
So when is his next appearance on Rachel Maddow’s program? I’d watch that.
@Calouste: Thanks for the link. I am not sufficiently well-versed in the history of the run-up to WWII, but Buchanan’s apologia seems to handle facts rather cavalierly. He says
. I have always thought that initially he wanted an oligarchic alliance with the US; his goal of US conquest was the result of the US choosing to side against Germany. He asks questions about Hitler’s motivations and answers them without any historical citation to indicate that his answers are more than mind-reading (from the grave, no less).
I don’t know how much he has now on anyone who bothers to read or listen to him, but the implications of getting this stuff published without comment — the media must remain neutral in controversial matters — are chilling.
DonkeyKong
Wingnut Squared: If Hitler were alive today he would fight the real Hitler!
ricky
@General Winfield Stuck:
Yes General, if Karoli from DrumsNWhistles said it happened
it must be good enough for Raw Story. The fact that the digit in question was described as a pinky insured the morsel was raw and meritied inclusion in their fine publication. Since the victim was 65, I am sure Los Robles Hospital will bill Medicare for reattaching the finger.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@freelancer:
They claim that Buchanan left the Republican party years ago. So, when he says embarassing things, they claim he isn’t one of them. The fact that he has endlessly cheerleaded for the GOP and that he definitely identifies as a conservative is utterly irrelevant. The way it works is this: if a conservative/Republican differs from the party line, they aren’t really Republican. If a conservative/Republican says something that makes the GOP look bad, they aren’t really Republican. No one in their camp ever does anything wrong, because as soon as they do, it turns out they never really were in their camp.
freelancer
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony:
Sorry, I should have written that in all caps, I was being facetious.
Sloth
Joe Klein’s (yah, I know, whatev) latest is worth a read:
http://swampland.blogs.time.com/2009/09/03/it-gets-worse/
The comments are…revealing.
While I remember something similar happening during Clinton, and I know we can trace this back in history…this really does strike me as something entirely else. Way more. Way too much. These people are seriously buying into theories that are just nuts, being sold by other people who are even nuttier.
What I find simultaneously appalling and mystifying is that there does not seem to be any adult supervision anywhere in the republican party.
bellatrys
@Sloth:
When I was a falling-away increasingly-ex-wingnut theocon in the early-to-mid-90s, working for a conservative media outfit, one of the flakier publications we received on the utterly-inbred proto-list-serv that was the conservative Catholic mailing lists-for-sale was, get this, a catalog-newsletter of conspiracy newsletters you could subscribe to. Kind of like those magazine subscription catalogs they give schoolkids to rook their relatives into purchasing, only this one was entirely and nothing but other conspiracy newsletters, collated into one handy – and indexed – listing for you to pick off and send in for.
So you could get, say, “UFOs” if that was your thing, or “Freemasons” if it was that instead, or “Kennedy Assasination” if you went that way, or “Fluoridation,” or “Trilateralists,” if that was your preferred kink – or you could go through and find newsletters that *combined* these flavors in various ways, such as “Freemasons – Trilateralists” or “UFOs – Fluoridation” or even “UFOs-Kennedy Assasination – Trilateralists” — seriously, it was *that* whack.
I wish I still had a copy, and I wish I had had a better senseof the world back then, because so many of these themes meant nothing to me. I just remember the more surreal of them and thinking, “Um, wow, some of the people on Our Side are living in their own reality that doesn’t really intersect with mine at all, aren’t they?”
And, again, this was well before 1996, when I busted loose from there. And these were *old* Conspiracy Crazinesses, that had been around *way* before The Clenis drove them all mad…
Brick Oven Bill
The Nazis were put into power by the gays. This is why we should be very careful about gay people in the political process. Just sayin’.
You can’t be too careful.
Ruemara
@The Moar You Know:
I’m packing for New Zealand.
Xanthippas
Look, revisionist history abounds on the reasons why Hitler went to war when he did. Buchanan’s is just more recent and facile. The real problem with his column is this line:
Maybe I’m being uncharitable, but it seems that the implication is that had Hitler not been “forced” into war by Britain’s defense of Poland, the Holocaust wouldn’t have been initiated. This is foolish because Jews were already being sent to camps in the late 30s, and the program of repression and slavery began in Poland almost immediately after the invasion. So if Buchanan seriously believes that ending the war in 1940 would’ve have saved the Jews, or even a significant number of Jews, he’s completely insane.
(And never mind the fact that Hitler would’ve just gone to war at a later point, as was his original plan. Honestly, this is really bad history on Buchanan’s part.)
Sloth
I keep waiting for NZ or Australia or Canada or someone like that to offer free entry to high education and/or wealth U.S. citizens who just can’t take this shit any more.
Be a good way to scoop up some high quality tax payers for cheap.
But maybe they think we’re *all* nuts.
General Winfield Stuck
I couldn’t live in a place where the toilet bowl swirls clockwise. Taint natural. I plan to lead a Division of Code Pinkers and lay waste to the south.
Calouste
@Sloth:
New Zealand is fairly easy to migrate to. Australia and Canada are slightly harder, but if you are relatively young, say under 35, educated and have work experience in a field that is in demand, there shouldn’t be many obstacles. Australia and Canada have their own versions of the South though, Queensland and Alberta respectively.
jaquestraw
There is a little bit of Hitler in everyone some people are just honest about it.
kommrade reproductive vigor
I don’t see what’s so difficult about this. Hitler was just a demagogue who directed the slaughter of millions for the crime of existing and millions more through an attempt to take over the world. Barack Hussein Obama is incontrovertibly and unabashedly BLACK.
Sheesh.
Anne Laurie
@Crashman06:
In Buchanan’s universe, if only the Allies’ totally mistaken demonization of Hitler, anti-Semitism, and eugenics hadn’t happened, we noble Americans would have dropped the nukes which only we possessed on those Asiatic Commies (Russians AND Chinese) by the mid-1950s. Which, happily, would also have killed off most of the remaining Eastern European Jews, who would not be able to spread their rabble-rousing left-wing sympathies to the teeming hordes of the brown people, especially in the southern, or bottom, hemisphere. So by now, the Pax Americana would have replaced those pansy Old European empires, and a world full of serfs and other unlimited natural resources would guarantee every white American male the right to live like a king, just as Jesus intended!
I wish I was exaggerating, but this kind of deeply insane “Francoism” was all too common among the Irish-American Catholics of Buchanan’s generation. In the very blue-collar neighbor where I was growing up, they were regarded as the last vestiges of a dying breed of bigots — the idea that he’d be able to spread this crap around 50 years later would have been considered so crazily pessimistic as to qualify as a sin against the Holy Ghost.
mcd410x
There’s something that happens in English football when a team gets bad. And it’s not that there are more hooligans. It’s that the non-crazy fans stay home so the bad eggs stick out more.
IndieTarheel
You know, with everyone getting compared to Hitler these days, maybe some remedial history (as opposed to revisionist history) is in order…
chopper
@Xanthippas:
yeah, as has been mentioned here before, the final solution wasn’t the beginning of the genocide against the jews and their ilk, it was the beginning of the end. one of the first things the nazis started doing in the invasion was rounding up and killing polish jews.
honestly, i don’t think hitler wanted the invasion of poland to spark a europe-wide war. the nazi government was careful to ally themselves with stalin just prior to the invasion so as to make it as quick and clean as possible and give guys like britain pause. he wanted an overwhelming win in part for its intimidation value.
but hitler still had his eyes on russia and others.