I only recently became aware of this internet tradition:
A well-known rule of Internet discourse is Godwin’s law, which states that, as an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches inevitability.
Let me propose Nyhan’s corollary: As a foreign policy debate with conservatives grows longer, the probability of a comparison with the appeasement of Nazis or Hitler approaches inevitability.
I like this especially:
Consider Charles Krauthammer, an influential Washington Post — and TIME magazine — columnist and administration ally. He is the probable source of Rumsfeld’s quote, having used it in his August 11 newspaper column about Iran. In doing so, he joined what writer Ross Douthat calls the growing number of conservatives who see “Iran’s march toward nuclear power” as “the equivalent of Hitler’s 1930s brinkmanship.” And a Nexis search reveals that Krauthammer tends to see Hitler analogies everywhere — he trotted out the same Borah quote to denounce the alleged appeasement of China in 1989 and North Korea in 1994.
gnomedad
Borah! Borah! Borah!
General Winfield Stuck
@gnomedad:
Torah Torah Togga!
Krauthammerhead needs to shrink his own head if he thinks the bumbling antics of Iran’s Mullah’s can even be remotely compared to German efficiency in building a war machine like the Nazi’s did.
And a deliverable NUke is pretty far down the road for them and those who claim Iran’s Mullahs would be willing to commit national suicide by using or giving it to someone else to use, that can easily be tracked by isotopes to them, have not been keeping up./
They like the good life of controlling a country and have become something like Allah’s Aristocrats living the high life of religious piety.
They preach they are ready to meet Allah as martyr’s, just not today — to coin a Peter Bergen phrase.
The big danger of them getting a nuke however, is that it will likely lead to an atomic arms race in the ME< Which is obviously not a good idea.
The Mullah’s preach martyrdom for others but not themselves
neill
dont fergit ol’ burmashave boy from minnesota — thar current non-guvner runnin fer 2012 — wev his name… hit nyhan’s corollary at the “values” conference a coupla days ago.
what a slimey casper mittens milktoast that asshole is…
Mark S.
The question I always have when Munich comes up is “Would fighting Germany in 1938 (or 1939) have gone much better than what happened in 1940?” I think the only thing that could have deterred Hitler would have been an alliance with Stalin.
James
dont fergit ol’ burmashave boy
Oh man. Nothing to do with the comment or the topic but….
YouTube – Burma Shave by Tom Waits (Live)
also
Tom Waits – Burma Shave (Summertime) – part 1 from Cold Beer on a Hot Night, Sydney 1979.
Sorry, please resume.
GregB
Notice that the propagandists like Krauthammer never tell the reader that Sen. Borah was an isolationist Republican from Idaho.
-G
Leelee for Obama
@GregB: Superfluous information, my Dear! He was probably a RINO, or perhaps even a stealth Democrat. Tough sell, that-since the Democratic President was trying like hell to figure out a way to get into the war, but that kind of detail would never slow-down Krauthammer.
Brachiator
@GregB:
In the reptilian neo-con brain, preemptive war is somehow the equivalent of isolationism. It doesn’t appear to make sense, and yet, it is so.
Mike in NC
Consider attaching a JATO bottle to Dr. Strangelove’s wheelchair and aiming it over the Grand Canyon.
Persia
What people don’t realize is that little Hitlers are like cockroaches. Let one in, and the next thing you know your crackers are full of bug shit.
/wingnut
General Winfield Stuck
OT
Well looks like Obama has come up with another idea to drive the wingnuts off their rockers.
Malken is fueling up her atomic outrage rocket for a sortie on libtard commie rag gummint takeover.
***an open thread would be nice.
The Republic of Stupidity
Let me propose Nyhan’s corollary: As a foreign policy debate with conservatives grows longer, the probability of a comparison with the appeasement of Nazis or Hitler approaches inevitability.
_________
Hmmm… would this in turn create some sort of political Event Horizon as a logical consequence?
asiangrrlMN
Thunk thunk thunk. That sound is me bashing my head against the wall at the mere thought of my idiotic governor, Ratface Pawlenty making such an ass of himself on a national level. Fucker.
Spike Nesmith
Wow, Time Magazine. Way to research. I hate to be the pedant, but Godwin’s Law states not that it approaches inevitability, but that it the probability approaches 1.
/sniff
smiley
@General Winfield Stuck: Ok, since this is now an open thread, does anyone have a link to Obama’s Univision interview. I looked but didn’t find.
Comrade Mary
Since Smiley has implicitly declared this an open thread, did anyone just watch the 60 Minutes piece on prosthetic limbs? (Yes, it’s a repeat). I think the room got a little dusty while I was watching.
And I have stopped making fun of Dean Kamin for the Segway as he has redeemed himself with the DEKA arm.
Brachiator
@General Winfield Stuck:
This has got to be a joke.
Please tell me that this is a joke.
MikeJ
Don’t non-profits already enjoy tax breaks, in that you only pay taxes on profit?
Linkmeister
@smiley: Si, amigo. (Thus exhausting my border Spanish.)
Here.
General Winfield Stuck
@Brachiator:
Nolo Joke. He is also gearing up to take on oil company subsidies, not only here, but around the world. Not to mention giving his stamp of approval on Holder’s torture investigation
Something lit a fire under the dudes ass, which I fully approve of, though the newspaper bailout to make them non profit is highly suspect to ever occur, and shouldn’t imo.
Shell
Forget her head exploding. Everytime I see a still photo of her mouthing off, I keep expecting her eyes to explode.
Talking of exploding, that top photo of ‘Vote for Bitsy’ ad. The hell? Is there a nuclear bomb coming out of his poor head.
Brachiator
@General Winfield Stuck:
The G-20 will ignore him on this, internationally. Congress will ignore him on this domestically.
I have no great love for oil companies, but I think that Obama’s focus should be on restoring the economy, health care, and financial institution reform. And Christopher Dodd and other Democratic Party sell-outs in Congress have already signaled that they are too willing to kiss banker ass if the White House does not take control of regulatory reform efforts.
This is a brave move, given the recent opposition from intelligence “experts.”
Aside from the lack of merit in the idea of bailing out newspapers, any talk about new bailouts of failing industry groups is a gift to tea baggers. It’s just bad politics.
General Winfield Stuck
@Brachiator:
You spoil all the fun
Llelldorin
@MikeJ:
Not exactly. A “non-profit” can, confusingly enough, turn a profit in the sense of having revenues exceed expenses–in fact, it needs to if it wishes to stay in business. What makes it a non-profit is that:
(1) It doesn’t have owners or shareholders, so it never distributes profits as dividends. Non-profits only have retained earnings.
(2) Its board of directors has a responsibility to ensure that the corporation serves “the public interest” instead of “the interests of its shareholders.
(I’m currently running a sole proprietorship that I’m hoping to turn into a 501( c )(3) as soon as it accumulates enough money, so I’m depressingly aware of these things.)
Splitting Image
Doesn’t that imply that Iran is using brinksmanship because its leaders don’t actually want war?
Or did Krauthammer and Pat Buchanan not get their stories straight before going to press?
Brachiator
@General Winfield Stuck:
I still remember the wisdom of James Carville during the 1992 presidential campaign.
In order to keep the campaign on message, Carville hung a sign in Bill Clinton’s Little Rock campaign headquarters that said:
Change vs. more of the same
The economy, stupid
Don’t forget health care.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/It's_the_economy,_stupid
People in fear of losing their jobs, their homes, their health insurance don’t make getting even with the oil companies their highest priority.
RSA
… except staring back at him in the mirror, when he’s advocating U.S. torture of terrorism suspects and prisoners of war. ‘Cause, you know, the Nazis got some stuff right, I guess.
Jay C
@Mark S.:
Actually, probably yes. While Hitler had been frantically building up the German war machine since 1933, and enlarging their armed forces at a breakneck pace, the Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe were still very much works-in-progress at, say, the time of the Munich Conference (10/1938) – a fact which they took a LOT of pains to keep under wraps. Some German generals, in fact, had planned to overthrow Hitler in a coup if the sellout of the Czechs at Munich had gone awry, as they thought fighting a war at the time would be suicidal folly. But of course, feckless British/French “diplomacy” made fighting irrelevant.
tc125231
@Spike Nesmith: I also hate to be a pedant, but a probability of one is a reasonable surrogate for inevitability.
English Bomber pilots in WWII were “actuarally dead” after about 6 missions. Some made it through the war, but damn few.
At one point, it was recommended that they take off the tail gunner bubble, because statistically, the increased speed would have outweighed any good done by the tail gunner. The High Command turned it down because they felt that it would be too demoralizing to the crews if they understood it.
Roger Moore
@Brachiator:
That’s a good point, but don’t make the Rovian mistake of thinking only about campaigning and not about governing. Eliminating fossil fuel subsidies is a good idea. It wouldn’t make sense as a major campaign point, but it does make sense as a governance goal.
I think it may also make sense as a diversionary tactic. If Obama limits his legislative goals to a few key issues, the Republicans can limit their counterattacks to those same few issues. But if he brings up a whole bunch of other legislation- or even better, as in the case of the idea of letting newspapers change to non-profits, talks a bit about Congressional Democrats’ legislation- he forces the Republicans to respond on all those topics. Eliminating subsidies for Big Oil may be an especially clever choice. It’s a relatively easy sell, so he doesn’t have to spend much time and effort backing it, but it’s an area that the Republicans are bound to defend vigorously. If he can keep them occupied defending the indefensible, they not put enough effort into stopping some of his other legislative goals.
BillCinSD
@Jay C: but were England or France anywhere close to ready to fight then. They weren’t ready in Sept. of ’39.
ellaesther
How any reasonable person can compare 21st century Iran, located as it is in the 21st century Middle East/Central Asian region, bracketed as it is by the 21st century United States and China, to 1930s Germany is beyond me.
Oh that’s right. We’re talking about Krauthammer.
Jay C
@BillCinSD:
Actually, while British military preparedness was fairly sucky, the French were “ready” to fight in 1939 – they just didn’t know it: their failures were mainly ones of strategy and planning, rather than materiel (except in air strength).
But of course, in the event, that was enough….
J. Michael Neal
A large part of what happened was an intelligence breakdown. Both the Allies and the Germans made exactly the same mistakes: both sides overestimated German military strength and underestimated Allied strength. Even by the spring of 1940, it took every lucky break going the way of the Germans, plus a French intelligence catastrophe, and the Belgians forgetting to do a couple things they promised the French for the Germans to roll so easily. In fact, along the Dyle, where top line French troops met top line German troops, the French got the better of the fighting, before they found out that they were cut off.
The British weren’t really ready to fight in 1938, but the Germans weren’t either. I don’t put much credence in the idea of a German military coup; they always talked a big game, but the closest anyone came was one guy in Munich working by himself, who almost managed to kill Hitler with a bomb placed in the famous beer hall during a reunion. However, Hitler was counting on the Allies backing down, because he had almost nothing protecting him in the west. A lot of people (including the Allies at the time) don’t realize how good the Czech army was. It wasn’t good enough to defeat the Germans, but likely would have tied down enough troops that the French could.
But, as I said, no one had an accurate picture of the military situation. Chamberlain gets a bad rap, at Munich at least, for the intelligence failure. His generals were insisting that the British couldn’t afford to go to war with Germany yet, so he played for time. At that point, the French and British were engaged in full scale rearmament themselves. It was going faster than the German one was, because the Nazis had managed to completely overheat their economy, which simply couldn’t support their goals. In that sense, Chamberlain was correct in thinking that the Allies were better off postponing a war for as long as possible. For all that he proclaimed, “Peace in our times,” he was never under the delusion that Hitler was going to stop. Hence the treaty with Poland.
Where you can bag on him was for doing absolutely nothing when the war started. Had the Allies been aggressive in September, 1939, they likely would have caught the Germans unprepared for a two front war, even for the four weeks it took them to defeat Poland.
Ash Can
@General Winfield Stuck:
Actually, this doesn’t sound like a bad idea. Taking the big-bucks incentive out of the equation would presumably reduce the influence of corporate-board fatcats on the news organizations, mitigate the propensity for sensationalism, and force the prima-donna pundits to come back down to reality or be left out in the cold. Domestic news organizations are in peril, and the day could come when our only decent source for national and world news is a foreign organization such as the BBC. That would be deplorable. I really wonder whether this could be a solution.
Sean
An extension to Godwin’s law that I’m particularly fond of is this:
I’ll leave it as an exercise to the reader to determine whether Krauthammer has “lost” the debate.
-Sean
Cain
@General Winfield Stuck:
He’s done working with Republicans. The hand that went out in friendship and has turned into a FIST. It’s about fucking time. Teacrappers are going to go nuts. We got another 3.6 years going!
cain
Cain
@Ash Can:
Indeed. Also it might encourage media corporations to spin off the newspaper business into non-profits so that they don’t lose money on them. This turns into getting hopefully better newspapers that actually do their damn jobs. It might be a problem wtih people who don’t want to do “bail outs” but I suspect that only a small number of newspapers are going to do this.
cain
General Winfield Stuck
@Ash Can:
It’s pure common sense for a country strapped for cash. And insanity to give subsidies to an industry making tens of billions of bucks a year getting wingnut welfare. Same goes for the drug companies, and even a large chunk of farm subsidies at least for big combines. But of course wingnuts will oppose it, thus making reconciliation the only way to pass it. What a country.
General Winfield Stuck
@Ash Can:
oops, wrong topic.
TenguPhule
Yes, he’ll look at them, wave the happy Congress away and throw the bill into the “shit I have looked at and rejected” pile.
Bill E Pilgrim
Flash: George W Bush was a “liberal”.
Plus his efforts to mitigate the multiple disasters that he caused in office are acts that Presidents get “canonized” for!
I’ve really never read a more devious and bone-headed tract, in equal parts.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/21/opinion/21douthat.html?_r=1&hp
Brachiator
@Roger Moore:
The economy is still in a shambles and the bankers’ lobby is busy buying all the members of Congress (both parties) that they can throw money at.
While Obama is obviously going to have to spend some time playing politics with the GOP, he can’t afford to make it a big item.
The economy isn’t simply a key issue. It is THE issue.
cosanostradamus
.
Ah, yes. Taking foreign policy advice from the Right. Helps to remember that all parties to the Munich agreement were of the Right. Hitler, of course, the secret hero of the American Right then as now; Chamberlain, leader of the British Conservative Party, and Édouard Daladier, a right-leaning pol who’d split with Socialists and later outlawed the Communists. But even he would have stood up to the Nazi’s if isolationist US Republican Senator Johnson’s “Act” had not delayed sale of American warplanes.
Ironically, it’s the Israeli Right that’s running our policy in the Middle East today. We have them to thank for nukes in the region, and they seem Hell-bent on seeing them used. It really might be best if we kept them out of foreign affairs, those who believe might makes right and who look forward to Armageddon. Especially since they seem incapable of either remembering or learning from history.
Can’t we all just get along, like Kate Beckinsale? And anyone else.
.
Napoleon
@MikeJ:
MikeJ said: “Don’t non-profits already enjoy tax breaks, in that you only pay taxes on profit?”
Yes but I think what they are likely talking about is tax consequences of the conversion itself. Although I do very little tax work I do know there are a whole series of tax adjustments that take place on conversion. I am going to make this example up, but it is the type of thing I am talking about.
Say the for-profit newspaper has been taking accelerated depreciation on its presses and goes to convert to a non-profit. It may trigger the government requiring you to recalculate the depreciation on a normal basis through the date of conversion and then pay the tax difference. So long story short the very act of converting would cause you to, in a manner of speaking, pay a tax you would not have otherwise (or more accurately push forward a tax you would have paid ultimately at a later date if you never converted).
This type issue comes up often when you have things like credit unions or depositor owned S&L type entities converting to commercial banks. My guess is they are asking basically to not have to pay any readjustements so they don’t need to come out of pocket with cash to make the conversion.
MNPundit
You only recently became aware of the nazi thing? What the HELL?
ksmiami
effin Krauthammer doesn’t even realize that most of the Persian brains trust left Iran in the 70s and they now own a sizeable portion of Los Angeles. What.an.idiot! It would be as if all the guys like Werner Von Braun and Rommel had emigrated to France….
What does the Right have against history??????
Matt T.
According to Wikipedia, the Borah quote was apparently said only in private to William Kinsey Hutchinson, then International News Service’s Washington Bureau Chief, and there’s no other record of Borah saying anything like it. No wonder Krauthammer’s so fond of it.
Matt T.
According to Wikipedia, the Borah quote was apparently said only in private to William Kinsey Hutchinson, then International News Service’s Washington Bureau Chief, and there’s no other record of Borah saying anything like it. No wonder Krauthammer’s so fond of it.