Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

When do the post office & the dmv weigh in on the wuhan virus?

Whatever happens next week, the fight doesn’t end.

It’s the corruption, stupid.

The most dangerous place for a black man in America is in a white man’s imagination.

I wonder if trump will be tried as an adult.

We’ll be taking my thoughts and prayers to the ballot box.

This has so much WTF written all over it that it is hard to comprehend.

You can’t attract Republican voters. You can only out organize them.

I didn’t have alien invasion on my 2023 BINGO card.

Just because you believe it, that doesn’t make it true.

T R E 4 5 O N

Conservatism: there are some people the law protects but does not bind and others who the law binds but does not protect.

I’m sure you banged some questionable people yourself.

But frankly mr. cole, I’ll be happier when you get back to telling us to go fuck ourselves.

So it was an October Surprise A Day, like an Advent calendar but for crime.

Historically it was a little unusual for the president to be an incoherent babbling moron.

He really is that stupid.

Prediction: the GOP will rethink its strategy of boycotting future committees.

“Everybody’s entitled to be an idiot.”

A last alliance of elves and men. also pet photos.

Make the republican party small enough to drown in a bathtub.

Let’s finish the job.

Ah, the different things are different argument.

They are lying in pursuit of an agenda.

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Reader Interactions

65Comments

  2. 2.

    Brother Machine Gun of Desirable Mindfulness (fka AWS)

    I would sooner suffer being eaten alive by rabid badgers than wade into that fever swamp, even if there is no link, but exactly what qualifies as “evidence” here?

  3. 3.

    vtr

    All dogs have four legs.
    I’m sitting on something with four legs.
    Therefore, I am sitting on a dog.

  4. 4.

    PaulW

    @Baud:

    You know who else was gay?

    If you’re gonna say Stalin, we historians are just gonna have to mark up the Eastern Front as the worst case of “lovers scorned” in human history.

    /sarcasm

  5. 5.

    beltane

    It occurred to me yesterday that despite Ferguson’s impressive academic credentials, the man is essentially of the same mindset as Sarah, or even Bristol, Palin.

  6. 6.

    dmsilev

    @Brother Machine Gun of Desirable Mindfulness (fka AWS): I took a look.

    Army interrogator Herman Merl, who was a medical technician who interviewed Hitler’s doctors, Karl Brandt and Hitler’s primary physician, Theodor Morell, wrote “Homosex” in the space provided for Hitler’s sexuality.

    Convincing!

    By the way, very first comment on the story is “What a coincidence! So is obama. . .”. Raise your hands, everybody who is surprised.

  7. 7.

    Todd

    Clearly this means something.

    If I throw in “Trotsky was a ravenous horndog who had scores of women”, or that “by every account I’ve ever noticed, Lenin was conventionally monogamous” that change their equation?

  9. 9.

    Ash Can

    It means that the next step after legal recognition of gay marriage is that all us hetero-marrieds are going to be gassed and shoved into ovens. Or something.

  10. 10.

    the Conster

    Has there ever been a time in history where manhood anxiety has been more on display? Every day the right wing id show has alternately been entertaining and horrifying.

  11. 11.

    Commenting at Balloon Juice Since 1937

    New evidence from the coroner shows Breitbart was a Nazi.

  12. 12.

    Commenting at Balloon Juice Since 1937

    @dmsilev: So, Hitler’s doctors were English speakers who did not write German? Hmmmmmm.

  15. 15.

    Tokyokie

    Actually, this theory has been out there for a while, first proposed by some German author who wondered how it was that Hitler could have won the Iron Cross during World War I, yet still emerged from that war as a mere corporal. If you interpret his actions through the lens of his being a self-loathing closeted gay who would not embrace his sexuality, some of his actions, such as the extermination of Ernst Röhm and the Sturmabteilung on the Night of the Long Knives, or his relationship with Eva Braun, make more sense.

  16. 16.

    magurakurin

    But they are losing. Delaware made it 11 and Minnesota will make it 12 on Monday. 12(plus D.C.) out of 50 is a fourth of the States that have now legalized gay marriage. Surely, more will follow.

    So fuck em. Let them squawk. They are losing.

  20. 20.

    Belafon (formerly anonevent)

    @the Conster: Well, maybe the white males are working together more now than before, but hasn’t most of human history been about how my sword is bigger than your sword?

  23. 23.

    NCSteve

    @NotMax: A device so powerful that it even wove the illusion of English speech over the lips of the speaker so all the humanoid aliens didn’t look like characters in Hercules or Kung Fu movie when they talked.

  24. 24.

    Schlemizel

    Years ago I read a book written by a guy who worked for OSS during WWII as a physiologist. His job for a time was to generate a profile on Hitler and the book covered his work on that topic.

    They interviewed everyone they could that had contact with the little paper hanger. The belief at the end was that he was one sick puppy who liked to be debased and abused by women (stories from former gfs that he liked to be kicked while groveling. There were also rumors that he either had only one ball or one was shriveled but the shrink sort of discounted that.

    No mention of liking boys although he did explore little Dolphies relationship with his mother who had lost all (IIRC) her other children either in birth or very young.

  31. 31.

    SparkleFarkle

    They don’t always sound american…sometimes they sound british or australian, or whatever the geico gecko is supposed to be.

  33. 33.

    Uncle Cosmo

    @Schlemizel:

    There were also rumors that he either had only one ball or one was shriveled but the shrink sort of discounted that.

    Viz. these variant lyrics for the “Colonel Bogey March”.

    The ones I learned in my misspent youth (which FTR was in retrospect not half misspent enough):

    Hitler
    Had only one big ball
    Goering
    Had two but very small
    Himmler
    Had something similar
    But poor old Goebbels
    Had no balls at all…

  36. 36.

    Alex S.

    I always thought that there must some sexual ‘deviation from the normal’ in Hitler’s psyche. But when it was revealed that Hitler lost a testicle in World War I that pretty much explained it for me.

  40. 40.

    priscianus jr

    @Tokyokie: I thought folks from Andorra had Basque accents.

    The name “Andorra” is of Basque origin, but there hasn’t been any significant Basque population in Andorra in historical memory. The language of Andorra is Catalan, which has no relation to Basque.

  42. 42.

    Waldo

    I dunno. I heard things got pretty hot between Adolf and Eva on their honeymoon.

  43. 43.

    Omnes Omnibus

    @Tokyokie:

    first proposed by some German author who wondered how it was that Hitler could have won the Iron Cross during World War I, yet still emerged from that war as a mere corporal.

    Class barriers to promotion? An oddly slow promotion system – Richtofen died in 1918 as a mere captain. Of course, he was unmarried* so he might have been gay as well.**

    *IIRC

    **Notintendedtobeafactualstatement

    @Uncle Cosmo: Ah, youth and rugby parties.

  47. 47.

    A Humble Lurker

    Wasn’t Hitler Jewish on his mother’s side? Being gay too would just add to the whole self-loathing psychopathy angle. Kind of like the pray-the-gay-away life-ruiners who wind up being caught with escorts of their own sex, only on a much bigger and infinitely nastier scale.

  50. 50.

    Grumpy Code Monkey

    @beltane: I think Ken at Popehat pretty much nailed it:

    Niall Ferguson is an historian and Harvard professor. If you teach at Harvard or study there, you’ll find that you can coast a great distance on the Harvard name with little effort. Ferguson is determined to reject such complacency and make his own mark as an asshole entirely on his own merits.

  51. 51.

    schrodinger's cat

    Since this is a thread on Hitler and so by definition has already been Godwined. This whole Ferguson dust up reminded me of the Nazis branding Einstein’s work as Jewish physics. When you bring up extraneous matters, that usually means you cannot argue on the merits. So Ferguson has no economic argument to make so he makes personal attacks. Just as in Einstein’s case, Keynes sexuality is immaterial to the discussion of his theories.

  52. 52.

    Tokyokie

    @Omnes Omnibus: I’m sure there were class barriers to promotion, but I believe those mostly governed who was allowed into and was promoted within the officer corps. Basically, Hitler achieved the military rank anybody who’d served four years in the Bavarian army would have attained, rising from Schütze to Gefreiter. That he was deemed unsuitable for becoming an Unteroffizier, the lowest enlisted officer rank, despite winning an Iron Cross, First Class (the highest battlefield honor for which he was eligible, as the Großkreuz was reserved for generals), would indicate something else was going on with him.

  53. 53.

    Tokyokie

    @A Humble Lurker: Perhaps on his father’s side. His father was the illegitimate son of a housekeeper, and it’s been theorized that a member of the Jewish family for which she worked impregnated her. But then you’d have to buy into notions of racial purity and all that crap to believe that a child of parents who didn’t practice Judaism could be considered “Jewish” in any regard.

  55. 55.

    El Cid

    @schrodinger’s cat: I’m pretty sure that the likelihood of an internet post on Hitler resulting in comments bringing up Hitler is 1, Godwin’s law of the probability of a comment appearing relating to Hitler is irrelevant.

  56. 56.

    David Hunt

    @Tokyokie:

    That he was deemed unsuitable for becoming an Unteroffizier, the lowest enlisted officer rank, despite winning an Iron Cross, First Class (the highest battlefield honor for which he was eligible, as the Großkreuz was reserved for generals), would indicate something else was going on with him.

    Perhaps, but it might just have been that he was a raging asshole/lunatic and the people around him didn’t want to promote him.

  60. 60.

    Geeno

    @Tokyokie: I thought he was injured in the event where he was awarded the iron cross, and sent home for convalescence for a while, and the war ended before he was sent back.
    Can’t remember where I heard/read that though.

  62. 62.

    Villago Delenda Est

    @Geeno: I vaguely recall that the engagement included some gas attack action, which required the convalescence.

    Nevertheless, to compare Bush 43 to Hitler is off limits, because Hitler was a decorated combat veteran and Bush 43 a deserting shitstain.

  63. 63.

    Bob In Portland

    There was a book written by a German author, although available here in English, called THE HIDDEN HITLER, which made a good case that Hitler was in fact gay. His evilness came not from his being gay but from his self-hatred that was created by his father’s beatings.

    Think of Lindsey Graham. Don’t ask, don’t tell.

  64. 64.

    Uncle Cosmo

    @Tokyokie:

    That he was deemed unsuitable for becoming an Unteroffizier, the lowest enlisted officer rank, despite winning an Iron Cross, First Class (the highest battlefield honor for which he was eligible, as the Großkreuz was reserved for generals), would indicate something else was going on with him.

    “What was going on” was probably the fact that his duty was that of signals runner. At the time of the Great War radio sets were heavy, cumbersome & hard to power–nothing mobile short of a warship could carry & power one. The fastest means of communication between front-line units & higher command in the rear was by telephone, but artillery barrages routinely tore up the lines buried at any practical depth. So messages were usually carried by someone.

    This was an ideal activity for a loner like Hitler. And it was personally extremely hazardous. Runners were prize targets–nailing one could cripple the unit in question for many hours before the body was found & the message re-sent with another runner–& snipers were always on the lookout for lone figures heading purposefully to the rear.

    Hitler got his Eisenkreuz for repeatedly doing this job well with little regard for his own safety. (He was recommended for it, IIRC, by a Jewish officer–which may in part explain why the first wave of restrictions on Jews in the Third Reich often exempted those who honorably served in the Great War. Not that that lasted very long, but still…)

    Note that the personality type best suited to running messages is widely at variance with that best suited to command others. Kind of like a master sniper. You can give a guy a chestful of medals for picking off enemy officers at dog-knows-how-far, but it doesn’t make him fit for command..the fact that he performs so well in almost total isolation (maybe one spotter there) probably means he’s completely unsuited for higher rank.

    (Yeah, TMI, logorrhea, whatever. Sue me.)

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