Busy Night - On Calling People Fascist and Nazi

Busy Night, three posts.

The mainstream media and even Fox, even Bloggers like Little Green Footballs get very uptight at calling what is happening a precursor to Nazism. Even using the term Fascist raises their hackles ( whatever a hackle is). But you have to wonder what people thought in the mid-thirties.

I'll start with Fascism. Aside from the hypocrisy of forgetting that the term has been thrown as an epithet at conservatives and libertarians for decades, Incorrectly it turns out. Because conservatives and especially libertarians are anti-statist. They are against strong central government. Fascism is a system of government with private ownership of the means of production with government control of that production. It is a very straightforward definition, and one that truly describes the changes in this country in the last nine months. If anything, we have overshot fascism a little towards communism, the state owning the means of production - right, GM?

But Nazism? Perhaps that is a stretch. After all, this isn't national socialism or nationalism, this is international socialism. Or is it? There is something else. Something that makes one involuntarily think of Germany prior to the Second World War. There is the cult of personality. Barack Obama is not just President of the United States of America. This week he is presiding at the United Nations Security Council. This week he is also pontificating at the global economic summit, the G-20, in Pittsburgh. He is President of the World, maybe even President of the Universe. Small children sing his praises the same way they did for Hitler. His nomination/investment/coronation/anointment in Denver last Summer look for all the world like it was designed by Leni Riefenstahl or Albert Speer. The only thing missing now is the repeal of the 22nd amendment. Oh, wait, what about Representative Jose Serrano's (D - NY 16th District) bill H. J. Res 5? A 2/3 majority of the Senate and it is the law of the land. Obama, President for Life, like his buddies Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez, and Kim Jong Il. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who still has to be elected, rigged-or-not, would envy him. It could never happen here. Isn't that what moderate Germans said in the thirties? Do you suppose the ones that tried to warn the others about the cult of Hitler were belittled and mocked?

Our Founding Fathers feared just this particular kind of Presidency.