Friday, March 26, 2010

What I Learned This Week (or, Sue was wrong, will she admit it?)

It was D. P. Moynihan who observed that we are all entitled to our own opinions but not to our own facts. Last Saturday, sort of in the heat of the moment, Sue Polinsky posted about the alleged cursing of Tea Partiers at the Saturday rally in Washington. By Sunday morning it was noted by a number of sources that those events may not have happened, and I wrote Sue asking her to note that the charges were "disputed" (see comments). She demurred.

On Wednesday, She doubled-down with another post, this one entitled "Socialist. Fascist. Nazi. Fa**ot. Ni**er".

Today she adds another post on this subject: "Our own shattered glass" . This one evokes the German Kristallnacht, comparing last weekend's events to that horror. This is all very good. It's her blog and she's entitled to her opinion.

Earlier this week, the Blogfather had a reference to an almost forgotten anniversary, the German Enabling Act of 1933. I had not heard of that particular act, but then I'm not a historian. The Wikipedia article is here. This was the act that gave Hitler the power to take over the German government and led to WWII and all its horrors. I suspect at the time that very few folks saw these outcomes as a possible result of that act.

An interesting sidelight of this story is the role Ludwig Kaas played in the passage of the Enabling Act and the events of last weekend and the passage of ObamaCare. If you read the Neo-Neocon post, which you should, you'll probably be struck by this:
"I am sure that rings a small, sad bell for someone whose name is somewhat similar (hint: instead of beginning with a “k” and ending with an “s,” it begins with an “s” and ends with a “k”)."
Am I comparing ObamaCare with the Enabling Act of 1933? I am not. Neither do I think last weekend's Tea Party demonstrations have any comparison to Kristallnacht. Dr. Sue is off the deep end worried about events which may have never happened. Will she realize that?

Note: I'm having trouble getting Blogger to translate the HTML in this post porperly. I have that problem often if I try to use their Block Quote function. I'm trying to edit it to display properly so it may change in appearance for a while.

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