CT Blue

A few observations about some random stories in today’s newspapers.

First, the Boston Globetells us that the Republicans are never going to stand up to Trump, because he’s giving them what he wants. No arguments with that, but thisis a common refrain that really has to stop:

The majority of his successes have been reversals of the Obama agenda, a goal shared by Republican leaders who are now tacitly or actively participating in his remake of the 164-year-old Republican Party to match his own image and priorities.

With incredibly minor exceptions, the Trump agenda is the Republican agenda. Trump is not remaking the Republican Party. It has been the party of plutocrats, racists, corruption, environment rapists, etc., for decades. Trump is merely the actual unvarnished expression of what the Republican Party has been trading on since Nixon. Every time the media draws this sort of distinction between Republicans and Trump they legitimize what is in fact a party dedicated to destroying the Republic.

Meanwhile, the New York Times reportsthat a high school in Andover, Massachusetts has had to stop distributing yearbooks, because one kid put a quote from Joseph Goebbels as a caption to his senior picture. The school reacted with the required shock and horror. The unidentified student allegedly did not know the source of the quote, and his reasons for using it were not explored, though the school says they were innocent. The Times partly chalked it up to anti-Semitism, or at the least, of being anti-Semitic, because of some anti-Semitic events from the school’s recent past, but that’s not at all clear, as there’s nothing about the quote that mentions Jews. Here’s the quote:

The quote, which reads “Make the lie big, keep it simple, keep saying it and eventually they will believe it,” is widely associated with Hitler and Goebbels’s use of propaganda to build the Nazi empire. The quote is not attributed in the yearbook, and appears in black text underneath the photo of the student, who has not been identified.

Seems to me the quote is a perfect description of the political strategy of the Nazis currently running our government, so it is not impossible to conclude that the quote may have had nothing to do with anti-Semitism, but may, in fact, have been a veiled attack on our current Führer. This possibility goes unmentioned in the article, but it seems to me that it fairly cries out as a distinct possibility.

The school’s investigation found, according to the principal, that the student in question did now know the original source of the quote nor did he have any hateful intent in using the quote. All of this raises an interesting question. Should we be expunging quotes from Nazis that shed light on the events of our own times? The fact that Goebbels said this, and the fact that it is precisely the strategy employed by the very stable genius and the state run media at Fox should be legitimate subjects of discussion. The conventional wisdom is that Hitler comparisons should be avoided, because simply nothing compares with Hitler. Therefore, such comparisons have no validity and undermine the argument of those making the comparison. We don’t have gas chambers yet, but we do have concentration camps in which we are imprisoning little children, and, as noted already, we have a government and enabling media spreading the big lie. If comparisons are apt, we should use them.