Byron York reports Rush Limbaugh’s response to proto-Bobo David Brooks’ attack:
Last week House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said that town-hall attendees critical of the Democratic health care makeover were “carrying swastikas and symbols like that” to meetings. The next day, Rush Limbaugh responded at length on his radio program, saying, “I have always bristled when I hear people claim that conservatism gets close to Nazism. It is liberalism that’s the closest you can get to Nazism and socialism.”
On “Meet the Press” this morning, host David Gregory played a brief clip of Limbaugh’s monologue — a sentence in which Limbaugh said, “There are far more similarities between Nancy Pelosi and Adolf Hitler than between these people showing up at town halls to protest a Hitler-like policy” — and then asked guest David Brooks to comment. “I hadn’t seen the Rush Limbaugh thing,” Brooks said. “That is insane. What he’s saying is insane.”
I asked Limbaugh for a reaction, and here is his answer:
Everyone seems to ignore that Pelosi started this, saying town hall participants were showing up with swastikas, etc. That’s calling them Nazis, as Dick Durbin referred to our Gitmo interrogators from the Senate floor. I’ve been listening to the left compare George W. Bush to Hitler for eight years. I’ve been listening to Democrats and the left compare conservatism to Nazis my whole career. This time I responded. In kind, by comparing the radical left policies of the Nazis to today’s radical left leadership of the Democrat Party. I’m not surprised they don’t like it.
If only somebody would write a book on that topic…
Found via the Professor, who believes that “what’s really going on is that Brooks was suckered by David Gregory with an out-of-context soundbite.” Ransom note-style editing? That never happens in the MSM!
Update: Welcome to those tuning in from NRO’s Corner.
There are plenty of reasons to think carefully about the twisted German medical system of the 1930s and 1940s and compare it to what the president and Congress are proposing. Especially concerning are “death panels” — only part of the House bill I have read, p. 429ff.
I am most concerned about patient CONSENT.
The enormous machinery of informed consent we now have in our medical system traces back to the Nuremberg war crimes tribunals after WWII, specifically to the “Medical Case.”
Here is a PDF link to an influential article about consent and medical ethics abuses in American research prior to about 1965.
http://www.scielosp.org/pdf/bwho/v79n4/v79n4a12.pdf
Dr. Henry K. Beecher wrote this in New England Journal of Medicine, v. 274, June 16, 1966. Very influential paper here in USA.
The program was, and is, Aktion T-4.
As for Brooks, who are these people who think he’s a conservative? He’s not.
“You’re on thin ice” is a threat. The executive of the federal government is threatening people for speaking words?
The world can be changed by man’s endeavor, and that this endeavor can lead to something new and better .No man can sever the bonds that unite him to his society simply by averting his eyes . He must ever be receptive and sensitive to the new ; and have sufficient courage and skill to novel facts and to deal with them .
Gibbs will lie all by himself, thanks. He doesn’t require Brooks make a liar out of him.
The Left is no longer interested in debate (never was). Confronted with disagreement, it moves immediately to de-legitimize its opponents through character assassination, legal harassment, media intimidation and ridicule — anything to avoid responding to the substance of opposition.
Obama doesn’t simply claim his critics are mistaken, wrong or even mis-guided. Instead, our Mountebank-in-Chief accuses any who disagree with deliberately ‘spreading mis-information’ or trying to obstruct something so obviously good and desirable that it should be beyond examination. This despite skepticism in poll after poll. His elitist shills sneer at the way opponents are dressed, claim free assembly is ‘astro-turfing’ or play the race card.
Anyway, what was that saying about how first they ignore you, then they laugh at you . . . and eventually you win?
I don’t know why people other than his employers at the NYTimes continue to think of Brooks as a conservative. He is barely a RINO. This weenie is the David Gergen of his generation, someone the MSM turns to when criticism of the left needs to be balanced by criticism from the right.