Santorum Kerfuffle

Senator Santorum said the following on the floor of the Senate...

"Some are suggesting we're trying to change the law, we're trying to break the rules," said Sen. Rick Santorum (R., Pa). "Remarkable. Remarkable hubris. I mean, imagine - the rule has been in place for 214 years that this is the way we confirm judges. Broken by the other side two years ago. And the audacity of some members to stand up and say, 'How dare you break this rule?' It's the equivalent of Adolf Hitler in 1942 saying: 'I'm in Paris. How dare you invade me? How dare you bomb my city? It's mine.' "

Everytime Hitler or Nazism is invoked, it never looks good for the speaker. This is just another example of the stupidity of it.

That being said, the point he so clumsily was trying to make would have been the same if the Senator had said, "It's the equivalent of Saddam Hussein in 1991 saying: 'I'm in Kuwait City, How dare you invade me? How dare you bomb my city?"

Or, "It's the equivalent of Tojo in 1941 saying: 'I'm in Seoul, How dare you invade me? How dare you bomb my city?"

You can replace any leader with a year and an invaded city.

I probably would NOT have chosen Hitler and the Nazis, but that's the thrust of it. No. I'm not excusing it.

Now the Senator is already regretting it.

Predictably though the left wing of the blogosphere is a little upset.

DailyKos did some linking.

Atrios:

Once upon a time an organziation called Move On (or probably Move On Pac, forget which) ran a little ad creation contest. The initial submissions, of which there were many, weren't really screened by the organization, and a couple of them admittedly crossed the line by making Bush/Nazi comparisons. Those ads were yanked immediately by the organization, but are nonetheless used to this day by the liberal media to smear Move On as an irresponsible "extremist" organization.

Now we have the junior Senator from Pennsylvania comparing the entire Senate Dem caucus to Adolf Hitler. Will the "Move On" standard of the liberal media still apply?

Steve Gilliard:

Comparing Senate rules to this is like shitting on the WWII memorial. This isn't the equivilent of Hitler saying anything. The cheap use of history shows the Senator from Tyson's Corner needs to read his history closer. In between trying to murder people by pimping for Accuweather and dragging his dead fetus around for a bit of family show and tell, he wants to denigrate history and sacrifice as well. We all know Santorum wants to sit in the big house, but he's just another blowdried freak who thinks Jesus speaks to him personally and he's the lord's servant.

How easily he compared his collegues to oh, Nazis. You mean John Kerry and Tom Harkin are gonna show up to his house with some of their war buddies and toss hin into a van? He's gonna do slave labor for Micahel Moore? Clean Barbra Streisand's house? Exactly how are his Democratic collegues like the Nazis? Are they meeting at Greenbrier for the final solution of the Republican Party? Are camps being built in the Sonoran desert for Republicans and will they have their property stolen?

Santorum, like so many Republicans, forget that being a public official has responsibilities which go beyond party. One of them is to not unfairly malign the loyal opposition. That is a responsibility of goverrnment, of his office. And he seems not to get it.

Josh Marshall:

Did Rick Santorum really just say that?

Late Update: It seems he really did. Amazing.

Carpetbaggerreport:

The man is clearly not well. It’s time for him to go.

It was bad enough when Bill Frist suggested yesterday that Dems want to “assassinate” Bush nominees, but Santorum’s Hitler analogy suggests Republicans have really lost all sense of perspective and decency.

Youngphillypolitics:

Now, our good friend Rick Santorum, he who compared being gay to practicing beastiality, has compared Senate Democrats to... Adolf Hitler. Imagine, just imagine, the reaction if Harry Reid or Dick Durbin did this. We need to push this far and wide, and demand that the Media pays attention.
As Chuck Pennacchio says:

As an historian of Holocaust-era Germany, I find Rick Santorum’s comment to be offensive, divisive, and destructive. Rick Santorum should immediately issue a public apology, and then retreat with conscience to consider the lasting damage he has done to the United States Senate and to the memory of 12 million Holocaust victims.

His number is 202-224-6324. Call him tomorrow, and let him know how inappropriate his remarks were.

Casual followers of the filibuster debate will remember that this was not the first time that Nazism and Hitler were invoked.
Senator Byrd of West Virginia in March said the following...

Many times in our history we have taken up arms to protect a minority against the tyrannical majority in other lands. We, unlike Nazi Germany or Mussolini’s Italy, have never stopped being a nation of laws, not of men.

But witness how men with motives and a majority can manipulate law to cruel and unjust ends. Historian Alan Bullock writes that Hitler’s dictatorship rested on the constitutional foundation of a single law, the Enabling Law. Hitler needed a two-thirds vote to pass that law, and he cajoled his opposition in the Reichstag to support it. Bullock writes that “Hitler was prepared to promise anything to get his bill through, with the appearances of legality preserved intact.” And he succeeded.

Hitler’s originality lay in his realization that effective revolutions, in modern conditions, are carried out with, and not against, the power of the State: the correct order of events was first to secure access to that power and then begin his revolution. Hitler never abandoned the cloak of legality; he recognized the enormous psychological value of having the law on his side. Instead, he turned the law inside out and made illegality legal.

And that is what the nuclear option seeks to do to Rule XXII of the Standing Rules of the Senate.

Given that Santorum had asked for a retraction of Byrd statement, it's even dumber for him to use a similar analogy. What was he thinking?

Out of curiousity, I went to google, and tried to find equivalent denunciations of or indignation at Senator Byrd's speech.

I searched for Byrd hitler and using the site: operator in google. The actual searches are linked, as well as links to early march posts (where available). I also searched those pages for any mention of Byrd.

Here's what I found:

Kos: byrd hitler had a lot of links... so I searched part of Byrd's speech. Nothing.
I could not find an archive link.

Atrios: Nothing of value on Google.
Even in his archives.

Steve Gilliard: Same.
His archives end in 2004.

Josh Marshall: Nothing.
Josh's archives.

The Carpet Bagger Report: More of the same. Nothing.
Archives? More of the same.

Youngphillypolitics: nothing.
Appropriate archive? Nothing again.

Obviously, if I can be pointed to the right post, I will link it with retraction.

For all of the sturm und drang (and I think rightly so) over Rick Santorum's dickstepping, there is very little comment about the former Klansman's comments just over three months ago.

And in a similar context.

Maybe he's just the old crazy drunk uncle they'd prefer to lock in the basement.

Or maybe it's just hypocrisy.

Addendum: The more I think about it, the more I think that if there were no Hitler mention, this would have been a pretty unremarkable statement.

Media and Blogging Posted by AlexC at May 20, 2005 12:00 PM