Wall Street Journal: Okay, Obama Isn’t Hitler, But He’s Pretty Hitler-y
By Jonathan Chait
Tom Perkins’s letter to The Wall Street Journal last week, in which he compared liberal attacks on the one percent to the Holocaust, was an anthropologically useful document that displayed the deranged persecution complex that afflicts large segments of America’s superrich in the Obama era. Lest you think Perkins is merely one slightly addled old man, who has slipped into a Howard Hughes–esque cosseted stupor, today the Journal devotes an editorial to defending him.
The Journal concedes that Perkins’s chosen metaphor may have gone a tad too far (“The comparison was unfortunate, yet provocative”). But, the Journal's editors argue, the fact that so many people disagreed with it proves the basic thrust of his argument: “The vituperation is making our friend's point about liberal intolerance — maybe better than he did.” Liberals are mocking wildly rich people who compare their plight to the victims of the Holocaust, and even if this mockery does not currently rise to the level of persecution of the Holocaust itself, really the spirit of the thing is about the same.
The editorial proceeds to defend its thesis by rattling off a list of terrible things that have happened to one percenters in the Obama era. The actual policy agenda that harms the rich — the restoration of Clinton-era tax rates for incomes over $400,000 a year, higher investment taxes to help fund Obamacare, regulation of Wall Street — is curiously absent from the list. Instead the Journal wanders through a farrago of partisan fever dreams. For instance:
Maybe the critics are afraid that Mr. Perkins is onto something about the left's political method. Consider the recent record of liberals in power. They're the ones obsessed with the Koch brothers and other billionaires contributing to conservative causes, siccing journalists to trash them and federal agencies to shut them down.
“Siccing journalists to trash” the Koch brothers can be translated as “a number of news reports and opinion commentary has criticized the Koch brothers.” Just like what happened to the Jews in Nazi Germany! I follow the right-wing media pretty closely, and I have no idea what federal agencies shut down the Koch brothers, though I would simply point out that, ipso facto, they have not been shut down.
more
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/01/wsj-obama-isnt-hitler-but-hes-pretty-hitler-y.html
= new reply since forum marked as read
