http://airamerica.com/theronreaganshow/blog/12-17-2009/reagan-ingraham-stick-it-where-monkey/?p=allHere is the text, but you can "hear him say it" in the above link.============================
As Jon Stewart pointed out last night on the “Daily Show,” tea baggers and various other historical illiterates took time out from their Christmas warrior activities to have one last rage-fest in our nation’s capitol. Accompanying the members of Congress, past and present, was radio host and frequent Fox News contributor Laura Ingraham. Laura seemed determined above all to prove that her lack of good sense was more than matched by an absence of character.
Ingraham was, of course, making a nauseating hash of the famous poem “First they came…” usually attributed to the German pastor Martin Niemoller who was writing about the Holocaust. In other words, Ingraham was comparing a Senate bill that amounts to a big wet kiss to the health insurance industry to genocide.
Some of you who are not Laura Ingraham and therefore have some real respect for those who suffered and died under the Nazis may have noticed that the words she spoke seemed unfamiliar. Dare i say, inaccurate? All that business about the rich, the property owners, and the right to bear arms: was that in the original Niemoller poem? Uh, no…
In case you’re wondering, the version of the poem most often cited – and the one Niemoller himself is said to have prefered – goes like this:
“First they came for the communists, and i did not speak out – because i was not a communist / Then they came for the trade unionists, and i did not speak out – because i was not a trade unionist / Then they came for the jews, and i did not speak out – because i was not a jew / Then they came for me – and there was no one left to speak out for me.”Nothing in there about rich property owners and their guns… Care to venture a wild guess as to why someone like Ingraham would substitute those words for ones refering to Communists and Jews? Maybe she was afraid of being lynched by rowdy tea-partiers.
The real point, though, has less to do with literary accuracy and more to do with sheer stupidity. You see, Ingraham is actually a well-educated person. She has a BA from Dartmouth and a law degree from the University of Virginia. That means she can’t hide behind a cloak of mere ignorance. Many in her audience yesterday might not recognize the Holocaust if it erupted in their breakfast cereal, but Ingraham knows better. Ingraham surely realizes that offering more people health coverage while ensuring the profit margins of the private health insurance industry through mandates and government subsidies isn’t at all like rounding up folks and jamming them into boxcars bound for concentration camps where they will be gassed to death.
To pretend otherwise is the very definition of stupidity and evidence, seems to me, of a profound character flaw…
Ms. Ingraham,
take your disingenuous quote/unquote “respect” and stick it where the monkey put the onion.