I’ll be watching the GOP “presidential” debate tonight — presidential in quotes because there will be nothing presidential about it — not because I expect to learn anything new about the issues that are important to the American people because those probably will not be discussed.
Rather, I am curious as to how narcissist Donald Trump will react to his fall from grace and how other Republican presidential wannabes will adjust to what has now become a new norm in this pathetic GOP primary: The more you smear your opponents, the more outrageous statements you make, the more untruths you tell and the less you (seem to) know about policy and issues, the better you do in the polls.
I am curious to see how Dr. Ben Carson will top not only his previous inconsistencies but, more importantly, his preposterous and shameful claims about how men who go into prison straight and are gay when they walk out; how Obamacare is the worst thing since slavery; how Muslims should be disqualified from the presidency; how there is a comparison between women who get abortions and slaveholders and women slaves; how the government should monitor college campuses for (liberal) political speech, etc., etc.
However, as one who — as others here at TMV — has lost close relatives to the Nazi gas chambers and who has seen first-hand the shocking, revolting remnants of Hitler’s Endlösung at Auschwitz, I have an almost morbid impulse to see how the “good doctor” will surpass his previous dishonor of the millions of Jews who perished in the Holocaust.
TMV author Shaun Mullen touched upon some of Carson’s defilements in this respect:
Carson, who has been infatuated with Nazi Germany for years, warns that a Hitler-like figure could emerge in America, that Hitler’s Mein Kampfmanifesto provides insights into the presidency of Barack Obama, that the Affordable Care Act is akin to something that would have been endorsed in Nazi Germany, that Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger and eugenics advocate Hitler had much in common, that political correctness is a tactic reminiscent of the feared SS, the armed wing of the Nazi Party, and most incredibly of all, that the Holocaust would have been “greatly diminished” if Jews had been allowed to possess guns.
When Carson was asked why he continues to use such offensive Nazi metaphors, he blamed the media for making a big deal out of this and claimed, “he’s heard from many people in the Jewish community, including rabbis, who said, ‘You’re spot on. You are exactly right,’” according to ThinkProgress.org.
Commenting on Ben Carson’s scandalous rhetoric, Ruth Marcus at the Washington Post invites the brilliant neurosurgeon to spend some time in Berlin and visit:
* The 1936 Olympic Stadium, where Adolf Hitler presided over games in which the Aryanized German team won 33 gold medals, as exuberant German crowds thrust arms upward in the Nazi salute.
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* Track 17, where, starting on Oct. 18, 1941, thousands of Jews were deported from the Grunewald train station to ghettos and concentration camps, and 186 steel plaques line the platform edge, documenting the Nazis’ relentless efficiency: “6.7.1942/100 Juden/Berlin-Theresienstadt.” “12.10.1944/31 Juden/Berlin-Auschwitz.”
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* Wannsee House, the lakeside villa where, on Jan. 20, 1942, Hitler’s lieutenants diligently planned the implementation of the Final Solution, poring over Adolf Eichmann’s meticulous typewritten list of Jews to be exterminated — 160,800 from the Netherlands, 742,800 from Hungary, and so on.
Marcus went to Berlin, in her words, “expecting to escape the U.S. presidential campaign. But that turned out to be impossible with the news about Carson’s rise to the top of the Republican heap in Iowa and perhaps even nationally. Touring this city’s sobering sites as Carson once again defended his use of Nazi analogies underscored his offensive blend of tone-deafness and historical ignorance.”
Marcus points out how Republican voters seem “inexplicably mesmerized by [Carson’s] soft-spoken outrageousness” and how, in a recent Bloomberg Politics/Des Moines Register poll, “77 percent of likely Republican caucus-goers said they found Carson’s statements about Hitler and guns attractive.”
Referring to Germany, Marcus observes, “This is a country that has accepted the unwelcome lessons of history. The same cannot be said for this man who would lead ours.”
Regrettably, if the polls are right, the same can also not be said of the majority of Republicans.
Frightening!
Lead image: Main entrance to Auschwitz Birkenau Concentration Camp. www.shutterstock.com
