Delay Compares His Indictment to Exterminating 6 Million Jews

Yeah I hate it how Republicans from Texas are the only ones who ever make wildly dumb comparisons to the Holocaust.

Thank God the Democrats and non-Texans have the sense to never compare Bush to Hitler.

 

I find a bit of joy in the fact that being stripped of power is probably just killing Tom Delay.

 

The guy does have the ego of 6 million normal people, so I totally understand the comparison.

 

Yet no one has cared to actually invalidate the comparison of Delay's plight with the Jews.

Just because it's distasteful - people say "what nerve he has".

I'm more and more convinced that truly there isn't that open-minded thinking really doesn't exist. To be open-minded, well, you'll be disgusting to some people if you really are - since you have to entertain all possibilities and perspectives, even the ones of Nazis, the KKK, Black Power, Al Qaeda, Japanese Imperialism.

Yeah, that's true open-mindedness. But no one, not even me, probably can truly be open-minded and try to understand versus judge.

 

or compare wearing a scarf in a mosque to wearing a swastika and appeasing Nazis in the lead up to WWII.

 

I don't understand what the problem is with the comparison. He's just talking about abuse of power. He's not saying he's the victim of genocide, just that both events -- the Holocaust and his indictment -- resulted from the abuse of political power. That sounds reasonable to me. He could have used the purges in the Soviet Union, or the Dreyfus Affair, but the Nazis do have a lot more name recognition. The only difference I see is that I highly suspect he is guilty of corruption.

 

The deal is one was a systematic abuse of power against an entire people. The other is the fact that he beleives power was abused against him alone.

Even if both were abuses of power, they still aren't comparable.

 

I'm not saying it is the best simile he could have chosen. There obviously are differences, which may or may not be important. In this case, he seems to want to say that, because the underlying world view that drove both the Holocaust and his indictment are the same, there is a danger that the forces behind his indictment are capable of doing something as atrocious as the Holocaust, even if his own case does not approach that magnitude. I will grant that that's a little nutty and probably not true. I read it as insincere rhetoric anyway.

I suppose what bothers me is how Hitler and the Holocaust are up on this pedestal of evillness, as if nothing could begin to compare. You can compare the Rwandan genocide to the Holocaust. You can compare Bush's invasion of Iraq to Hitler's invasion of Poland. You can compare Bush's relationship with Halliburton and others with Hitler's relationship with the big German industrialists. You can compare the Boy Scouts with the Hitler Youth. There might be something enlightening about laying the two side by side and see what is similar and what is different.

I'm not sure what DeLay means about the criminalization of politics. I think a better big-name comparison would be the prosecution of Trotsky or maybe Jesus. If he wanted to stick with Nazis, the assassination of Röhm might be appropriate. Then he could say the sort of people who would do something like assassinate Röhm are the same sort of people who would instigate a Holocaust. Maybe that was his line of thought, but he didn't say the part aloud that likened himself to a homosexual Nazi.

In any case, it certainly isn't a good thing if DeLay is the victim of political enemies who have managed to bring baseless charges against him. That's a very bad indicator for our country. And, someone who knowingly did such a thing is probably capable of other evils. But, I really do think he's guilty.

 

Geez

Talk about a persecution complex

First it's Jews, now it's lacrosse players --


Tom DeLay Compares Himself To Duke Students Falsely Accused Of Rape »

Last night on the O’Reilly Factor, former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-TX) compared himself to the Duke lacrosse players who were falsely accused of rape by district attorney Mike Nifong. “I haven’t been found guilty of nothing [sic],” DeLay said. “I’m presently under indictment for laws that don’t exist in Texas by a Nifong of Texas called Ronnie Earle, undermining our justice system here in Texas.”

DeLay has been indicted on money laundering and criminal conspiracy charges — yes, those laws exist in Texas. Ronnie Earle, whom DeLay frequently tries to paint as a bloodthirsty partisan, has prosecuted four times as many Democrats as Republicans during his career. Moreover, the indictments against DeLay weren’t even brought by Earle, but by multiple Texas grand juries made up of DeLay’s peers.

Nevertheless, DeLay’s “defense” won praise from O’Reilly. “See, I don’t think you even have to justify [the] statement with that,” O’Reilly said. “The record shows that, you know, you served your country. They may not like you, but you’re a public servant who’s walking around free right now.” Watch it:


In his new book, DeLay also writes that by repeating the “big lie” that he violated campaign-finance laws in Texas, “liberals have finally joined the ranks of scoundrels like Hitler.”

O’Reilly and DeLay agreed on another point last night: that “left-wing blogs” are on their way to silencing all political discussion in the United States. As O’Reilly put it, “I’m getting to the point now where I’m seeing what the left-wing blogs are doing and what they’re doing is trying to wipe out people, like you said, carpet-bomb them, and if this starts to domino down, then you’re not going to have any commentary at all.”

http://thinkprogress.org/

 

If the power of a county prosecutor is extrapolated to that of a popular dictator, the capacity for suppression becomes similar. Granted, the 'Caust always had an element of violence to it, so unless Earle at least tries to get Delay beat up or something, the comparison probably loses heft.

A key characteristic of the HC, however, is that, at the time, German citizens and the Western world perceived it fairly innocuously, which allowed it to fester and grow into genocide. My point being that some Holocomparisons are actually valid, if less for their body counts than for their depiction/demonstration/foreboding of unchecked evil.

 

What in the world??

 

Not to be mean, but you are misusing a lot of words in this post, and it makes it impossible to discern what you are trying to say.

Also, refering to the Holocaust as "the 'Caust" and "the HC" can come off as trivializing to some people, myself included.

 

Last time I checked, being indicted for a crime was much healthier than being gassed to death with Zyklon-B or being burned alive in an oven.

Tom DeLay is a horse's ass.