Fury with the fringe on top

I always enjoyed Dana Milbank’s nightly appearance with MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann until The Washington Post columnist’s fall from “Countdown” favor with a COLUMN about Barack Obama’s pre-election hubris.

In this morning’s WaPo, Milbank says the despicable message of the recent Mason City, Iowa, billboard is “supported by conservative thought leaders and propagated by high-level Republican politicians.”

A “thought leader” at the conservative Hoover Institution recently wrote in a revoltingly hypocritical column that Obama, like Hitler and Lenin, exploits "useful idiots" who don't know much about politics. Sarah Palin tweeted the link to her supporters.

“Godwin’s Law,” Mr. Milbank writes, emerged with the Internet and states that eventually when two sides argue online, one will call the other “Hitler” or “Nazi.” Such epithets, Milbank notes, have moved from the fringe to the mainstream – to cable news and even the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives.

THE BECK TALLY

Milbank writes, “Consider these tallies from Glenn Beck's show on Fox News since Obama's inauguration: 202 mentions of Nazis or Nazism, according to transcripts, 147 mentions of Hitler, 193 mentions of fascism or fascist, and another 24 bonus mentions of Joseph Goebbels. Most of these were directed in some form at Obama - as were the majority of the 802 mentions of socialist or socialism on Beck's nightly ‘report.’"

By quoting a number of politicians, Milbank contends the language of the lunatic fringe has gone mainstream. Perhaps it is the other way around. It seems to me those who were once considered “mainstream” have stepped across the line and moved into the fringe.

DemWit recommends:

“The tea party makes trouble with a capital T,” Dana Milbank, The Washington Post, 18 July 2010: LINK