There’s a lot of change going on outside of the Court, that, you know, the judges have to essentially take judicial notice of. I mean you’ve got World War II. You’ve got the doctrines of Naziism, that we are fighting against, that start looking uncomfortably similar to what’s going on back here at home….
That now much-discussed 2001 radio interview affirming "economic redistribution" contained as well the above snippet which Mark Levin uncovered and broadcast on his show yesterday (Oct. 28). (Click on the “We have nothing in common with the Nazis” heading in the left column.) This moral equivalence perfectly reflects his autobiography’s post-modern casualness about justice and lack of devotion to America that disqualify a person from being President.
What can Obama mean by similarities between Nazis and Americans? Presumably not government regulation of the economy! An alliance with the Soviet Union? He surely can’t mean the temporary relocation of West coast ethnic Japanese--who, after all, were free to leave the relocation centers, if they had jobs or schools to attend outside the West coast.
This is all of a single narrative intertwining terrorist William Ayers, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, and Palestinian activist Rashid Khalidi in his past and attacks on defending American interests in the world today. The point isn’t that Obama necessarily holds the same views as these extremists (though he well might; it’s hard to say he doesn’t); it’s that he even regards them and their views as legitimate and non-objectionable--until his ties become politically inconvenient.
Yawn.
https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/columnists/chi-oped1023chapmanoct23,0,3571457.column
Please, Ken: this is desperation from a party about to lose big in an election. Obama's argument comes from standard histories of the influence of fighting Nazis on the movement toward ending racial segregation in the US. See Michael Klarman, "Brown, Radical Change, and the Civil Rights Movement," 80 Va. L. Rev. 7, 14 (1994). Fighting a country in the grips of the ideology of racial superiority is awkward when ideas of white racial superiority structure the relations of millions of your own citizens. This is not hard to understand; it certainly wasn't for those who took the lesson from WWII that racial segregation and subordination needed to be abolished here at home. Or are you and Levin now aiming for the title of defenders of Jim Crow?
I guess if I were like Levin, I would start a campaign that said: "we have nothing in common with white supremacists - tell Levin that Jim Crow is wrong!"
Talk about your hatchet job here. Take a quote completely out of context, and even admit that Obama does mean what you imply him to mean, and then go ahead and imply it. You make the japanese internment experience sound like a summer vacation. Hey they were in camps, but they could go and work, kind of like the people on Schindler's list.
This post and the comments elicited by "Is there something happening here?" (below) seem to me unworthy of NLT.
Brett - obviously the American defenders of the Jim Crow laws were not part of the real America. They were part of the fake one that doesn't count when accessing America's awesomeness and status as best-country-ever.
The defense offered Obama above is that he is simply being a conventional liberal--a defense that begs some questions. Consider FDR's January 11, 1944 State of the Union Address:
One of the great American industrialists of our day—a man who has rendered yeoman service to his country in this crisis-recently emphasized the grave dangers of "rightist reaction" in this Nation. All clear-thinking businessmen share his concern. Indeed, if such reaction should develop—if history were to repeat itself and we were to return to the so-called "normalcy" of the 1920's—then it is certain that even though we shall have conquered our enemies on the battlefields abroad, we shall have yielded to the spirit of Fascism here at home.
Obama adds to FDR's partisanship the glibness and irresponsibility of post-modernism.
Naziism and American racial policy does have a "similarity"--in their reliance on Darwinism. If someone can point out an instance in which Obama criticized Darwinism, I would reconsider my criticism above.
By the way, I long for the moment when a pro-life politician boasts that he/she "believes in science"--that life begins at birth.
Ken, the defense offered above is that he was describing the scholarship on the civil rights movement.