A BRIEF PROGRAMMING REMINDER

Not that anyone should need reminding, but statements like these are just further proof - what author Raymond Carvey once called "gravy" - of the fact that the Republican Party truly is like no other:

"And I want to tell you something, and I'm going to say it to you loud and clear. The radical homosexual agenda will not stop until religion is outlawed in this country. Make no mistake about it. They're all not nice decorators. You better get it through your head before it's too late. They threaten your very survival. They went after the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church is now caving into the homosexual mafia. They will not stop until they force their agenda down your throats. Gay marriage is just the tip of the iceberg. They want full and total subjugation of this society to their agenda. Now, if you want that and if you don't think it's a threat -- believe me, that is what's going to occur in this country," - radio talk-show host, Michael Savage (who is Jewish, and whose real name is "Michael Weiner") with 8 million listeners daily.

As a certain blogger says, "Substitute the word "Jew" for "homosexual" and see how it reads".

I must also say that I am deeply troubled by the insta-comparison many on the right make, implicitly or explicitly, of ideas and people to Hitler. This "add hate and stir" invective is all the more alarming considering many Jewish righists are tossing it around. One need merely look at Charles Krauthammer's column on any given day to discover who his new Hitler of the week is (Look - it's Ahmadinejad in the middle of January! Say, isn't that Nancy Pelosi in the first week of September?). "Little Green Footballs", a site frequented and maintained by many Jewish ultra-rightists, also has a Hitler of the Week program in good standing, but has gone one step further: it has advocated so many ideas that have a Hitleresque ring that it has been dubbed "Little Green Nazis". Curiously, the site has not tried to distance itself from this label, or offer arguments as to why it doesn't apply. To Paul Wolfowitz, Saddam was Hitler. Richard Perle Necklace believes that any number of moolahs (er, mullahs) are Hitler. And, of course, to all of these folks, whoever doesn't want to bomb Iraq off the face of the map is Neville Chamberlain.

These facile labels are used to demonize, to, as The American President noted, "make you afraid of something, and to tell you who is to blame for it. The labelers are the "intellectual" heirs to the Jews who helped to popularize the term "feminazis". In the presence of these labels, rationale thought disappears and hate takes over. After all, as Roger Ebert once said, "After you call someone a feminazi, what else is there left to say about her?"

There was only one Hitler. There will always only be one Hitler. It is often said that individual Jews (said to be of "liberal" persuasion, mostly) try to "cash in" on the Holocaust - what with, the argument goes, their "memorials", their acquisition of Nazi-confiscated art, and so on. But the right - as per usual, gets a free pass when it does something ACTUALLY VILE - misleadingly summoning historical tragedy for purely reductive purposes. These people, who claim to have learned (what?) from the Holocaust, and to have been "aggrieved" by it (no doubt because they've never set foot in a synagogue and are Jewish in all of the wrong ways), would do well to remember that the name "Hitler" is an abomination. Not a label. These folks keep telling us to "Never Forget", but by flippantly passing around Hitler's name at every turn, they are helping to destroy the singularity of shadow that should be associated with the Holocaust. Shame on them.