-By Warner Todd Huston
You know, I am about sick to death of this childish back and forth between the unhinged left and the oh-so-outraged right on the name calling issue, especially where it concerns the use of the name of humanity’s most evil villain, Hitler. Yeah, they said (put latest politician here) is Hitler. But so what? Let’s stop the foolish waste of time focusing outrageously, outrageous, outrage over the name calling because not only is it human nature to name call, but it is an age-old American political pastime. A little of it is even cathartic. On the other hand if you happen to be the one using Hitler all the time, stop it, you dipwad. Quit the name calling, you creep. Yes, do read on my morons and let’s hash this out, shall we?
It is a simple, historical fact that Americans have been using the most vile names they could think of with which to label their political opponent. No, we haven’t been calling each other Hitler since the founding and only a gutwrenchingly stupid level of moron would think that. Yet I know that at least a percentage of you reading this were thinking just that, intending to use it to show I am an idiot myself. The fact is that each era has had it’s own version of the worst person in the world award, to be sure, and each era has had no less than one slobberingly absurd Olbermannesque person doing the awarding.
In the early founding those that were targeted for attack were called monarchists. That may seem mild now, but it was a particularly un-American name then since we had just split from a monarchy through a difficult 7-year war. If it were religion that was the target subject, the worst that an American could be called in the early days was a “Papist” as Catholicism was considered an evil not much better than a monarchist. Remember, both monarchy and Catholicism were mass murderers at that time. Later if a southerner was called a Yankee, why them was fightin’ words… literally as it turned out. Then there are the hardy, low and vile racial epithets we are all so familiar with. God forbid anyone was called an Irishman after the 1820s and we all know about our long, sad history with the black man in America.
The point I am making is that this “Hitler” thing is nothing new. You can pick any era in American history, any era, and you’ll find movements using the worst rhetoric with which to depict their opponents in order to put them in the worst light possible. There’s truly nothing new under the sun. Only the names have been changed to diminish the truth!
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So They Called Him Hitler, So What? Grow Up, The Both of You!”