The San Francisco Bay Guardian's Paul Redinger hates Fox News, hates President Bush, is a veritable fragrant bouquet of pure hate. He's entitled to his opinion, but he's not entitled to be taken seriously, as this rant comparing President Bush and FNC to Hitler's henchman and propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels proves.
Invoking, and by extension unforgivably diminishing the pure evil that was Goebbels and Hitler to make a political point is common; it's also incredibly insensitive to their victims and super-bad karma in general. But on a less esoteric note, if the left wants civility, it must be civil in return. But calling fellow Americans Nazis is not the way to do it:
Dr. Göbbels, if he were to pay us a friendly visit today, would doubtless find much to his liking in our modern multimedia circus. We might not have a propaganda ministry (Göbbels's official title was "minister of propaganda and national enlightenment" — indeed!), but we do have the bellowing minions of Fox News to spread the reactionary gospel and impugn those who dare to propose another way. Nazi Germany had no media tool to match Fox News' dizzying dazzle, and perhaps Göbbels would be envious, or perhaps not; his pupil and leader Adolf Hitler was largely the creature of radio and of gigantic, orgiastic public rallies and might not have played well on TV — just as, in our own time, a certain self-styled "war president" manages to give offense to large swaths of a disillusioned population each time he smirks or mugs within view of a network camera.
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» The San Francisco Bay Guardian, failing history, failing civility
