Godwin's Law no longer applies

By Libby

The wingers have evoked Godwin to avoid debate for many years but the old rules have been nullfied. Via Avedon, Josh Marshall says what needs to be said about the increasingly disturbing resemblence between our hard right and those who enabled the Nazis.

An inflammatory comparison? Yes. But the inflammatory nature of the comparison shouldn't scare us into ignoring how strong the similarities are. You see it in the explicit 'stab in the back' rhetoric and the effort to cover up their own authorship and prosecution of the role by blaming their own failures on the critics of the war. [...]

As the war for faux-democracy looks more and more like a debacle, the lure of authoritarianism at home becomes greater and greater for the war's dead-end defenders. And as redeployment looks more and more likely, they have to keep raising the stakes on the consequences of doing so. Apparently our whole future, our honor, destiny, certainly our safety from the Iraqi insurgents who will restart the insurgency in the US -- all of this is in the balance. The stakes must keep rising because that is, paradoxically, the only way for them to avoid taking responsibility for their failures. And cowardice that militant, in a faction within the body politic, is dangerous for the rest of us.

He's right. It's a threat, not just to each of us individually, but to the nation as a whole and everything we used to stand for.