james_nicoll

No, it's the exchanges that are ... fuck that, I can't even type the rest.

I am pretty sure there are more people in Idaho who want to exterminate the Jews than there are Jews in Idaho (estimates vary, but it's around 1000 to 2000). So it's a doubly interesting metaphor.

The weird part is that she seems to be equating *insurance companies* with an oppressed minority in danger of extermination. Not the people in the companies, but the actual corporate legal entities. I think this might be taking the whole "corporate personhood" thing a bit too far.

Might be?

We're well past the theoretical on that one by now.

It's always fascinating seeing fundamentalist-type Christians try to act like they care about Jews.

Also, this quote: it wasn’t just Jews, but Jews, and Christians, and Catholics, and priests: is she one of those people who think Catholics aren't real Christians?

Also, priests aren't real Catholics?

Many fundamentalist Protestants don't.

And for fundamentalist Protestants in the middle of the country, Jews are really nothing but a convenient ideological-fantasy prop. I'm not sure they even know that American Jews exist outside of New York and maybe California.

Also, trying to elide the difference between an obsessive program of extermination essential to your ideology and the fact that Christians were also killed is disgusting.

Also, what about the communists? And the Roma? Is there a reason she doesn't want to talk about the most targeted people?

Pat Buchanan did a similar thing a few years ago when he argued that WWII was 'unnecessary'. From here:

On Sept. 1, 1939, 70 years ago, the German Army crossed the Polish frontier. On Sept. 3, Britain declared war.

Six years later, 50 million Christians and Jews had perished. Britain was broken and bankrupt, Germany a smoldering ruin. Europe had served as the site of the most murderous combat known to man, and civilians had suffered worse horrors than the soldiers.

By May 1945, Red Army hordes occupied all the great capitals of Central Europe: Vienna, Prague, Budapest, Berlin. A hundred million Christians were under the heel of the most barbarous tyranny in history: the Bolshevik regime of the greatest terrorist of them all, Joseph Stalin.

Note the pointed shoving in of Christians as up there with Jews as Hitler's victims, as well as Stalin's. Clearly, they were the true victims!

Britain was broken and bankrupt


...and about to create the NHS, free university education, and build the goddamn bomb independently. Fuck a bunch of Tories moaning that they didn't get to be Indian civil servants.

I'm sure it has nothing at all to do with Revelations stating that Jews have to be around for the apocalypse to occur, and making sure nobody kills all of them before that happens.

Or a deep and abiding belief that Jews are just Christians who haven't come around yet.

Or having to hate them less than muslims because Jesus was a j-e-w (but one who apparently got better.)

Speaking as a Jew, getting health care and being murdered for my ethnicity seem different enough to me that it would be an easy choice (health care all the way, thanks).

I also doubt Obama's gonna have to order armed troops and tanks into the ghettos to suppress armed resistance caused by rumors that people are gonna be offered free healthcare.

Perhaps he'll get to send tanks into the gated communities when they riot at the news of poor people getting free healthcare.

Bruce

There is no idea so bad that a fool cannot be found to say something even dumber about it.

I must remember to stay out of Idaho.

Culturally, Idaho starts at Snoqualmie pass, and ends somewhere west of Minneapolis. It's just that most of the stuff that makes it to the newspapers happens in Idaho proper.

Thank you for feeding my surrealism jones.

G'day,

"Like Jews boarding the trains to concentration camps" seems an unusual death metaphor to use.

In Australia when a politician wants to chide a group acting against their own best interest, as the politician sees it, the politician is more likely to say, "Like turkeys voting for Christmas."

I understand that Christmas is politically charged in the USA in a way that the holiday is not in other, lesser, polities. So maybe Senator Nuxoll was merely being cautious.

Cheers,

Nich

I think she just wanted to make sure we all understood that Obama was Hitler and the Democrats were Nazis and liberalism was the great evil of our generation.

My brother, his wife, and at least two kids live in Boise, so there's at least one hardpoint of mental resistance in the midst of the brouhaha. (They run a bookstore and, at last report, a gaming store.)

--Dave