In defense of comparing everything to Hitler

Ben Carson deploys one of his two historical examples.

Ben Carson deploys one of his two historical examples.

When I was an expensive SAT tutor, we made the kids learn three examples from history for the essay section. It doesn’t matter what the question is. Pick three historical examples—Rosa Parks, free silver, French revolution—and learn enough that you can use them to respond to any prompt. It sounds like we were gaming the test, but really that’s how smart people think. You don’t try to become an expert on every conceivable situation. You learn a lot about a few things—chemical engineering, the Bible, judo—and use them as frameworks to understand whatever comes up. The goal is not to additively expand your knowledge, but to multiply your ability to apply what knowledge you have. Most high schools don’t teach that way, because it’s hard. They try to cram as much knowledge into your kid as they can, and the really expensive ones cram more and harder. Anyway, that’s why your kid needs a tutor. Also, there was one example from history my students were not allowed to use: rise of Hitler.

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Hank III now second-best Williams

Hank Williams, Jr. comports himself with the dignity of his office.

Hank Williams, Jr. appeared on Fox and Friends yesterday morning to offer his opinion of the 2012 GOP field and managed to compare President Obama to Hitler within the first 90 seconds. To be fair, he was explaining why it was a bad idea for John Boehner and Obama to play golf together—a move he called “the biggest political mistake of all time.” Those of you familiar with his hit song “Don’t Talk to Me About FDR’s 1937 Court-Packing Plan” know that it’s futile to argue with Bocephus about such matters. Hank Jr. did not directly compare Obama to Hitler; he merely said that the joint outing between the Speaker of the House and the President was like “Netanyahu playing golf with Hitler.” Then he added that “they’re the enemy.” When asked who, exactly, he shouted “Obama!” and then immediately endorsed Herman Cain. It makes sense that Hank Williams, Jr. is a Republican. His dad did make him a millionaire. Video after the jump.

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Friday links! Airborne children edition

DW_Dining_Sausage_md

From www.dollywood.com. I'm not kidding.

First of all, check out the dude in the striped sweater at right, and what he apparently considers a facial expression that humans make when they are visually pleased. Second of all, did you hear about this kid in the weather balloon who wasn’t really in the weather balloon? That’s how I feel whenever I meet a new person. Fortunately, I have you guys, and your loyal readership keeps me going from day to day, driving my car back and forth along crumbling roads, blindly consuming energy drinks, wandering from Home Depot to Best Buy to Chili’s in pursuit of that crazy little dream we call America.

The other thing I do, of course, is put my finger in women and tell my friends about in on Twitter. That’s essentially the new marketing campaign for Pepsi Amp, the energy drink with an iPhone app to help you score with chicks. The app breaks women down into 24 types, like “aspiring actress,” “book worm,” “punk rock girl,” “treehugger” and “married.”* Screen shot 2009-10-16 at 10.38.20 AMOnce you’ve classified the woman whom you briefly thought might touch you, the app suggests restaurants and offers primers on things that might interest her. The ad shows an explanation of punk rock, though presumably if you pick the “married” type it’ll tell you about stain remover and babies. Best of all, it provides a handy link to your Twitter or Facebook page, so you can type “OMG slept w married grl shot in stomach r u hspital?” without having to launch Safari. My favorite part of the Pepsi Amp HPV Acquisition App is the degree to which it encourages us to think about people the same way marketing thinks about us. It’s got 18-35 year-old women broken down into 24 types, each of which is connected to known preferences in restaurants, popular music, movies and television. Those of you familiar with Marxist theory might remember the principle of commodification, the process by which previously unowned or un-salable goods—land in the middle ages, clothing in the eighteenth century— become components in economic transactions. Marxism is totes irrelevant to the modern era, bro. Now it’s all about how previously unbranded human experiences—like getting drunk and making out with your Improv 301 classmate—become instruments of marketing. First person to come up with a name for this process wins a Combat! blog t-shirt.* Screen shot 2009-10-16 at 11.02.34 AMAlso, unrelated to the contest, but you must not drink a bunch of energy drinks immediately before sleeping with a woman for the first time. I cannot emphasize that enough.

Not all applications of Apple computing technology are evil, though. Some of them are powerful, exciting, and changing the way we think about our world despite the complete lack of evidence for their existence. Just like God, and like the new, possibly imagined Apple tablet PC that Daniel Lyons is writing about over at Newsweek. The iTablet, as he calls it, isn’t actually in production yet and may not even be in development, but that doesn’t stop Lyons from assuring us that it will be a media revolution comparable to the invention of television. Lyons envisions what is basically a very big iPhone, with screen space to hold “multiple panes of information,” video playback capability, and the power to “display text.” My god, this text-displaying supercomputer will make Steve Jobs like unto the new Prometheus. Lyons story is almost hypnotically absent of information, but he does make an interesting point about the recent hysteria over the death of print journalism. (You can almost see him looking at his word count at that point.) The internet seems like an unsatisfying way to do the job of the printed New York Times in part because the medium doesn’t work the same way. Much like the way early television shows were basically radio shows with pictures, and therefore sucked, the developing internet is going to take a while to figure out its natural forms. When it does, according to Daniel Lyons, it will rule.

Until then, we’ll have to content ourselves with Lexis-Nexus searches, the transistor-radio-held-up-to-the-ear of information technology. Ben Smith at Politico has put the venerable search tool to good use, in order to analyze just what sort of pressing threats to America Glenn Beck has been warning his audience about. On Monday, Beck accused the White House of being “more worried about the war on Fox than the actual war in Afghanistan.” Beck’s own references to Afghanistan, however, are outnumbered by warnings about ACORN at a rate of about 12 to 1. Second on the list is “czar/czars,” followed by “socialist/socialism” and “communist/communism.” In fact, “community organizer” beats out both “Afghanistan” and “Iraq,” which should give you some idea of just how much Glenn Beck cares about the United States of America. I realize that Combat! blog harps on this guy a lot, and maybe more than he deserves—in both senses of the term—but man. The most popular political commentator in America thinks working for social justice in your community is worse than war. At this point, I would like to formally offer to fight Glenn Beck in a racquetball court or earthen pit—possibly one that contains a mean dog. Seriously. You’ve got seventy pounds on me, buddy. Come over here and be somebody.

Of course, Beck’s ichor is made necessary by the vituperations of his enemy. Just look at the cruelty of Barack Obama, whose supporters booed Bobby Jindal at an Obama town hall. “No, no, Bob is doing a good job,” the President said, before joking that he gets that a lot, too. “Even though we have our differences politically, one thing I will say is that this person is working hard on behalf of the state, and you gotta give people credit for working hard.” Then the crowd cheered for Bobby Jindal.  So A) town hall audiences be fickle and B) is this really the President who has launched a concerted war against his political opposition, who rules by dictate and who resembles no one so much as Adolf Hitler? Or is the American right laboring under such a dearth of ideas that it has decided to abandon objective reality entirely?

Fortunately, in these times of twisted rhetoric and inverted values systems, somebody has some sense. That somebody is Colt Harris-Moore, the eighteen year-old “Barefoot Burglar” who stands accused of stealing and crashing a series of small planes belonging to rich people. He’s like Robin Hood, only instead of giving the bag of gold to the poor he slams it into a clearing and runs away. If you for some reason don’t have time to read the whole CNN article, you can pretty much get the sense of it from one transcendentally beautiful sentence: “Harris-Moore has not been charged in any of the plane thefts. But authorities are testing vomit found in the cockpit of one plane to see whether they can place the teen inside.” Probably I will never own a Cessna, but if I do, I think it’s a safe assumption that it will one day be found crumpled in the wilderness of Washington State with vomit in the cockpit. According to police, young Colt seems to have been moving from vacation house to vacation house, living in them for a while and moving on when he, you know, figures out on Wikipedia how to fly the plane. We here at Combat! know that stealing is wrong and all, and that Colt Harris-Moore is probably not such a cool guy when you actually sit down and talk to him, but just now it seems like he’s hit on a bold new way of living. Colt, if you’re reading this, crash land in Montana and do an interview for Combat! blog. You’re not reading this. That’s probably just as well.

The unspoken racism of the Obama/Hitler comparison

On an artistic level, I think this is the best one of the lot. Bonus points for racism: notice the hair does not quite lie down.

On an artistic level, I think this is the best one of the lot. Bonus points for racism: notice the hair does not quite lie down.

Anyone with access to the internet knows that the similarities between Barack Obama and Adolf Hitler are numerous and eerie. Both were heads of state. Both were closely involved with their nations’ auto industries. Both were talented orators, and both presided over the systematic extermination of six million Jews. When you get right down to it, our sitting President and Adolf Hilter are pretty much the same person, except Obama hasn’t suspended democratic elections, implemented a policy of cultural nationalism, embarked on a massive expansion of the armed forces, created a class system based on ethnicity, assumed control of the national media, staged an attack on the legislative branch, implemented a eugenics policy or invaded a sovereign nation.

He is black, though. If you hate Barack Obama’s politics and you’re also a racist, the election of our first black President is doubly galling. You know what else is galling? The fact that Adolf Hitler—generally agreed to be the worst human being of the modern era—was a racist, too. That was, like, his thing. Which makes it hard, when you’re vigorously arguing that black people have an extra muscle in their calf that makes them especially good at pro basketball, not to think of yourself as maybe kind of an asshole.

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Thomas Sowell has estimated your intelligence

Dr. Thomas Sowell, who did not realize the sour candy was going to be this sour.

Dr. Thomas Sowell, who did not realize the sour candy was going to be this sour.

The logical question, of course, is “Who the [fudge] is Thomas Sowell? I mean [gosh] [darn] it, why are you wasting my time with this [sugar], you [fudging] [dinner companion for business travelers]?” It’s weird you’d ask that, though, because Thomas Sowell knows exactly who you are: some kind of idiot. Witness his most recent column at Townhall.com,* in which he speculates that the vaunted intelligence of Barack Obama and his team of advisors is, in fact, a disadvantage. “There is usually only a limited amount of damage that can be done by dull or stupid people,” Sowell writes. “For creating a truly monumental disaster, you need people with high IQs.” Specifically, you need people with high IQs to tell the dull and stupid how to think about politics—that’s when you can really started messing [shirts] up. I presume that part was cut for length.

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