Not Your Everyday Republican

**BigBrother** · 07-18-2009, 05:29 PM

http://thinkprogress.org/2009/07/18/...ocialism-nazi/

DeMint’s discourse: Government is fascist, says he will ‘break’ Obama and cause the Senate ‘pain.’

Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) is ratcheting up his anti-Obama rhetoric. On a call with right-wing activists yesterday afternoon, he proudly proclaimed that he aims to “break” the President by defeating health reform. He also said recently that he prefers to cause “pain” to his fellow legislators rather than working on reform. And while promoting his new book on the G. Gordon Liddy show yesterday, DeMint agreed with Gordon — who ironically has a history of expressing sympathetic views to Nazis — that Obama has created a government like that under Hitler:

LIDDY: But there’s something else that I remember because I’m a lot older than you are and it’s called national socialism and that’s where the government allows private people to continue to own industrial capacity and what have you but tells them what they may — must do with it. You know, you will make Messerschmidts, etc. That was national socialism. That seems to me the way we’re going.
DEMINT: You’re right we’ve got national socialism, national paternalism and our form of socialism seems more benign than the classical form that we noted in Europe.

Listen here:
This isn’t the first time DeMint has used this incorrect analogy. As Matt Yglesias previously wrote, “Look, comparing your domestic political rivals to Nazis is a time-honored tradition. But confusing the Nazis and Germany’s Social Democrats is a scandal. The Social Democrats were the main source of opposition to Hitler at a time when the Communists were bizarrely maintaining that there was no difference between the two and the mainstream parties of the center-right decided that it made sense to form a tactical alliance with Hitler. Social Democrats stand for a generous welfare state and active labor market policies. Nazis try to conquer the world and send people to the gas chamber.”

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The link appears to be from an extremely liberal rag...