[D]uring the worldwide Great Depression, the German Reichstag passed a law “for the relief of the German people.” That law gave Hitler dictatorial powers that were used for things going far beyond the relief of the German people — indeed, powers that ultimately brought a rain of destruction down on the German people and on others. If the agreement with BP was an isolated event, perhaps we might hope that it would not be a precedent. But there is nothing isolated about it.
Yes, that’s right. In defending BP’s role in destroying the Gulf of Mexico, Sowell compared Hitler’s strong-arming the legislature of Germany into voting to give him dictatorial powers through the Enabling Act with Pres. Obama convincing BP CEO Tony Hayward to put in writing his company’s promises to clean up the Gulf and pay reparations to small business owners and others whose livelihoods have been devastated by the oil spill.
Sowell’s pro-BP column would have gone unnoticed outside the fever swamps of Glennbeckistan had it not been picked up by Dave Weigel in his “Right Now” column in the Washington Post. Weigel, who is a rare solid sources on the machinations of right-wing politics, was shocked that Sowell, whom he called “one of the nation’s most respected conservative columnists and authors,” would stoop to bringing Hitler into the right-wing’s propaganda in support of BP. “The gap between conservative intellectual leadership and Republican politicians on this issue is as wide as we’ve ever seen it during the Obama era,” Weigel wrote.
Cue Rep. Louis Gohmert of Texas, a Republican politician who decidedly does not represent anything like “conservative intellectual leadership,” took to the House floor to comment on Sowell’s op-ed and read portions of it into the Congressional Record.
Via Weigel:
GOHMERT: There’s a brilliant man named Thomas Sowell. And, um, I didn’t vote for Barack Obama in 2008, but I sure would have voted for Thomas Sowell.
If what Gohmert means here is oblique to you, that’s because it’s Southern racist dog whistle stuff — a left-handed compliment to Sowell, who is African-American, but one of the “good” ones, not, you know, uppity like the president.
Gohmert then reads from the opening of Sowell’s oped:
SOWELL: When Adolf Hitler was building up the Nazi movement in the 1920s, leading up to his taking power in the 1930s, he deliberately sought to activate people who did not normally pay much attention to politics.
Such people were a valuable addition to his political base, since they were particularly susceptible to Hitler’s rhetoric and had far less basis for questioning his assumptions or his conclusions.
“Useful idiots” was the term supposedly coined by V.I. Lenin to describe similarly unthinking supporters of his dictatorship in the Soviet Union.
Got that? Thomas Sowell, a leading conservative intellectual, believes that American young people, blacks, Latinos and smart people of all ages and ethnicity who were energized by the Obama campaign after having been marginalized during the eight years of right-wing jack-boot style government under Bush are the same as the unemployed thugs who joined the Nazis during Hitler’s rise to power.
Back on the House floor, Gohmert wanders away from defending BP by comparing the president to Hitler and starts simply making shit up:
GOHMERT: This isn’t in the article, This is my comment. We do have “useful idiots” today who are heard to say, “Wow, what we really need is for the president to be a dictator for a little while.” [After a dramatic pause:] They know not what they say.
Of course, nobody has said anything remotely like that. The lies that come out of these useless idiots’ mouths never cease to amaze.
Gohmert concludes with more made-up shit — this time quoting from Sowell:
SOWELL: Just where in the Constitution of the United States does it say that a president has the authority to extract vast sums of money from a private enterprise and distribute it as he sees fit to whomever he deems worthy of compensation? Nowhere.
Wrong. If taxpayers are forced to pay to clean up the Gulf, as Republicans like Thomas Sowell and Reps. Barton and Gohmert want, BP’s disaster would present a real and present danger to national security. The president’s authority to act unilaterally to prevent that comes from the same part of the Constitution that gave Reagan the authority to invade Grenada and Bush the authority to occupy Iraq.
Dave Weigel points out that Gohmert is in a safe seat — apparently in a special part of Texas where the average IQ hovers around 40 — and so won’t face repercussions for his lies and outrageous rhetoric. If anything, it will probably help him.
Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on where you stand) nobody outside his district takes Louis Gohmert seriously.
